The Westermarck Effect posits that intimate association during childhood promotes human incest avoidance. In previous work, I articulated and defended a version of the Westermarck Effect by developing a phylogenetic argument that has purchase within primatology but that has had more limited appeal for cultural anthropologists due to their commitment to conventionalist or culture-first accounts of incest avoidance. Here I look to advance the discussion of incest and incest avoidance beyond culture-first accounts in two ways. First, (...) I shall dig deeper into the disciplinary grooves within cultural anthropology that make attractive the view that incest has a naturalness to it that is countered only or primarily by explicit social rules, such as taboos. Second, I further explore the emerging, post-conventionalist view of incest avoidance in a more positive vein by elaborating on the nature of the Westermarckian mechanism and how it relates to such explicit social rules and our innate biological endowments. One general aim here is to overcome the bifurcation between perspectives that are seen as biological and those seen as cultural, preempting or countering the claim that rejecting culture-first accounts entails a form of biological reductionism, a general aim I have pursued in related publications on bioessentialism about kinship. (shrink)

This article defends a version of the Westermarck Effect, integrating existing clinical, biological, and philosophical dimensions to incest avoidance. By focusing on care-based attachment in primates, my formulation of the effect suggests the power of a phylogenetic argument widely accepted by primatologists but not by cultural anthropologists. Identifying postadoption incest as a phenomenon with underexplored evidential value, the article sketches an explanatory strategy for reconciling the effect with the clinical reality of incest, concluding with an explicit argument (...) against culture-first or conventionalist accounts of incest avoidance prevalent in anthropology. (shrink)

Incest is a crime in most societies. In the United States, incest is punishable in almost every state with sentences going as far as 20 and 30 years in prison, and even a life sentence. Yet the reasons traditionally proffered in justification of criminalization of incest—respecting religion and universal tradition; avoiding genetic abnormalities; protecting the family unit; preventing sexual abuse and sexual imposition; and precluding immorality—at a close examination, reveal their under- and over-inclusiveness, inconsistency or outright inadequacy. (...) It appears that the true reason behind the long history of the incest laws is the feeling of repulsion and disgust this tabooed practice tends to evoke in the majority of population. However, in the absence of wrongdoing, neither a historic taboo nor the sense of repulsion and disgust legitimizes criminalization of an act. (shrink)

L’inceste, comme transgression en acte, et l’incestuel, comme séduction narcissique et aliénante, constituent des figures d’une causalité que Spinoza et Freud, dans des perspectives différentes, ont explorée. Appuyée sur les grands principes qui fondent leurs démarches respectives, la confrontation de leurs analyses du procès d’individuation, de la filiation et de la transgression conduit à un éclairage réciproque des deux doctrines : apparaissent alors nettement certains de leurs points de convergence théorique comme leurs dissemblances. Elle permet aussi la reconstitution théorique de (...) la genèse et de la nature de l’inceste dans ses trois principales formes, en tant qu’objet d’interdit social, inceste psychique et inceste en acte. Loin d’être l’effet de désirs sexuels conduisant à la transgression de la loi, l’inceste résulte de son absence, et de la persistance de liens fusionnels qui manifestent à la fois les difficultés et l’immaturité des individus qu’ils unissent. (shrink)

L’inceste, comme transgression en acte, et l’incestuel, comme séduction narcissique et aliénante, constituent des figures d’une causalité que Spinoza et Freud, dans des perspectives différentes, ont explorée. Appuyée sur les grands principes qui fondent leurs démarches respectives, la confrontation de leurs analyses du procès d’individuation, de la filiation et de la transgression conduit à un éclairage réciproque des deux doctrines : apparaissent alors nettement certains de leurs points de convergence théorique comme leurs dissemblances. Elle permet aussi la reconstitution théorique de (...) la genèse et de la nature de l’inceste dans ses trois principales formes, en tant qu’objet d’interdit social, inceste psychique et inceste en acte. Loin d’être l’effet de désirs sexuels conduisant à la transgression de la loi, l’inceste résulte de son absence, et de la persistance de liens fusionnels qui manifestent à la fois les difficultés et l’immaturité des individus qu’ils unissent. (shrink)

