Talk:Covert incest/sources001

Quotations from relevant sources on the topic of "covert incest".

Sex and Self-Respect
Helfaer, Philip M. Sex and Self-Respect: The Quest for Personal Fulfillment. Praeger Publishers (1998). ISBN 0275961850.

While there can be overt sexual incest, there are also relationships which could be called "covert incest." When the parent responds with his or her adult sexuality to the child's love, the relationship becomes incestuous. This is very common, perhaps more common than otherwise. There need not be overt genital contact. In all likelihood, there will be some kind of physical contact that carries an erotic charge.

A very pretty young woman described how her father would have her lie with him on the couch while he watched television. His embrace was so intimate that he would even wrap his leg around her. I find it hard to imagine that she did not feel his penis pressing against her. I would call this an incestuous experience for the daughter.

The incestuous relationships of everyday life are readily observed. One hot summer day, near where we live in New England, my wife and I were watching the horse-pulling contests at a county fair. We were thrilled by the beauty and strength of the horses. As we sat in the bleachers, we also watched, with a somewhat horrified fascination, a father and daughter who sat nearby. The girl, between fifteen and sixteen, sat right between her father's knees on the board just below him. Their bodies grazed each other in an unconscious, erotic dance. She was restless and jumped up from time to time to run after a shirtless boy about her age who was selling ice cream, only to return to the intimacy with her father. By the father's side was a younger boy we assumed to be son and brother. He looked disconsolate and confused.

Both parent and child in this sort of incestuous, erotic dance tend to act as if the sexual feelings and erotic tone are nonexistent. Here the father acts as if he had no erotic feeling for the girl, despite her sexual liveliness and adolescent blossoming. The daughter definitely must act in the same way. The contradiction between the facade and the father's bodily movements, and her own bodily experience, which she is still in touch with to some degree, will make the girl feel crazy inside. Further, this daughter is caught in a trap. If the father were to respond in a genitally overt way, she would be jeopardized and made crazy. As it is, he responds with hidden excitement through covert behaviors, and, to control his guilty excitement, must overtly deny her attractiveness, her sexuality, and her being.

False-Memory Creation in Children and Adults
False-Memory Creation in Children and Adults: Theory, Research, and Implications. David F. Bjorklund, editor. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (2000). ISBN 080583169X.

Another factor that contributed to bolstering the public's impression of the high prevalence of childhood sexual abuse was the expansion of the definition of what constitutes abuse. Herman (1981) effectively expanded the pool of possible incest victims by conceptualizing abuse as occurring along a continuum from the most extreme exaggeration of patriarchal norms, overt incest, to covert incest, the term that she used to describe women who had seductive but not incestuous fathers. According to Herman, victims of covert incest were larger in number and experienced similar consequences as victims of overt incest. Forward (1989) continued this loosening of the term incest by stating, "Victims of psychological incest may not have been actually touched or assaulted sexually, but they have experienced an invasion of their sense of privacy or safety" (p. 139).

The recovery movement exaggerated society's perception of victimization by promoting the notion that most of us grew up in or live within the context of a dysfunctional family. On his public television "infomercials" and in his various books, John Bradshaw has claimed that 100% of families are dysfunctional, which implies that everyone needs to recover from something. Bradshaw used the term emotional incest as the recovery movement's parallel to Herman's concept of covert incest. Blume (1990) described this emotional incest more explicitly by claiming the following:

"It can be the way a father stares at his daughter's developing body, and the comments he makes. . . . It can be forced exposure to the sounds or sights of one or both parents' sexual acts . . . or it can be a father's jealous possessiveness and suspicion of the boys his daughter associates with, his inquisitorial insistence on knowing the details of her sexual encounters. . . . Horribly, increasingly, it can occur as part of a cult ritual activity engaged in by a network of adults and involving many children -- violence and abuse of animals as well.' (pp. 8-9)"

In response to these claims, Kaminer (1992) stated, "If child abuse is every form of inadequate nurturance, then being raped by your father is in the same class as being ignored or not getting help with your homework. When everything is child abuse, nothing is" (p. 27). Thus, these perpetual reconceptualizations of abuse had the effect of making child abuse seem even more prevalent, increasing the numbers of the incest survivor movement.

