Chapter 7
PARENT-CHILD ADULT MANIFESTATIONS
Many a young man who seems overly devoted to his mother in adulthood has been accused, in ribald jest, of having an affair with her. And while the relationship is ordinarily one of normal mother-son affections that are overdone and carried on too far into adulthood, we have studied many cases where the love relationship has also been sexual.
Some of these situations are merely continuations of incest activities from childhood, where the question of morality has been^ disregarded and the parties have succumbed to the powerful forces of their desires. However, we find a great many factors that often lead to the beginning of an incestuous parent-child relation after maturity.
Children who may have hardly known one or both parents through divorce or other separation have sometimes become the victims of a serious emotional involvement with them. In the mind of an adventurous and high-strung young woman who has been constantly told that her father was a woman-chasing wastrel, there may be built up a strong desire to experience the powerful love of this "evil" male who charms every female he meets.
The parent who refuses to release a child from the bosom, so to speak, is often expressing a subconscious wish to become far more intimately involved. In a desperate attempt to hold the son or daughter, the emotionally disturbed mother or father may try to snare the child into a situation of sexual dependence to replace the security of the home upon which the son or daughter is no longer dependent.
We have seen what a powerful influence the mother, for instance, plays on the matter of sexual preferences in the adult life of the son. If he is constantly seeking symbols that will remind him of his mother, the original can completely overwhelm him, if the incest barrier and other taboos can be broken down.
When separation has been involved, the father or mother who has been missing hardly seems like a parent at all. Take the case of a handsome and charming adventurer who leaves his wife before his daughter is born and then meets her for the first time 18 or 20 years later. Does the lovely and matured young woman look upon the roguish 40-year-old man as a father? Does he look upon her as a daughter? Certainly not in the same sense as if he had been a father to her all his life.
It is from situations similar to this that many incestuous liaisons in adulthood are manifested.
These later relations may, of course, be homosexual or heterosexual, and the ratio is very-likely about the same as in other forms of incest. We have noticed in our various behavioral studies though, that most males and many females have a rapt fascination over mother-daughter relations. Collectors of pornographic photos seem to treasure pictures alleged to be of a mother and daughter together. The love-clubs and mail order erotics constantly tease known "sex customers" with opportunities to meet and correspond with a mother-daughter sexual set-up.
In Europe, it is an extremely common practice for a prostitute in her 30's to team up with a girl of 16 to 25 and claim that she is her daughter. They offer themselves as a duo for threesome activities.
Case History (26):
AN ACTRESS INVOLVED IN INCEST WITH HER 22-YEAR-OLD SON AFTER SEPARATION SINCE INFANCY
In PECULIARITIES OF BEHAVIOR, psychiatrists Wilhelm Stekel and Ludwig Schaeffler report the case of a 24-year-old drifter and Army veteran who lived with his 44-year-old mother in a sexual relationship.
Walter, as we shall call him, had been raised since inimagine by his father and step-mother. He never saw his real mother until he was about 20 years old. However, a large photograph of her in the heyday of her highly successful acting career on the European stage and cinema had always hung in his room. To Walter, his mother was "the most beautiful woman in the world." And from his earliest memories, any beautiful young actress was his ideal.
At the age of three, he recalls, he "gazed with interest" at his stepmother's breasts, yet always covered his own genitalia with embarrassment when she bathed him. Both his father and stepmother impressed upon him the "evils and dire consequences" of masturbation.
Yet he masturbated continually from a very early age and had the deep desire to be masturbated by others. It was also at the age of three that this latter wish was fulfilled by a servant girl who liked to shower him with kisses and put her finger in his mouth and let him bite it. He recalls exhibiting his penis to her one time and insisting that she masturbate him, which she did.
When he was brought to Drs. Stekel and Schaeffler for examination by the authorities, he had been institutionalized for several brief periods after convictions for theft and pyromania (setting fires). A few years before, he had met his mother for the first time and prevailed upon the still attractive actress to let him live with her.
The first admission that the arrangement involved incest came after he reported the following dream:
"Heard something like a shot, a hissing and dull cracking, a ghost seemed to lay over him; he threw out his hands, seized his mother's arm and tried to push her away. The hovering figure descended on him, he got sexually excited and his mother masturbated him.
