Perversion Part 1: Incest
When you put the effort into studying Psychology there are certain subjects that keep intruding, even when you are reading very general subjects, and that includes, in bright neon lights: Perverted Sexuality. Easily one of the most stigmatizing subjects out there, it’s not something you would readily visit a library in person in order to checkout books on these subjects. You can imagine a librarian staring at you like a criminal and ready to press a button underneath a desk. If instead the librarian is perverse, they might think you would like to join their perverse cult. Thanks to digital university libraries there’s more anonymity, or maybe not! Regardless, the subject touches on so many millions of people that a blog like this would not be comprehensive if it ignored unsavory, disgusting, and immoral behavior. Humans are animals and they do as many wild and illegal things as you can imagine, and more.
Despite this subject being so stigmatized, many people have written about sexual perversion nonetheless, and the message one gets is that it’s meant to be consumed privately, but the knowledge that these behaviors are widespread is to be denied publicly. Certainly the below topics won’t end up in a YouTube video as I’m sure it would be flagged and banned. In the end the written word is much better suited to these subjects to avoid strange titillation based on a perception of forbidden-ness, which may be impossible to avoid completely. A more useful aim for this post is to look at why people like what they like, how it hurts others, how victims can recover, how perpetrators reform in those cases where it’s possible, and what happens to those who never change.
In this first entry of this perversion series, one of Freud’s disciples Sándor Ferenczi was able to recover some of Freud’s earlier developments on incest, despite orthodoxy, resistance, and censorship by his psychoanalytic friends, and he was able to develop the topic much further than they ever did.
Confusion of Tongues
Influenced by Freud’s initial seduction theory, about the effect that incest has on the development of children and adult pathology, Ferenczi cleaved off a different path from Freud, who focused more on frustrated wishes, even while Sándor felt that he was behaving very loyal to Freud. Ferenczi, in his Confusion of Tongues, focused “more emphatic stress on the traumatic factors in the pathogenesis of the neuroses which had been unjustly neglected in recent years. Insufficiently deep exploration of the [external] factor leads to the danger of resorting prematurely to explanations—often too facile explanations—in terms of ‘disposition’ and ‘constitution’.” Using typical psychoanalytic methods, many times they failed Ferenczi. Patients would continue to have nightmares and repetition of trauma in analysis. Typical explanations of a resistance being too strong, or that the patient had such severe repressions that healing could only be done a little bit at a time, led Sándor to listen to his patients and allow self-criticism. “I began to test my conscience in order to discover whether, despite all my conscious good intentions, there might after all be some truth in these accusations. I wish to add that such periods of anger and hatred occurred only exceptionally; very often the sessions ended with a striking, almost helpless compliance and willingness to accept my interpretations. This, however, was so transitory that I came to realize that even these apparently willing patients felt hatred and rage, and I began to encourage them not to spare me in any way…This encouragement, too, failed to achieve much, for most of my patients energetically refused to accept such an interpretative demand although it was well supported by analytic material…I came to the conclusion that the patients have an exceedingly refined sensitivity for the wishes, tendencies, whims, sympathies and antipathies of their analyst, even if the analyst is completely unaware of this sensitivity…We must discern not only the painful events of their past from their associations, but also—and much more often than hitherto supposed—their repressed or suppressed criticism of us.”
Ferenczi began to expound the problems of counter-transference, or as he calls it, a professional hypocrisy, and whether analysts can actually handle criticism themselves. The more difficult admission was that the repressed hatred between analyst and analysand could actually be reenacting a form of abuse that happened long ago. Only admitting mistakes and trying to avoid repeating them allows the analysand to regain trust that this social exchange is different. “It is this confidence that establishes the contrast between the present and the unbearable traumatogenic past, the contrast which is absolutely necessary for the patient in order to enable him to reexperience the past no longer as hallucinatory reproduction but as an objective memory.” By allowing more attunement, the analyst can adjust rigid procedures and respond more to what is actually happening. Fake sympathy, or other fake emotions are often seen through by patients and this demands the analyst to pay more attention. When Sándor was able to take patients more seriously he couldn’t ignore anymore what was there.