Le consentement et le discernement seraient-ils dans l’inceste le gage qu’il n’y a pas de violence? À lire la loi française telle qu’elle est et à entendre la défense de beaucoup de parents incestueux, la soumission du sujet incesté à leur entreprise serait la preuve d’une non-violence. Or, l’inceste est violence quelle que soit la façon dont les actes sexuels qui le réalisent sont commis parce que l’inceste ne se réduit pas à l’illégalisme de l’acte sexuel. Les cas cliniques et (...) judiciaires dans lesquels l’allégation d’inceste consenti a été énoncée montrent que l’inceste n’est en fait jamais consenti pour ce qu’il est concrètement : un acte sexuel entre deux personnes interdites de mariage, mais qu’il est toujours une violence absolue dont la mentalisation ne vient que longtemps après. Ce que les victimes ont pu croire, même après révélation des actes, c’est que leur place d’enfant et la relation à celui qui les agresse passent par la confusion entre désir sexuel et désir de lien, la notion d’inceste étant indicible. (shrink)

This article is a libertarian critique of incest laws. On the basis of the libertarian “harm principle”, one must ask what exactly is the harm that incest brings forth. Traditionally, anthropologists have tried to rationalize the incest taboo in various theories, and lawmakers have used these principles as grounds for the criminalization of incest. These principles are the preservation of family structure, the enhancement of alliances and the avoidance of genetic risks. While I acknowledge that these (...) rationalizations are plausible, I argue that they are still not sufficient grounds for the preservation of incest laws, and consequently, there is an ethical need to reform them. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that we can make sense of moral norms against consensual, adult incest by appealing to the value of familial relationships and the potential for sex to damage them. Viewing sex as unconscionable between family members helps to enable the loving intimacy normally associated with family relationships. Therefore, there is good reason for incest, even when consensual and between adults, to remain taboo. That being said, I argue that there is insufficient legal justification for (...) all consensual, adult incest to be criminalised. I examine four potential arguments in favor of consensual, adult incest being illegal, and conclude that none of them succeeds in justifying a total legal prohibition against it. (shrink)

I contend that there are strong moral reasons for most adult family members to avoid having sex with one another; indeed, I argue that even among consenting adults, incestuous sex is usually wrong. The argument is simple. Absent compelling reasons, it's wrong to take a significant risk with something that's extremely valuable. But having sex with a family member takes a significant risk with something extremely valuable—namely, a family relationship. And since compelling reasons for taking such a risk are very (...) hard to come by, it follows that incest is usually wrong. (shrink)

Here Gellius, also the target of poems 74, 80, 89, 90, 91 and 116, is accused of incest with his mother, sister, and aunt. This accusation is coupled with the only extended mythological reference to be found in the group of short Catullan epigrams 69–116:2 not even Tethys or Oceanus can wash out Gellius' crimes. This notion that large bodies of water are unable to wash away the stain of crime is of course a topos going back to Greek (...) tragedy, but the individual naming of the two sea-deities seems to make a point—a literary point which is relevant to the invective of the poem. (shrink)

Readers of Plautus’ Poenulus are struck by the generally ‘sympathetic’ portrayal of the title character Hanno, a portrayal somewhat surprising to us since the play was produced shortly after the Second Punic War.1 Contrary to what we might expect, Hanno the Carthaginian is neither villain nor scapegoat, and he even exhibits the Roman virtue of pietas.2 However, Hanno's portrayal is not wholly positive, for Plautus delineates his character principally by endowing him with the negative stereotypes of Punic physiognomy, dress, speech, (...) and behaviour familiar to his Roman audience.3 Hanno's Punic ethnicity is not merely an incidental matter of fact, as it is with his relative Agorastocles, but an essential part of his characterization that serves to isolate him from all the other characters of the palliata. While some of Hanno's vices—deceit, licentiousness, and effeminacy—are not exclusive to Carthaginians and are shared by other Greek characters in the palliata, there is one vice peculiar to Hanno. In this paper I argue that Plautus ridicules Hanno through arecurrent insinuation of incest. The insinuation of incest has not, to my knowledge, been noted previously, but our text does imply it in three conspicuous places. (shrink)

