Introduction
"Hey! Hey, get this! I like sex with men, women, girls, boys ... love young girls! Hell, I can get a good hard-on looking at a knothole in a piece of wood. You give me that Rorshach test like the other shrinks have ... every one of the damned inkblots remind me of sex! There's one inkblot that looks exactly like the left nipple on my mother's tit ... bless her. Hell, I bet you shrinks don't have a name for a pervert like me. You know what? My mother taught me to eat pussy, and, ... oh, man, Mom liked to get fucked with a good, hard cock more than anything else in the world ... she and her brother would go at it for hours, and then I'd blow him and give it to her again. My stepdaughter and cousin are two of the best pieces of ass I've had ... and I got me a beautiful little cherry from my stepdaughter. Overseas, I've had women and their daughters together. Oh, hell, that psychs me up! And in North Africa, I had the cutest and smallest little teenage cunt you ever saw....I bet a guy once I could suck a different cock each day and never have to pay for it....Now, you're the damned Doc! What the hell would you call a guy like me?
Following this intensely "confessional" outburst from Jack Gordon at our very first meeting (realizing he was trying to shock me) I explained to him that the only instantaneous term I could come up with for a person with the behavioral manifestations he described was "a multi-anomalous sexual psychopath." This man not only desired and practiced almost every deviation and perversion of the sexual instinct known to experts in the field, he performed anomalous feats that do not strictly adhere to the clinical definitions of perverted acts.
Rape, incest, and regular coitus with forbidden persons (minors, for example, in a legal and mental health sense) are abhorrant and abnormal. But they are not, strictly speaking, deviational acts. Therefore, I will agree with Horace and Ava Chapney English, authors of A Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychological and Psychoanalytical Terms (Longmans, Green, New York 1958), that what is involved here is "anomalous sexual behavior," to a very extreme and widely varied degree.
I think it would be fairly accurate to say that we are generally aware of the fact that many of the more serious sexual abnormalities today stem in part from what is generally known as the conflict that arises concerning the incest-taboo and the incest-wish. The great majority of us are mature and emotionally stable enough to cope with the situation or ignore it, without creating bizarre and unhealthy latent or overt sexual desires in later life. We realize that it is quite possible from a physical as well as emotional standpoint that one of our parents or children may be sexually attractive in a way that could not completely escape our attention. But i we view the parent-child relationship in a "normal" and affectionate way. We do not dwell on the potential of a stronger sexual attraction, and we manage to suffer no serious emotional conflicts in this regard.
Such is frequently not the case in the mentally disturbed person whose problem manifests itself in an erotic way. The male homosexual, for instance, subconsciously in love with his own mother, may see all other females either as sluts, unworthy of love and affection; or else they are mother symbols, toward which an overt sexual feeling is forbidden by parents, society, religion, etc.
Likewise, the "Don Juan," the inveterate and perennial Satyr and woman-chaser and whoremonger, keeps searching for the "right" woman, never able to find a woman both lovable and "fuckable." He usually does not turn to men, although he may very well be a latent homosexual. He pushes himself as a Don Juan with the women, in an effort to prove he is not homosexual, as much as to prove that, to his mind, all females are mere tarts.
Many a Lesbian has felt strongly unloved by her mother as a child and constantly seeks the affections of other women, allowing the relationship to evolve into a sexual one simply because she is desperate for the strongest kind of love and devotion she can share with another female-a mother symbol.
The parent-child relationship may play a vital part in the formations of sexually abnormal desires and practices in adulthood. A too repressive view by the parents and Church, I think, may be just as bad as too liberal an outlook. Instead of talking out things logically with children, many parents have a strong "taboo" regarding sex. The children are bombarded with the idea that almost all sex is bad, that the emotion itself is "sinful," and that one of the most forbidden of all sexual couplings is the one that is incestuous.
If this is the atmosphere in which a child is reared, no wonder that a conflict arises. He or she is a human being. Sexual arousal and capability for physically pleasurable response is a part of nature. The child or adolescent may become dreadfully confused and immersed in deep guilt feelings. He cannot help it that he is "guilty" of having sexual feelings, much of which is of biological origin at young ages. As the desire becomes stronger, the guilt feeling grows, and is often responsible for its very nature for exacerbating the sexual desire out of proportion.
The right kind of sex education in the home or school could prevent so many of the injurious manifestations of these conflicts. Perhaps most parents are too ill-trained themselves or emotionally restricted because of the relationship involved. Thus, a competent program of sex education conducted by mentally healthy and well-trained instructors in public schools and the Churches, seems to be the most reasonable answer to the problem of easing children and adolescents out of the sexual "rut" in which so many find themselves.
