Conclusion
In the preceding five chapters we have attempted to present varied case histories of father and daughter sexual relationships. All were motivated by different causes and circumstances. In these case histories, the author has tried to show that the happy and satisfactory outcome of an incestuous problem depends on the willingness of those involved to conquer their desires and to "trod the straight and narrow." For those who felt different and unrepentant, the future course, in most cases, proved tragic. Some of these people are sexually off the track and have no desire whatsoever to return to the degree of "normalcy" defined by medical science or society. These people will need extensive psychiatric care for quite some time to come. Either way, the proper motivation
"to straighten out" is mandatory. Both the mentally healthy and the neurotic are driven by the need to find a reason for living and a happy and peaceful way of doing it.
Sex plays an important role in every person's life. How they confront sex is a mirror image of how they confront life itself. Primitive urges often drive a parent onto the incest trail. In a normal person, the awareness of "Mother" or "Fatherhood" is strong enough to keep him or her from straying from the imaginary to the overt act of committing incest. Social and religious pressures are a great tool of the conscience. The other aspect of incest is, of course, the child's desire for the parent. The child may think that sexual adventures with one or the other parent will create a closer bond of love and acceptance. The alert parent will see these abstract urgings in their young and will take action in time to prevent an actual confrontation. Unfortunately, there are a few parents who will take advantage of such a situation. Parents who look to their children as normal extensions of their sex output are very disturbed people, indeed, and will require the services of a psychiatrist or, ultimately, law-enforcement officials.
The sexual revolution of the '60s and '70s will bring forth all types of sexual practices into the open. Themes that have been absolute taboos since Victorian times are now pretty much accepted. Though still often considered rather bizarre, they are not necessarily taken to be indecent, perverted, or criminal. Stigma is still attached to bestiality, incest, and child-molestation-as it should be-for these activities have an adverse effect on all stages of civilized society due to the adverse effect on the sometime innocent victim.
Incest is more common in rural communities than in urban. In some communities incest is a natural way of life for many families. In the cities, where education and communication is better, acts of incest are rarer and, in most cases, are committed by people with psychological disorders.
Open discussion, education, and therapy can bring the urban offender to an arrest of this aberration. In rural areas, where family life is much more close-knit, the practice of incest may go on unobserved or unreported.
Incest, of all the sexual aberrations, is the most difficult to handle because of the secrecy it is usually surrounded with. Only in cases of pregnancy are the true facts usually uncovered.
Man is a complex creature, and is the only mammal that will knowingly commit wrong. Mark Twain once observed that "God created the monkey because He was so disappointed in Man." Man is an imperfect animal, yet the only animal gifted with the freedom of choice on how he wishes to live his life. Only through education and idealism can man remove these imperfections. It will take an informed and concerned society to accomplish this. Medical science, teachers, and preachers can do just so much. Man will have to do the rest-by lifting himself by his own moral bootstraps.