Westermarck proposed that humans have an incest avoidance instinct, triggered by frequent intimate contact with family members during the first several years of life. Westermarck reasons that familial incest will tend to produce less fit offspring, those humans without instinctive incest avoidance would hence have tended to die off and those with the avoidance instinct would have produced more viable offspring, and hence familial incest would be, as indeed it is, universally and instinctively avoided . Victorian (...) Westermarck claimed this as a human adaptation. Evolutionary psychologists have generalized these claims to Pleistocene humans and their ancestors, to primates, and indeed to animals generally. Yet there is surprisingly little evidence for these claims of universal instinctive avoidance. Considerable inbreeding appears among large, territorial primates and may have been so with early humans and with their ancestors. While there is little reliable non-anecdotal evidence about incestuous behavior or the lack of it among humans, what little there is does not fit well with the Westermarck thesis. (shrink)

Résumé La lecture des quotidiens à La Réunion révèle la récurrence des crimes et délits sexuels intrafamiliaux, en particulier ceux commis par les pères et beaux-pères sur leurs filles et belles-filles mineures. Le passé colonial de l’île (esclavagisme, engagisme), les retards dans l’application de la départementalisation et la situation sociale difficile que connaît cette société créole ne peuvent seuls expliquer leur fréquence élevée. Analysant les 339 dossiers jugés aux assises sur la période 1980-2004, l’auteur montre qu’il est possible de discerner (...) trois modes de fonctionnement de l’agression sexuelle incestueuse impliquant le père ou le ti-père, la fille ou la belle-fille et la mère de ces dernières, et que, dans tous les cas, la mère apparaît comme l’un des personnages clés de ce drame familial. (shrink)

Résumé La lecture des quotidiens à La Réunion révèle la récurrence des crimes et délits sexuels intrafamiliaux, en particulier ceux commis par les pères et beaux-pères sur leurs filles et belles-filles mineures. Le passé colonial de l’île (esclavagisme, engagisme), les retards dans l’application de la départementalisation et la situation sociale difficile que connaît cette société créole ne peuvent seuls expliquer leur fréquence élevée. Analysant les 339 dossiers jugés aux assises sur la période 1980-2004, l’auteur montre qu’il est possible de discerner (...) trois modes de fonctionnement de l’agression sexuelle incestueuse impliquant le père ou le ti-père, la fille ou la belle-fille et la mère de ces dernières, et que, dans tous les cas, la mère apparaît comme l’un des personnages clés de ce drame familial. (shrink)

L’Inceste, bilan des savoirs Dorothée Dussy, introduit l’ouvrage L’Inceste, bilan des savoirs, en rappelant que l’inceste concernerait 5 % à 6 % de la population : « Autrement dit (…), en Occident, sur une classe de 30 élèves âgés de 10 ans, en moyenne, un ou deux enfants [dans la plupart cas, des filles] ont été ‘incestés’ à la maison… et sur 60 millions, 3 millions vivent avec cette expérience » (p. 10). L’ouvrage est constitué de quatre parties, correspondant à (...) quatre angles d’approches :... (shrink)

This paper is based on two presentations under the auspices of thf Edinburgh Medical Group in 1976. Dr Noble and Professor Mason, explore the incidence of incest and society's attitudes to it from legal, anthropological, medical and social viewpoints. They place this in a world context by looking at the universal prohibition of incest and the theories related to that taboo. In conclusion, they suggest that there seem to be sufficient sensible grounds on which to base a reappraisal (...) of attitudes to incest. Their conclusions are in turn appraised by brief commentaries from a moral philospher and a psychiatrist. (shrink)

In this article I challenge two common arguments against incest: the genetics argument (that incest is immoral because it might lead to the conception of a genetically deformed child), and the family argument (that incest is immoral because it undermines the family, the emotional center for the individual). These arguments, I contend, commit us to condemning not only incest, but also a wide range ofbehaviors that we currently permit. I thus present the reader with a dilemma: (...) on pain of inconsistency, we must either accept certain forms of incest in order to maintain these other moral judgments, or reject these judgments in order to maintain our condemnation ofincest. The reader is free to decide which alternative is preferable, but I suggest that the former is a much less radical shift in our moral system as a whole. (shrink)