To the other extreme, my studies in incestuous behavior indicate that in both the U.S. and England, several groups of what I might call pseudo-intellectuals, are in favor of incest and adult-child sexual acts as a cure-all for the prevention of murder and much other vicious crimes.
It has been suggested by these groups that aunts, uncles, older brothers and sisters, adult "friends of the family," even the parents themselves, teach young children about sex by actively practicing intercourse and related acts with them from a very early age.
One very well organized group in the United States claims to be doing these very things today, and are trying to proliferate their ideas among the upper socioeconomic and better educated strata of society. Their slogan is "Sex by the age eight or else it's too late!" And they make it quite specific that they are referring to child-child and adult-adult acts of overt sexual intercourse.
An-early leader of one of these movements attempted to gain my interest recently when he wrote me from the West Coast:
"Last year I corresponded with a man who was seduced by a seven-year-old girl and her slightly older sister as they sat in the balcony of a movie (he was twenty-one at the time). He later succeeded in 'making' all the sisters. His last connections occurred with his twelve-year-old niece and some of her girlfriends.
"I have also read an account by [name of world famous sexologist deleted here because of lack of corroboration]. He writes of his introduction to a well-to-do Italian family in Rome. There he enjoyed the intimite favors of the two young daughters, with their parents complete approval."
In my own estimation, I am inclined to think that most of these young people are complete sexual perverts, trying to rationalize their lust for incestuous pedophilic acts with a lot of "intellectual garbage." And I know of no better example to present as an argument against such monstrous ideas than the case of Jack Gordon, a man whose sexual relationship with his own young and beautiful mother lasted until her death, when Jack was about 30 and she was in her early forties. Both his childhood and adult life represents one of the most bizarre case histories of sexual psychopathy that I have encountered during many years of behavioral research. His incest-wish has no limits, and is vicarious and voyeuristic as well as active. He still has an occasional affair with a first cousin with whom he conducted sexual encounters when both were children.
When Jack first approached me, after learning that I specialized in sexual and emotional problems, he really had no desire to change or to be "cured." He wanted someone to talk with. His desire was to brag of his exploits (on the surface), but also to purge himself of guilt, so to speak, by "confessing" his deeds to an authoritarian figure, much as one confesses sins to a priest.
Yet when he would recount his fantastic erotic experiences to me privately (most of which I have generally corroborated through usually reliable sources and methods), his small eyes would take on a fierce, excited glow, his nostrils would dilate, his face flush. Jack Gordon was mentally reliving the episodes in a state of high stimulation.
At other times, Jack's often high and nervously uneven voice would soften to a relaxed, cultured accent. And when he would become emotional in a nonerotic vein, it was obvious to me that he was actually fighting back tears. His lips quivered, but he refused to break down the masculine facade that he has sought so hard to maintain throughout his tortured life.
Jack Gordon is a neat and outwardly quite presentable man appearing to be anywhere from thirty to thirty-five. His personality and smile have a surprisingly natural quality about them, which serves him well in his erratic employment as an automobile salesman.
The life story of this most unusual man has been put together from tape recordings and extensively detailed notes that were made during the course of at least three dozen conversations. The story is his. The words are primarily his very own. (The only editing has been done for the sake of clarity, transitions, and to protect the privacy of those involved.) In other words, this is not a story written in the professional style of a polished writer.
It is fortunate to report that what began as merely a "confessional" on Jack's part may yet evolve into a change for the better. By being able to understand himself more clearly, and with the help of a woman whom he loves greatly, Jack Gordon is trying to join the ranks of the more emotionally stable with a relatively ordered personality. His story should serve as an example to many of those who formerly considered "cure" or change of their sexual psychopathes an impossibility. And it is to these troubled people that I sincerely dedicate this book on Jack's behalf.
I might mention at this point that I frankly doubted Jack's claim at first, that his life story could make Casanova or Frank Harris look like "amateurs seducing school kids." But I soon learned that I was wrong. After starting off our first meeting with the outburst quoted at the first of this introduction, and a brief explanation of his continuing incest, I told Jack to relax and start from the beginning. I told him to go back, as far back in his memory as possible, to the first sexual awareness, the awakenings of erotic feeling, and then to tell it all in chronological order, so far as he possibly could.
Dalton Edwards, Ph.D.