Incest

Taboo against Incest

Historically, every known society has had a taboo against incest except under very specific conditions. Certain primitive societies permitted incestuous relations as a magical ritual. Others allowed incest among members of the royal family in order to ensure the preservation of property. In the Ptolemaic period in Egypt, brother-sister and very occasionally father-daughter marriages were permitted. After the Roman conquest of Egypt, brother-sister marriages were allowed only in certain classes, and with the arrival of Christianity, incestuous marriages were forbidden across the board. Mormons in Utah once also permitted incest so that their children would marry within the church, but such marriages were banned by state law in 1892. The incest taboo appears to be grounded in sociological, psychological, and biological concerns, although theorists continue to disagree about its origins.

Biological explanations for incest reason that relations within the family can lead to serious birth defects in the offspring. The Greek Oedipus legend is a prime example of sociological understandings of the incest taboo. According to the legend, which revolves around fear and revulsion at the possibility of incest, Oedipus's birth is preceded by a prophesy that he will violate the prehistoric taboo against incest, killing his father, Laius, King of Thebes, and marrying his mother, Jocasta. Although his parents try to avert the catastrophe by leaving him on a mountainside to die, he is rescued by a shepherd and is raised by the royal family of Corinth. When Oedipus learns of the prophesy, he flees Corinth in order to prevent its fulfillment with the parents he believes are his own. He encounters Laius at a crossroads, quarrels with him and kills him, then continues to Thebes where the sphinx has been killing anyone who fails to solve her riddle. Solving the riddle and winning the hand of the widowed queen, he thus fulfills the prophecy. When he learns the truth, he is filled with self-loathing and blinds himself.

In Totem and Taboo, Freud attempted to explain the incest taboo on psychoanalytical grounds. Rather than assuming that humans have a natural aversion to incest, he saw the taboo as a means of averting inborn incestuous impulses. In his evolution of the theory of the Oedipus complex, he explained that all human males have an instinctive sexual attraction to their mothers and ambivalent feelings toward their father. They love, respect, and admire their fathers, but because of their instinctive sexual feelings for the mother, also come to see their fathers as opponents. Resolution of this complex, which Freud held as critical to normal sexual development, involves identifying with the father and relinquishing fantasies about the mother.

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