According to Westermarck’s widely accepted explanation of the incest taboo, cultural prohibitions on sibling sex are rooted in an evolved biological disposition to feel sexual aversion toward our childhood coresidents. Bernard Williams posed the “representation problem” for Westermarck’s theory: the content of the hypothesized instinct is different from the content of the incest taboo —thus the former cannot be causally responsible for the latter. Arthur Wolf posed the related “moralization problem”: the instinct concerns personal behavior whereas the prohibition (...) concerns everyone. This paper reviews possible ways of defending Westermarck’s theory from the representation and moralization problems, and concludes that the theory is untenable. A recent study purports to support Westermarck’s account by showing that unrelated children raised in the same peer groups on kibbutzim feel sexual aversion toward each other and morally oppose third-party intra-peer-group sex, but this study has been misinterpreted. I argue that the representation and moralization problems are general problems that could potentially undermine many popular evolutionary explanations of social/moral norms. The cultural evolution of morality is not tightly constrained by our biological endowment in the way some philosophers and evolutionary psychologists believe. (shrink)

Incest taboos should be seen as involving non?sexual objections to sexual relations, that is, objections based on who people are in relation to each other, rather than their activities. What is at stake is brought out by considering certain objections to father?daughter incest and certain features of taboos. The objections that matter do not depend on social ties and distinctions having a biological basis, but there is nonetheless a biological element in incest taboos. To see it, one (...) must look to the nature of the Oedipus complex, and to the conditions for the development of the individual and of society. There may be prohibitions which are necessary (to morality, to society, to humanity) even though they may not be justifiable within a narrower conception (e.g. utilitarian) of morality and justification. And so taboos which are universal (occur, in one form or another, in every society), and absolute (allow no questioning), and impose strict liability (allow no excuse), may not be irrational: they may mark the boundaries that shape a way of life. (shrink)

Taboo, as a space where the prohibited resides, delimits the form of the thinkable in a society. Freud, in Totem and Taboo, attempted to trace an explanation beyond the ‘categorical imperative’ of morality and custom. A century later the YouTuber PrankInvasion (Chris Monroe) seems to continue Freud’s account to his advantage. Through ‘Kissing my actual sister prank’, one of his most controversial videos, he challenged his own followers to fulfil an especially controversial challenge: kiss his own stepsister. It is through (...) these contacts with the limits of the moral, of the acceptable, that capitalism expands the colonized territory, absorbing the profane under its new exposure value. The unthinkable, the purported profanation of dogma (in this case, taboo of incest), disappears under the standardization of all rites as standardized consumable objects. But as Agamben warns about the nature of desecration it can not be related, in its new use, with the consumption realm. And that is not the case with PrankInvasion. Through the apparent absence of ordinary moral limits, Chris Monroe expresses his heartfelt attachment to the most extraordinary limit of capitalism: economic growth. (shrink)

Cet article vise à décrire la possibilité de travailler en institution de manière groupale avec une famille d’accueil et un enfant placé au long cours. En s’appuyant sur le suivi thérapeutique d’une enfant et de son assistante familiale, l’auteur privilégie l’aspect clinique. Les concepts présentés traitent de l’affiliation en tant que potentiel recours à la résolution d’un trauma sur les origines. Le cadre thérapeutique correspond au néo-groupe, sa contenance et l’émergence progressive de souvenirs, travaillés par des médiations. Les chaînes associatives (...) groupales sont fonction du transfert et du contretransfert au sein d’une structure médico-sociale. L’article passe en revue différentes temporalités thérapeutiques jusqu’à l’étape d’un assouplissement de certains mécanismes de défense. Le réel des faits est cependant toujours resté hors champ. (shrink)