"Wakes up with pollution."
Dr. Schaeffler reported:
"On going into the content of the dream we find that it contains a great deal of truth: a year and a quarter ago, after complaining of his irrepressible masturbation habit, which, he claimed, was ruining him, and by threatening suicide, the patient prevailed at last upon his mother to masturbate him, and that has happened repeatedly since then.
"When I asked his mother about this she corroborated the fact.. .
"When the mother masturbates him he always imagines that a beautiful, elegant woman looks on, perhaps that she exposes herself a little; this fantasy he also has while masturbating alone and even as a small boy he always wished a girl might look on while he indulged in the habit. Usually he imagines the woman is turning her back at him and craning her neck to look at him over her shoulder. This is a reminiscence of his one and only visit to a house of prostitution; the woman, unable to stimulate his membrum virile to erection by her manipulations, advised him to masturbate and, standing at the window, she turned her head to look at him from time to time."
Dr. Stekel, who took over Walter's analysis from Dr. Schaeffler, revealed that, "When he masturbates with the aid of the pillow, he always imagines that he is pressing the naked limbs of a woman between his thighs. Did he ever think of his mother in that connection? At first he rejects scornfully the thought ... Slowly, though under obvious resistance, the facts come to light: he has often crawled into bed and 'buried' himself in her bosom while she masturbated him."
Walter himself stated: "If I did not know that my dislike of the female genitalia kept me from going further, I would not be able to live near my mother at all."
Walter was asked to move away from his mother, but found excuses for staying. He assured Dr. Stekel that he had ceased having relations with her, however. But upon observing a strong resistance during the analysis, the psychiatrist directly accused him of trying to keep something back. Walter then admitted that the relationship was continuing and that his mother had made him promise not to tell.
"Saturday afternoon he crawled into his mother's bed," Stekel reported. "She lies down afternoons from four to half-past six o'clock. She treats him to a refined love episode. First she begins to stroke his back gently, her hand then slowly descends to the membrum virile, which she manipulates with rhythmic friction. He rests his head on her bosom ... Sunday afternoon-his mother lay in bed till ll o'clock-there was a repitition of the episode."
Finally, after two years of living in this relationship with his mother, where masturbation by her was almost the sole erotic practice, the barrier to coital incest was broken. According to Dr. Stekel, ". . . after some faltering and hesitating he blurts out a new confession. Yesterday his mother took 'pity' on him and, in spite of my warnings, matters reached the limit I had foreseen. They carried out passionate intercourse. Ostensibly his conscience did not trouble him and his orgasm was stronger..."
PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENT: Walter never completed his psychoanalysis and, against Dr. Stekel's entreaties, went back to a state of sexual cohabitation with his mother. We know little of her own motivations, unless that she initially took genuine pity on the youth, possibly due to guilt feelings over her long neglect of her own son. Perhaps the sexual relation simply evolved from there, the mother having found what she had been running away from all her life-a fear of erotic interest in her son.
Walter's problem is more readily discernible as a result of the many analytical sessions with the two psychiatrists.
"Very significant," Stekel says, "is the ridiculous manner in which the adults fought against the boy's masturbation habit. His foster-mother threatened him with castration, his father with loss of mind and premature death. In spite of everything, he was unable to give up the habit. But the notion that he would die soon or that he would surely lose his mind took root. To him death and masturbation were identical concepts. Perhaps his deliria may also be explained on this basis. I have often found that the fear of the consequences of masturbation drives persons into psychotic states. One will seldom meet an affect-psychosis, in which this root cannot be traced."
In our current study of incest, perhaps the most prominent point of this behavioral research is that the young man's incest-wish was ultimately realized to the fullest. Throughout his life, Walter had masturbated excessively. He had been fellated at times by homosexuals and masturbated by others.
During his Army service he was the subject of ridicule by his comrades, and made one desperate attempt to prove himself a man. He went to a prostitute, but was unable to effect coitus. His penis would not erect, so he masturbated while she watched. It was a miserable failure.