Early Childhood Exposure
Paul Okami, Richard Olmstead, Paul R. Abramson, and Laura Pendleton, "Early Childhood Exposure to Parental Nudity and Scenes of Parental Sexuality ("Primal Scenes"): An 18-Year Longitudinal Study of Outcome," Archives of Sexual Behavior 27.4 (1998). pmid = 9681119

Increasing numbers of academic researchers and clinicians have suggested that behaviors such as exposure of a child to parental nudity or scenes of parental sexuality ("primal scenes") constitute subtle forms of sexual abuse that previously have gone unrecognized (Atteberry-Bennett, 1987; Bolton, Morris and MacEachron, 1989; cf. Bottfield, 1992; Conte, cited in Best, 1990; Haynes-Seman and Krugman, 1989; Kritsberg, 1993; Krug, 1989; Lewis and Janda, 1988; Sroufe and Fleeson, 1986). Such subtle sexual abuse - referred to as syndromes like "maternal seductiveness," "emotional incest syndrome," "emotional sexual abuse," "covert sexual abuse," and "sexualized attention" - may also include less easily defined behaviors such as parent "flirtatiousness," or inappropriate and excessive displays of physical affection (cf. Sroufe and Fleeson, 1986).

Given the vehemence with which clinicians and child-rearing specialists often condemn childhood exposure to parental nudity, it is paradoxical that their dire predictions are not supported by the (scant) empirical work that does exist. Findings are at worst neutral or ambiguous as to interpretation, and there is even the implication of possible positive benefits in these studies (particularly for boys) in domains such as self-reported comfort with physical affection (Lewis and Janda, 1988) and positive "body self-concept" (Story, 1979). Although these investigations are methodologically limited, their results are consistent with the view of a smaller group of child-rearing specialists and other commentators who have stressed the potential benefits to children of exposure to nudity in the home, in areas such as later sexual functioning, and capacity for affection and intimacy (cf. Finch, 1982; Goodson, 1991; Martinson, 1977; Mead, cited in Goodson, 1991).

Freud and his followers chose the term "primal scenes" to refer to visual or auditory exposure of children to parental intercourse, and subsequent fantasy elaborations on the event (Dahl, 1982). Despite the identification of such exposure by psychoanalysts and others as uniquely dangerous to the mental health of children, there are, once again, scant empirical data bearing on effects of primal scene exposure. We could locate only one prevalence study (Rosenfeld et al., 1980) and two studies of initial response and subsequent adult functioning (Hoyt, 1978, 1979). Of course, numbers of case studies exist, including a very rich psychoanalytic literature describing putative consequences of exposure to primal scenes.

A number of trends were found that were significant at p [less than] 0.05, which was above the cutoff point for significance after the Bonferonni correction. Exposure to parental nudity predicted lower likelihood of sexual activity in adolescence, but more positive sexual experiences among that group of participants who were sexually active. Exposure to parental nudity also predicted reduced instances of petty theft and shoplifting, but this was mediated by a sex of participant interaction indicating that this effect was attenuated or absent for women. Similarly, exposure to parental nudity was associated at the level of trend with reduced use of drugs such as marijuana, LSD, Ecstasy, and psychedelic mushrooms, but again, this effect was mediated by a significant sex of participant interaction suggesting that this effect was experienced primarily by men. Indeed, exposed women were very slightly more likely to have used these drugs.

At the level of trend, exposure to primal scenes was associated with higher levels of self-acceptance and improved relations with adults other than parents. There was also a trend for women exposed to primal scenes to have been less likely to use drugs such as PCP, major tranquilizers, inhalants, and psychedelics other than LSD or mushrooms.

Although a number of nonsignificant trends emerged for control variables, the only significant finding was that family sexual liberalism was associated with sexual liberalism at adolescence.

Requests for sources
A couple of sources have turned up that might have more information. If anyone has access to electronic versions of the following, or is able to type out or paste quotations, they'd be appreciated.


 * PMID = 7258359 (possibly the Herman, 1981 alluded to above)
 * , already in the page as Jacobson, 2001, but contains a discussion of covert incest I am unable to access.

Thanks, WLU (talk) 15:24, 21 April 2008 (UTC)