The historical consensus on father-daughter incest during the postwar years in the United States is that it was fully and effectively denied--by social workers, courts of law, criminologists, psychoanalysts, social scientists, and ultimately the public at large. (1) Sociologists defined incest "as a rare sexual perversion, a one-in-a million occurrence," while the American Bar Association, on the advice of the psychiatric profession, informed judges that women and children "often lie" about sexual abuse and that therefore they could not be trusted. (2) Psychoanalysts and anthropologists, following the lead of Sigmund Freud and Claude Levi Strauss, characterized the incest taboo as "effective and total" and hence unworthy of attention. (3) The assembled picture is of a seamless refusal to engage with the reality of incest, a virtual "silence" created by the disbelief of children's claims and the suppression of information. (4) Psychoanalysis has long been viewed as chiefly culpable; indeed the widespread influence of psychoanalysis is thought to have been an ethical disaster for the social services. (5) Once the psychoanalytic perspective on childhood fantasy, particularly Oedipal fantasy, began to influence social workers and child serving agencies, allegations of incest, historians have argued, ceased to be believed.
It was, however, in 1955 that Kirson S. Weinberg, a rather obscure sociologist, wrote the first book-length study devoted solely to the question of incest in the United States. An attempt to look at incest in a systematic and scientific (which is not necessarily to say objective) manner, he examined the issue exhaustively: what forms were most common? How often was it prosecuted? Who were its perpetrators? What was their social class and racial makeup? What were the effects on its victims? He found, among other things, that father-daughter incest was the most common form of incest, and stated that prosecutions were not representative of actual incidence. These findings appeared only two years after Alfred Kinsey, the famous sexologist, published data that revealed that father-daughter incest occurred in closer to one in one hundred families than one in one million. (6) As Judith Lewis Herman pointed out in her groundbreaking book, Father-Daughter Incest (1981), Kinsey's statistics on father-daughter incest, unlike his information on masturbation or marital infidelity, did not become a public sensation. (7) Weinberg's book, meanwhile, made no visible impact at all on the public at large.
But Kinsey and Weinberg were not alone. Beginning in the early 1940s, psychoanalysts themselves began to take a closer look at father-daughter incest, specifically at incest that took place between fathers and adolescent daughters. Case studies appeared, papers were presented, and social scientists took up the question in numbers that, while not large, represented an unprecedented engagement with the issue in the human sciences. What led to these attempts to look at father-daughter incest afresh? Do these scattered and somewhat eclectic studies represent isolated instances of accidental "discovery," historically irrelevant aberrations, or a limited though real postwar engagement with the question of father-daughter incest? My aim in pointing out that some psychoanalysts were willing to confront father-daughter incest is not to exonerate psychoanalysis or the social workers who were influenced by it. There is no question that these social workers, as Linda Gordon has amply demonstrated, withheld judgement when confronted with complaints of incest, and failed to investigate incestuous fathers, even when they had evidence of sexual abuse. (8) What we find, however, when we look at the case records of child-serving agencies, criminal trials, psychoanalytic case histories and criminological studies is not, as one would expect, an overwhelming denial and silence--a history expunged. Instead, the picture that emerges is contradictory, complex, and historically illuminating. On the one hand, at criminal trials judges convicted, and prosecuting attorneys excoriated incestuous fathers with an indignation that shares much more with our own perspective on incest than with pre-feminist disavowals of both the fact and trauma of paternal sexual coercion. On the other, we find criminologists, anthropologists and psychoanalysts discussing father-daughter incest during this period with an equanimity that is surprising. Rather than hysterical suppression--an ongoing and active discursive collusion to define incest as "unthinkable"--father-daughter incest during the postwar period entered the record in ways that suggest it played a role in creating and sustaining important ideas about gender, family, paternal power and the sexual order. (9)
In this article I examine a wide range of historical evidence in an attempt to understand what impact psychoanalytic ideas, particularly those about the Oedipus complex, actually had on attitudes towards father-daughter incest in the United States at mid-century. I begin by looking at court cases and criminological studies in an effort to establish the impact of the rise of the psychoanalytic perspective on the prosecution of incest cases. In the second part of the article I look in depth at several published but heretofore unknown psychoanalytic case histories of father-daughter incest, as well as at the records of psychoanalytic social workers at a Boston clinic for "problem children." I argue that ideas about the Oedipus complex were not used to suppress the fact of incest among psychoanalysts (and others) so much as to reconfigure the way in which incest was interpreted during the war and postwar period. (10) Indeed psychoanalysts interpreted girls' claims of sex with their fathers as proof of the strength of female adolescent Oedipal desire--and therefore its potential enactment--rather than as evidence of the pervasiveness of incestuous fantasy among children. Moreover, part of what makes this interpretation so striking is that it took place not at a time when legal opinions about father-daughter incest were undergoing simultaneous reorientation, but instead, at a time when courts remained committed to punishing the incestuous fathers that came before them. Thus psychoanalytic and legal ideas were, if anything, somewhat at odds with one another on this question, a fact which implies that postwar society was conflicted about the issue of father-daughter incest, rather than simply bent on wholesale denial.
American psychoanalysts were open to the idea of what they called the "acting out of the Oedipal wish"--on the part of adolescent girls--in the nineteen forties and fifties for several reasons. First, it was during the postwar period that psychoanalysts began to apply themselves to the study of adolescence in general, and the social and sexual problems of teenage girls in particular. With the onset of World War II psychoanalysts became increasingly troubled by changes they were seeing in girls' behavior. Rising rates of female adolescent juvenile delinquency, the advent of "youth culture," and, not least of all the perception that paternal authority was on the wane influenced the case studies of practicing psychotherapists. In the social and sexual problems of adolescent girls, the most prominent postwar authorities on female adolescence--Helene Deutsch, Phyllis Greenacre, and Peter Blos--perceived what they thought was an alarming number of cases of Oedipal dysfunction. While in boys the Oedipus complex made only a momentary appearance at puberty, in girls the adolescent Oedipal situation was believed to be of profound complexity and psychic intensity. Hence the case histories of adolescent girls during this period are replete with Oedipal longing, frustration, conflict, and disappointment. (11)