“I obtained above all new corroborative evidence for my supposition that the trauma, especially the sexual trauma, as the pathogenic factor cannot be valued highly enough. Even children of very respectable, sincerely puritanical families, fall victim to real violence or rape much more often than one had dared to suppose. Either it is the parents who try to find a substitute gratification in this pathological way for their frustration, or it is people thought to be trustworthy such as relatives (uncles, aunts, grandparents), governesses or servants, who misuse the ignorance and the innocence of the child. The immediate explanation—that these are only sexual phantasies of the child, a kind of hysterical lying—is unfortunately made invalid by the number of such confessions, e.g. of assaults upon children, committed by patients actually in analysis. That is
why I was not surprised when recently a philanthropically-minded teacher told me, despairingly, that in a short time he had discovered that in five upper class families the governesses were living a regular sexual life with boys of nine to eleven years old.”
He admitted that Freud’s understanding of childhood tenderness and wishes, kind of like student crushes on teachers, or even a more friendly and benign fondness could be taken the wrong way by pathological adults who “especially if they have been disturbed in their balance and self-control by some misfortune or by the use of intoxicating drugs. They mistake the play of children for the desires of a sexually mature person or even allow themselves—irrespective of any consequences—to be carried away. The real rape of girls who have hardly grown out of the age of infants, similar sexual acts of mature women with boys, and also enforced homosexual acts, are more frequent occurrences than has hitherto been assumed.”
Because children are in a helpless situation, they lack the ability to defend themselves as an adult would. This can then dwell in the mind of child into adulthood, and in some cases lead to repeating these crimes themselves, or in other cases lead to a repeating of the trauma with the hope to master these memories some day. “These children feel physically and morally helpless, their personalities are not sufficiently consolidated in order to be able to protest, even if only in thought, for the overpowering force and authority of the adult makes them dumb and can rob them of their senses. The same anxiety, however, if it reaches a certain maximum, compels them to subordinate themselves like automata to the will of the aggressor, to divine each one of his desires and to gratify these; completely oblivious of themselves they identify themselves with the
aggressor. Through the identification, or let us say, introjection of the aggressor, he disappears as part of the external reality, and becomes intra- instead of extra-psychic; the intra-psychic is then subjected, in a dream-like state as is the traumatic trance, to the primary process, i.e. according to the pleasure principle it can be modified or changed by the use of positive or negative hallucinations. In any case the attack as a rigid external reality ceases to exist and in the traumatic trance the child succeeds in maintaining the previous situation of tenderness.”
Quite easily, the playful actions that happened before the abuse can transfer the sense of guilt from the adult to the child when they attempt to repeat those playful actions, and perpetrators can convince themselves that they were the ones seduced. “The most important change, produced in the mind of the child by the anxiety-fear-ridden identification with the adult partner, is the introjection of the guilt feelings of the adult which makes hitherto harmless play appear as a punishable offence.” The child can then blame themselves by increasing their standard to that of an adult, ignoring the powerlessness he or she was in. “When the child recovers from such an attack, he feels enormously confused, in fact, split—innocent and culpable at the same time—and his confidence in the testimony of his own senses is broken. Moreover, the harsh behaviour of the adult partner tormented and made angry by his remorse renders the child still more conscious of his own guilt and still more ashamed. Almost always the perpetrator behaves as though nothing had happened, and consoles himself with the thought: ‘Oh, it is only a child, he does not know anything, he will forget it all.’ Not infrequently after such events, the seducer becomes over-moralistic or religious and endeavours to save the soul of the child by severity.”
By succumbing to pressure of a helpless child, like in a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, the child tries to please the perpetrator as a way to identify with the aggressor and to avoid further punishment. This is especially compounded when other adults refuse to believe the child’s stories. “Usually the relation to a second adult—Eg. the mother—is not intimate enough for the child to find help there, timid attempts towards this end are refused by her as nonsensical. The misused child changes into a mechanical, obedient automaton or becomes defiant, but is unable to account for the reasons of his defiance. His sexual life remains undeveloped or assumes perverted forms. There is no need for me to enter into the details of neuroses and psychoses which may follow such events. For our theory this assumption, however, is highly important—namely, that the weak and undeveloped personality reacts to sudden unpleasure not by defence, but by anxiety-ridden identification and by introjection of the menacing person or aggressor.”