When faced with the real object of his "forbidden" incest-wish he again froze, living with his mother for two years while she masturbated him and gave of her breasts as a refuge. And then at long last, and possibly with sympathy as well as self-interest from his mother, he was successful in coitus with her. The result was the most satisfying orgasm of his life.
Not even the genius of Dr. Wilhelm Stekel could save him then.
Case History (27):
A 37-YEAR-OLD MOTHER SEDUCED BY HER 19-YEAR-OLD SON
This case is one of two special contemporary studies conducted for this research by the noted British sociologist Lillian Albright. The subject of this particular psycho-behavioral investigation was a middle-aged man whose story Miss Albright checked thoroughly for corroboration. Her report follows:
"He was a tall, slim, good-looking, fair man in his forties, nearing fifty I should say, very reserved, but once his reserve was broken down, perfectly relaxed. He was not college educated, worked as a solicitor's managing clerk in the city, but was well-mannered and broadminded once his lower middle-class respectability was breached.
"From the way he spoke of his mother, I formed the impression that he missed her very much. He was single. I think he was illegitimate from what I gathered, but his mother had, to use his term, remarried some five years previously, a 74-year-old wine merchant. His mother was, he said, 19 years older than he. I got the impression that he was glad to be telling this story of his life to someone, as if he had been holding it back for many years awaiting an opportunity such as I provided.
"When he was about 19 he had gone on a summer holiday, camping with other boys. At the end of the second week, the bad weather for the past three or four days culminated in a violent thunderstorm and their site was completely water-logged. As, in any case, they had to return the next day, Saturday, they decided to go home a day earlier.
"It was about ten o'clock when he got home. His mother was out. They lived in an apartment which many years ago had been built for the well-to-do and now consisted of suites of two or three rooms, some of which consisted of two rooms made out of one, a partition separating them. They had two rooms. One was a large L-shaped living room with a kitchenette curtained off near the door, while the recess at the other end of the room was similarly curtained off and served as the mother's bedroom. The boy's bedroom had a separate entrance and had formerly been a boudoir or children's room. It connected with the main room but was kept permanently locked, as the mother's bed was against it.
"At eleven o'clock his mother was not back so he made himself a light meal, cleaned up, and went to bed at around midnight. He was composing himself to go to sleep when he heard his mother's voice outside in the passage. She was talking in a low voice laughingly to someone with her. He thought it was a man's voice. He heard the light switch on in the living room and saw rays of light from it through the connecting door. He thought that both of them had been drinking.
"He heard his mother say, 'You'll have to pay for some new stockings if you ladder them with those great hands of yours.' The man said something and his mother said not to worry as the couple next door were on holiday; she obviously thought there was no one else in her flat. He heard his mother say, 'Of course I will,' and he heard the sound of heavy breathing and the bed creaking.
"A sudden desire to see what was happening overcame him and he put his eye to a crack through which light was coming. For the first time in his life he saw his mother completely naked. She was lying on her back, her legs around the neck of a young man, apparently much younger, who was, as he learned later, cunnilinguing her.
"They changed their position on the bed and the boy looked through another crack to get a better view. The man was now on his back and they were in a soixante-neuf position. Then he saw his mother put a pillow under herself and the man got on top of her. When he buried his head between her breasts the boy felt a slight pang of jealousy but it passed as his interest grew in what he saw.
"As he saw his naked mother having intercourse with the young man, he realized that he was seeing his mother for the first time as a woman, a desirable woman. He felt that, mentally, there could never be a barrier of shyness between them on his side again. He saw the young man reach orgasm and then the boy, full of excitement, turned away from the crack in the door and began to rub his penis. As he masturbated he had before him in his mind's eye a naked woman with large breasts and red hair, the face his mother's.
"He heard his mother say affectionately, 'I would never have let you bring me home if I hadn't had a few drinks-that always makes me loving.' The boy remembered that remark, accompanied by a laugh, then fell off to sleep.
"His mother was surprised when she heard him moving about the next day but he explained why he had returned a day earlier and said that he had gone to sleep before eleven the night before. He told me that after that he was always aware of his mother's femininity when he saw her. He realized that he must build up a situation and, during the next fortnight, he gradually prepared, by innocent endearments, for his mother's birthday when he said he wanted to take her out.