In contrast to Judith Herman, who understands incest exclusively in terms of power, Judith Butler insists on the importance of the child’s love for our understanding of incest. Butler’s thinking in this respect is suggestive but underdeveloped, while also holding considerable implications for how we might understand the role of violence in social life. This article develops and assesses her thinking on the child’s love and its relation to the question of violence and trauma more generally. At issue (...) is the question of how we are to understand violence. Is it always motivated? Is it always destructive? And finally are there limits to what can be understood? (shrink)

It is argued that traditional functional explanations of the incest taboo do not sufficiently supply causal conditions. It is widely acknowledged that the incest taboo, although universal among human societies, is largely a feature of human behavior. Husserl's investigations of intentionality are introduced to supply the particularly human element by which the taboo may be understood. So as to illumine the contrast between the conflicting intentionalities, a classical Aristotelian contrast between eros and parent/ child philia is drawn. Parent/child (...) philia and eros, although both requisite for the survival of the species, are shown to be crosspurposeful in several ways. Husserl's understanding of 'negation,' as it applies to affective and practical intentionalities, is reconsidered. It is thereby explained how parental/child affection and erotic love, are 'incompossible' and not only conflict, but 'nullify' and 'cancel out' each other, generating the 'taboo'. (shrink)

Cooperative breeding in birds typically occurs when offspring – usually males – delay dispersal from their natal group, remaining with the family to help rear younger kin. Sex‐biased dispersal is thought to have evolved in order to reduce the risk of inbreeding, resulting in low relatedness between mates and the loss of indirect fitness benefits for the dispersing sex. In this review, we discuss several recent studies showing that dispersal patterns are more variable than previously thought, often leading to complex (...) genetic structure within cooperative avian societies. These empirical findings accord with recent theoretical models suggesting that sex‐ biased dispersal is neither necessary, nor always sufficient, to prevent inbreeding. The ability to recognize relatives, primarily by learning individual or group‐specific vocalizations, may play a more important role in incest avoidance than currently appreciated. (shrink)

In recent years, memories and reconstructions of incestuous child abuse have become common features of psychoanalytic treatment. Among some clinicians, such abuse is suspected even when there is little evidence. How does the analyst distinguish between incest real and imagined, and how do recovered memories of incest affect the analyst? In this poignant and beautifully written study, Elaine Siegel brings new insights to bear on these timely questions. An inveterate note taker, she discloses the countertransferential ruminations and associations (...) to the occurrence of incest at various stages during the treatment process over the course of 30 years of clinical work. The manner in which her "analytic instrument" evolved and was shaped by her analysands' stories makes for a fascinating subtext in a book that addresses itself to the differences and similarities during treatment of real and imagined incestuous abuse. Among the powrfully disturbing clinical cases at the heart of this study are two reports detailing the lengthy analyses of women who found corroboration for multigenerational incest. Siegel also presents two cases in which patients retracted their claims of incest toward the end of their treatments. Through the medium of these and other reports, Siegel explores how psychoanalysts are struggling both to understand incestuous abuse and to accomodate their treatment techniques to shifting societal perspectives. (shrink)

Politics, public discourse, and legislation restricting abortion has settled on a moderate orthodoxy: restrict abortion, but leave exceptions for pregnancies that result from rape and incest. I challenge that consensus and suggest it may be much harder to defend than those who support the compromise think. From both Pro-Life and Pro-Choice perspectives, there are good reasons to treat all abortions as equal.

Incest taboos are universal, but it is questionable whether consensual incest should continue to be illegal. The most common argument in favor of the illegalization of consensual incest appeals to genetic risks and the harm to potential offspring. In this article, we examine whether public health concern is a sufficient reason to illegalize consensual incest. We posit that indeed, incest represents a risk, but this is not reason enough to illegalize incest. For, other circumstances (...) of sexual intercourse may lead to similar risks, and yet, such practices are not illegal. While those practices may represent an added risk to public health, to forbid them as a way to improve the genetic pool would be akin to eugenic program, and that is morally objectionable. This does not imply that consensual incest ought to be legal, for there may be other good reasons to illegalize it. But they do not relate to public health and genetic risks, and consequently, medical practitioners and public health officials ought to avoid using their medical authority as a platform to make moral pronouncements. (shrink)