This then sends the child’s sexual development into the wrong direction where Ego is underdeveloped, and there’s a failure in the grown up adult to be able to use their Ego to get what they authentically want. “One part of their personalities, possibly the nucleus, got stuck in its development at a level where it was unable to [change the environment externally] but could only react [by altering oneself] by a kind of mimicry. Thus we arrive at the assumption of a mind which consists only of the Id and Super-Ego, and which therefore lacks the ability to maintain itself with stability in face of unpleasure.”
The Ego and the Id – Sigmund Freud: https://youtu.be/Le_jw0YgTwo
Insightfully, Ferenczi sees that patients often can sense that they’re pathologically developed, or their underdeveloped sexuality is something they actually fight against and would like to remove if possible. “Parents and adults, in the same way as we analysts, ought to learn to be constantly aware that behind the submissiveness or even the adoration, just as behind the transference of love, of our children, patients and pupils, there lies hidden an ardent desire to get rid of this oppressive love. If we can help the child, the patient or the pupil to give up the reaction of identification, and to ward off the over-burdening transference, then we may be said to have reached the goal of raising the personality to a higher level.”
Connecting with older Freudian theories of identification, identification has to precede the object that is sought for. By essentially grooming a child towards a different developmental pathway, different objects can be searched for. “Vestiges of object-love are already apparent here but only in a playful way in phantasies. Thus almost without exception we find the hidden play of taking the place of the parent of the same sex in order to be married to the other parent, but it must be stressed that this is merely phantasy; in reality the children would not want to, in fact they cannot do without tenderness, especially that which comes from the mother. If more love or love of a different kind from that which they need, is forced upon the children in the stage of tenderness, it may lead to pathological consequences in the same way as the frustration or withdrawal of love quoted elsewhere in this connection.” Though, like with Freud, it’s much easier to revive an older identification before the abuse than to create one if it was never developed in anyway. “Detailed examination of the phenomena during an analytic trance teaches us that there is neither shock nor fright without some trace of splitting of personality. It will not surprise any analyst that part of the person regresses into the state of happiness that existed prior to the trauma.”
Many who grow up lamenting their abuse say that they “lost their childhood” and their development lost its potential, but Ferenczi also saw that some people matured faster because they needed to develop more skills in order to process their trauma. Again, this depends on whether the child, and then adult, stay in a helpless mind state, or if they eventually learn skills to master their situation. For example, learning to become a therapist.
Anticipating modern theories of Complex Post-Traumatic Distress Disorder (C-PTSD), these splits in personality that cleave the personality before abuse, and after, can create multiple splits when there are multiple abuses. Ferenczi called it atomization. “If the shocks increase in number during the development of the child, the number and the various kinds of splits in the personality increase too, and soon it becomes extremely difficult to maintain contact without confusion with all the fragments each of which behaves as a separate personality yet does not know of even the existence of the others.” Part of this splitting can connect with the above underdevelopment where children become caretakers of their family to such an extent that caretaking dominates earlier personality potentials, which also anticipates modern views of co-dependency. You take care of others so you can deserve love.
Connecting with the underlying hatred that is repressed, Ferenczi concludes that in his time, civilization has moved into a sadomasochistic mode, and along with Freud’s views of ambivalent feelings, the burden of the love object mixes with the love, also anticipating future theories on the cycle of abuse and that ambivalence that keeps people attracting and repelling each other in cycles. The playful tenderness of childhood gives way to the suffering passion of the adult.
Connecting the dots
Modern studies on taboo topics such as incest add an emphasis on power differentials. They do describe female forms of sexual abuse of children, but emphasize male dominance in the family and objectification. Certainly as power dynamics between men and women change people will focus less on identity politics and just on the power, because that’s really where behavior follows. Power means that you CAN do something, and impulses increase only when opportunities avail themselves with power. In Analysis of the Incest Trauma: Retrieval, Recovery, Renewal, Rachman and Klett provide clinical examples that match some of what Ferenczi was talking about. One of those examples is abusing children as a replacement for failed imitate relations, and also how therapy can accidentally trigger old flashbacks.