"While they were having a meal in a small West End restaurant he asked her to think of him no longer as a young boy, and, to please him, as a man entertaining a charming woman. The mother, probably unsuspecting, found pleasure in the idea and played along. He could not afford champagne but he remembered that his mother liked gin and beer, a fairly popular British drink. When they got home she was well under the influence.
"He said jocularly to her that she mustn't forget that, for tonight, he was her Romeo. As he helped her off with her coat he began to behave as he had seen her lover do. He squeezed her breast, as he had seen done, and she told him not to do it.
"He held her tightly and suddenly she became limp and he heard her murmur, 'Why not?'
"He saw she was looking at him in the way that she looked at the young man. He took off his clothes and his mother began to undress in silence.
She appeared to be reluctant to take off her bra but the boy kissed her and whispered, 'I want you naked just as that young man had you when I saw you.'
"After that the mother was able to bring the occasional lover home without subterfuge. And until she made a very good marriage with a much older man, she lived together with her son virtually as his wife, and they had intercourse quite often.
"The interesting aftermath of this story is that the man, although poorly educated and in a routine job, is known by many upper-class women as an extraordinary lover. From all I have heard, I should imagine that he is a first-rate Lothario. And having met with him as I have, I don't doubt them for a moment."
PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENT: Here we have a case where there appeared to be no moral block on the part of the son once he had witnessed his mother in flagrento delicto with another man. That the man was young, probably close to his own age, may have played an important part in his decision to attempt her seduction.
The situation is almost classic in that there was no other man-of-the-house, a frequent breeding ground for mother-son incest, and also for male homosexuality. In this regard, we see a certain element of Don Juanism, another indication of latent homosexuality. At the age of close to 50, he is still single and an inveterate woman-chaser.
In his eagerness to blurt out the whole story to Miss Albright, once she had gained his confidence, we see the only discernible sign of any guilt-feeling.
Yet this is evidence in itself that the episode had been bothering him all these 30 years since it happened. Perhaps the catharsis of confession alone will help to ease his troubled mind.
Case History (28):
A MOTHER-SON "LOVE AFFAIR" OF 25 YEARS DURATION
The story of H. is summarized for us here by a leading psychologist:
"When H. was 8 years old his father died. By the time he was ll, his mother had found another man and married him. H. was a very shy child, and at ll had stopped allowing his mother to see him undress or come into the bathroom when he was having a bath. His step-father decided he would put a stop to 'all this nonsense.' One evening he and his wife followed H. into his bedroom. He told H. to get undressed for bed. H. just stood there in acute embarrassment. His step-father then said, 'If you don't get undressed, I am going to thrash your mother with this,' and he produced a cane. 'It is her fault for allowing you to get like this.'
"Now H. and his mother, in spite of the inhibition that existed between them, were very close. H. loved his mother very much and his mother loved him, so that the thought of her suffering on his account was more than he could bear. He hesitated, / and then slowly undressed. It was an ordeal for H., but it was equally so for his mother, for she lived her son's embarrassment with him. When H. was completely naked he was allowed to get into bed. This happened several times, his step-father always insisting that he and his mother be present when H. went to bed.
"After that, whenever H. was disobedient or naughty, his punishment was to have to undress and walk about the house naked for one hour. In this way, he soon became used to being seen naked by his mother and step-father. He even began to allow his mother to bathe him. H. tells me that he remembers beginning to get a kind of sexual thrill when feeling his mother's eyes upon his naked flesh, and he found himself looking forward to bath night.
"On one such night, while his mother was washing his penis, he got an erection. His mother appeared not to notice and continued to rub his erect organ, so that he ejaculated into the bath water. It was his first experience of sex, and he was thrilled.
"His mother continued to masturbate him. Later, his mother undressed him for bed, and masturbated him every night before he went to sleep. H. says that he is grateful to his step-father for making him overcome his shyness. H. is now 40. He never married, but preferred to stay close to his mother. She is still alive and they are just as fond of one another as ever."
PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENT: The influence of the step-father, apparently a mentally sick man, played no small part in this case. His strange form of punishment was the catalyst which introduced a forced aura of sex into the family relationship, while bringing the boy and his mother more dangerously close, tinging their relationship with an erotic overcast.
Many subconscious forces were undoubtedly at work. The mother was protecting the boy from the potentially homosexual mood that the step-father created, as well as from the more direct consequences of his punishment. Perhaps she felt that it was her duty to provide heterosexual excitement and interest for this reason. She was undoubtedly highly neurotic to begin with, and her marriage to this man provoked her condition.
As the psychologist who related this case put it: "It is a well-known fact that the first person or thing that causes a child to have an orgasm can become the dominating sexual stimulus of his life. In the case of H., his sexual fixation became his mother, so that when she bathed him he automatically got an erection."
Case History (29):
INCEST BETWEEN A 30-YEAR-OLD WOMAN AND HER FATHER
This is another revealing contemporary study of incest contributed by sociologist Lillian Albright.
"This girl lived with her parents, the only child. She was an unmarried girl, 30 years old and still a virgin, although she had done a certain amount of petting, when her mother was killed in an accident. The father was in his 50's, a professional man, and reasonably well off. The daughter was a schoolteacher. The household chores were done by paid help but the daughter always prepared the evening meal.
"About a year after the accident, they had been watching TV, as they often did of an evening. She had always taken her parents a cup of milk as a nightcap into their bedroom and she continued the habit with her father. She would get into her night-clothes, put on a dressing gown so that she could take her own cup with her into her own bedroom and drink it while still hot.
"This particular night, her father said he was lonely and would like her to drink her milk with him, which she did. He began to cry and said he felt very miserable and lonely. Without thinking and, she told me, without any conscious sexual motive, she slipped off her dressing gown, herself crying, and impulsively crawled into bed with him. She kissed him and tried to console him and thus they lay in each others' arms.
"Suddenly, she became aware of a change in her father's attitude. His hands went over her body as a lover's and she felt within her the stirrings of desire. He took her hand and put it inside his pajamas and around his penis. Although she was virginal, she had masturbated boys and men often and she knew what to do. When her father reached orgasm, he closed his eyes as men often do, and she quietly slipped out of his bed and went into her own room.
"She thought about it next day but neither of them mentioned anything that evening. She brought him his milk as usual and put her own cup on a bedside table. Then, without anything being said by either, she took off her dressing gown and got into her father's bed. They kissed each other and nothing further happened. The next night it was the same thing.
"The father then said he did not want to have a child by his own daughter but that nature was strong and sooner or later it would triumph over both of them. He said he had been thinking things over and, if she wished, he would give her the address of a certain doctor she could visit and be protected against the risk of conception.
"They lived as husband and wife after that until, by mutual consent, he remarried and she found a man who was living apart from his wife and who eventually married her."
PSYCHOLOGICAL COMMENT: This is one of the few cases we have come across where the blame is shared almost equally by both parties, and where a sympathetic attitude may search hard for an element of serious "sin."
Obviously, the family had lived in a very close and loving relationship. The 30-year-old daughter was a reincarnation of the devoted wife who had been brutally snatched away from this man. His tears were apparently real tears of despair and loneliness.
On the other hand, the virgin daughter also hungered for love and affection. The death of her mother had brought her and her father closer together. She was already performing all the duties of a wife except to provide her father with sexual companionship. Some might even say that her masturbation of the despairing man was an act of mercy, a scene perhaps reminiscent of one with her boyfriend who had begged her to at least satisfy him manually to ease his passionate frustration. We have come across many girls and women, for instance, who feel genuinely "sorry" for the highly excited male who has been aroused by their presence, and offer this form of relief.
And when it came to actual intercourse, they might both have been assumed to murmur a resigned, "Why not?"
From another more strict viewpoint, it is entirely possible that the father's crying spell was consciously or subconsciously aimed precisely toward the reaction that it eventually received. Knowing his daughter's sympathetic nature, he may have deliberately taken advantage of it.
No matter what the reasons, the report is very enlightening^ from the standpoint of behavioral research, and certainly rates a place in our study of contemporary patterns of incest among adults and their parents.