Conclusion
The difficulties experienced by Paul Gebhard and his associates while compiling the records for Sex Offenders was in finding an appropriate definition as to exactly when incest was criminal. They write:
From the point of view of society as well as of sociology, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, and still other scientific disciplines, incest-that is sexual activity between close relatives-is set apart from other sorts of sexual activity; consequently we have made of it another . . . category.
. . . we have also limited incest to father-daughter (or surrogate-daughter) relationships. Again, this was for pragmatic reasons: mother-son and brother-sister cases were too few, and we did not wish to dilute our father-daughter cases with a miscellany of incestuous relationships among cousins. Indeed many of the cousin cases and even some nephew-aunt cases were only technically incest-there was no history of close proximity and emotional linkage as there is within a nuclear family of parents and offspring.
In all fairness, it must be noted that the re-arch was conducted among convicted offenders. There were not enough cases, other than father-daughter incest to come to any particular conclusions.
We can indicate, however, that the researchers are pointing out "close proximity and emotional linkage." We have seen this linkage in almost all the cases described here, and we can well speak of substitute brother-sister incest. In our society, mobile as it is, a considerable part of the population is not even remotely acquainted with all cousins. It is, therefore, quite well possible that there are cousins married to one another who discover the fact of their relationship long after first sexual intercourse has taken place.
If Gebhard and his colleagues were, so to speak, complaining about not having enough cases they could study to warrant drawing any general conclusions, we surely cannot generalize after having read excerpts from interviews of only five cases. It is remarkable, however, that none of these cases have any people who have a fulfilling sexual relationship. In the one case where we can speak of a sexually normal happy marriage, the partners were not even aware of their incestuous relationship and, to put it mildly, extremely shocked to find out that they had violated a criminal law in their state.
Three cases .suffer from inordinate guilt, although in one of the cases, the incest factor is negligible. The person had had the traumatic experience of a gang rape, committed by not only cousins, but also by three of her uncles.
There are two cases which we might consider substitute brother-sister relationships. The participants had known each other from early inimagine, they had grown up together on a day-to-day basis and were, in fact, as close as brother and sister. In one of those cases, the only two we might consider true incest in a moral sense, the partners were separated for eleven years. They joyously returned into each other's arms, but the relationship was soured by their fear of getting abnormal offspring. In the other case, only one of the partners found a perverted pleasure in the relationship, the other partner soon felt too guilty to continue. And, it is remarkable to note, in neither of the cases was the relationship one of criminal incest, since the states where the relationship occurred did not include cousins in their incest laws.
In Totem and Taboo, Freud wrote about the incest taboo, that we are "ignorant of the origin and cannot even tell in what direction to look for it. None of the solutions of the enigma that have been proposed seems satisfactory."