“Samantha came to believe that the father used the medical excuse of her asthma as a reason to spend evenings in his daughter’s room, escaping from the sexual rejection of his wife, searching for passion in the guise of providing tenderness and affection to his daughter. The moving back and forth of the male figure in [her] dream depicted the father’s masturbatory behavior. As we focused on this material, Samantha believed her father sexually abused her, not only by masturbating while in her presence, but, by fondling her genitals and encouraging her to sit in his lap while he had an erection. It was this lap sitting experience of sexuality with the father that was re-created by the psychiatrist, which led her to flee therapy with him.”
“During early childhood, probably before three years old, [a boy’s] mother had several sexual experiences with him. Two such sexual seductions were reconstructed. While he was being washed by his mother she focused on his penis, washing it over and over again, playing with his penis and his testicles, including masturbating him. What is more, the mother became sexually stimulated by her sexual play with her son to such an extent that she moved from masturbating her son to holding him in her hands and using him as a penis, rubbing him up and down her vulva, using his entire body as a masturbating device. Winston recalled fragments of this scene as well as the look and smell of his mother’s vagina.”
These examples also show how fused sexuality is with objectification. Part of the sexual function is to be able to treat people as parts that provide gratification. The difficulty is when objectivation, like a drug, zeroes in on only parts, but those parts are a part of a criminal act. When in desperation to find pleasure, objects that are simply nearby become a target. When objectifying narrows attention it also means consequences are ignored. As in Freud’s terminology, humans can be polymorphously perverse. To understand part of the reason why this “Samantha” was abused, is to recall the abuser’s death and the habitual attitude Samantha’s mother had towards him. “Samantha’s father became critically ill with a stroke. She came to her mother’s aid, and moved into her family home during this crisis period. Samantha helped her father go to the bathroom, including helping him urinate. Intense undifferentiated disturbed feelings began to surface. When her father died at home, Samantha and her mother prepared his body for the undertaker. While dressing her dead husband, the mother held her husband’s penis in her hand and said, ‘You see this little thing. He never did much with it.'”
In the heat of criticism, low self-esteem, and desperation, people can resort to criminality in order to gain pleasure and relief. Although incest is a form of pleasure, it is one that only provides karmic guilt and shame. Part of what makes a person considered to be a pedophile is their exclusiveness in their attraction to the underaged, but examples like the above include people who are capable of age-appropriate attractions. A good recent news story I bumped into, while researching the recent lockdowns and COVID19 pandemic, is how prevalent perversion is when people are prevented from finding normal outlets for libido. Not that this justifies what people should do even under pressure, but this world is full of humans caught in objectifications and obliviousness to the risks they are taking. One of the main outlets for sexual tension is pornography. Objectification reigns in that world where people can explore their unrealistic fantasies.
In the Guardian article by Harriet Grant, she interviewed child abuse expert Michael Sheath who sees similar patterns in sexual objectifications and drug addiction, where regular sexual themes become boring and forbidden ones become the next unexplored drug of choice. Beyond COVID19 lockdowns, there has been a shift based on technology that is independent from living through hard times, or excuses based on the lack of healthy sexual relationships, and that is early consumption of pornography with the advent of the internet age. “Sheath is seeing what he believes is a dangerous cultural shift in the profile of offenders, brought about by the enormous change that increasingly extreme pornography is having on the developing teenage mind.” This echoes again the importance of identifications before object-choices are made. “For the younger men who had their adolescence after about 2000, men up to 40, they will have watched a huge amount of online pornography before they have sex with a human being. And in my personal view that makes an absolutely enormous difference…Typically these men I work with will have been watching porn that is freely available on the internet at eight, nine, 10 years old. This isn’t looking at naked ladies, it’s group sex, it’s rape-themed, incest-themed. And that’s at an age when I still believed in Father Christmas…If you look at the videos on mainstream porn sites you can see ‘teen’ themes, ‘mom and son’ themes, lots of incestuous porn. It’s pretty deviant stuff. To watch this you have already lowered your threshold of what is acceptable. Porn is an entry drug for a lot of them…There is a school of thought that these men we work with were already interested in children and went off to look for it – that they are born paedophiles. But that’s not my thoughts. I think a lot of the men we work with go down what I call a potentially escalating pathway.”
