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Incest, Freud and class: scientia sexualis and the boundaries of bourgeois civilisation
| Since the turn of the twentieth century, the incest-taboo functions both in cultural anthropology and in psychology als a key to becoming ‘human’ (as opposed to animal-like, or primitive). The actual occurrence of incest – and the question of how a person comes to commit incest - thereby seems to have escaped any serious scientific consideration until fairly recently. As Jeffrey Masson has demonstrated, the coming into being of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, including the Oedipus Complex, has been a turning point with regard to the psychiatric interest in incest. Freud, as is well-known by now, in one of his first publications (1896) acknowledged the huge impact of sexual trauma during infancy on the lives of his hysterical patients. According to Masson, his lecture on this theme was received icily by his psychiatric colleagues and rejected as ‘scientific fairy tale’ by the then leading psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing. Later on, he abandoned this idea, reinterpreting the data as incest-phantasies of his patients. To Masson, Freuds lecture and publication of 1896 was a courageous act, revealing the inconvenient truth of incest to a psychiatric audience unwilling to acknowledge the facts.
In my paper I hope to argue that is was not simply the theme of incest itself that could not be raised. Krafft-Ebing himself, for example, published an article on the sexual abuse of children (mostly incest) and what he coined paedophilia erotica in the very same year Freud published his article. And, as Masson has pointed out himself, the issue of incest had been brought forward by forensic doctors already in France for several decades. Also, at that time child protection agencies were becoming aware of the frequent occurrence of incest. A first analysis of these other discourses on incest points quite clearly in one direction: the occurrence of incest was only acknowledged as a fact among the working classes. It was not a personal default, but a collective pest, related to alcohol, degeneration and poor housing. The taboo Freud broke was a class taboo: incest did not occur among the ‘civilised’ classes. That was exactly what distinguished them from both the lower classes and primitive people.
This very initial analys brings me to other, more broad issues with regard to developments in sciences of sexuality. When and where – or, for whom – were sexual problems individualised or ‘put on a sofa’ so to speak? When and where – or about whom – were sexual problems seen as collective defaults? How was scientific sexual knowledge divided along these lines, and how do both internal and external boundaries (classes, races) relate to these different regimes of knowledge?
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