One of the practices that Michael does is to bring up narratives of these abused children and pull addicts away from their objectification. Objectification has a dehumanizing quality about it, and one of the ways to zoom out of it, and not just from perversion targets, is to bring up realistic narratives for these targets. Even in regular romantic relationships, the narrative of a seduction target is lost, and those who objectify are often surprised at the independence and goals that targets have. It’s how a target’s ambition can be robbed without some perpetrators even knowing that’s what they were doing. The big separation between who can get better and who can’t depends a lot on whether a person is capable of empathy beyond objectification. “One of the exercises we do is I ask the men to tell me about an image they look at, I ask the girl’s age, I say what do you reckon her name is, what does she like doing at school? They look absolutely horrified. They have never considered it. They are objectifying this child seeing them just as a mouth, or a body part. When I make them think this is a kid who goes to school and has a hamster, has a mum and dad, they don’t like that, it’s painful for them…We can see a huge improvement in insight. They can reach a point where they have more empathy for the child. We have evidence that our work not only reduces reoffending but brings about changes in empathy levels.”
How extreme porn has become a gateway drug into child abuse – Harriet Grant – The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/dec/15/how-extreme-porn-has-become-a-gateway-drug-into-child-abuse
Healing the personality splits
As children grow up fragmented, the role for the therapist is to bring the adult to a stage where they can function enough so they can work and love. People need to be able to make their own decisions, see their positive impact, and to be creative to feel healthy. They have to integrate their personalities. L.E. Mason said that, “the literature defines a cure as integration—the repeated merging of one personality with another until only one remains. There are many steps along the way. The first is building trust…Next comes the recovery of memories. Therapy aims for emotional healing.” Like with Freud’s method of recovering memories, the adult can understand their childhood self, and forgive their helplessness. To realize that one doesn’t have to be a permanent caretaker, or to remember older influences that one had before the abuse, allows the self-narrative to congeal into the real adult who now has more power to develop the Ego in projects, hobbies, and genuine relationships based not on being manipulated or abused, but on working together on common goals. One can work and appreciate, instead of endlessly imitating and identifying with aggressors and split off undeveloped personalities.
A tragic example in Rachman and Klett’s book was an ex-president of an American university, Richard Berendzen. “An educator was apprehended for making obscene phone calls. First, an explosion in the media chronicled his public disgrace, then, in his own book, the ex-president of an American university, Richard Berendzen, revealed the psychodynamic behind his compulsion to make obscene phone calls to women with whom he could talk about having sex with children. Berendzen revealed that he was forced to have sex with his mother, from 6–12 years old, with his father’s awareness. His mother was obsessed with her son and was institutionalized for emotional illness. He felt he was his mother’s passion and her prey…It is clear to those of us who work with trauma survivors that they need an empathic emotional and interpersonal social climate, so that they can uncover the experiences and feelings connected to their incest. If incest survivors cannot gain this support in the social system, they should be able to have this necessary empathic experience with their psychoanalyst or psychotherapist.”
In brain science, victims have to deal with cortisol damage to hippocampus functioning, which increases emotional dysregulation. In treatment, “…language, in combination with emotional attunement is a central tool in the therapeutic process; it creates the opportunity to blend words with feelings, providing a means of neural growth and neural network integration…The therapist must provide an external scaffolding within which the patient can rebuild these brain networks of memory, self-organization, and affect regulation; on another level, the therapist serves as an external neural circuit to aid in the integration of networks left unintegrated during development.”
As people integrate their past history, there are healing moments in understanding that others have gone through the same situation and came through. One can develop the Ego, take action, and receive feedback to measure how well one is doing. Part of Ego development is taking the adult brain back to those old memories and to confront the abuser and accept that one was younger, more ignorant, and helpless. There’s less self-blame.
Over time, there’s less need to rely on others for self-esteem. One can rely on oneself much more. When you rely on yourself more, there’s less need to blame abusers. This can reduce a great burden of wanting revenge in a perfect way and those draining thoughts. At best confronting abusers will disclose their weakness and humanity when they are capable of changing, and for those who can’t or won’t change their abusive personality, an acceptance that some people are completely lost helps to motivate removal of these people from your life and your energy can focus in better areas.
In Behind Closed Doors in White South Africa, by Diana Russell, part of the rigidity of abusers is their conditioned entitlement. Objectification also includes a sense of property. Treating children as property. With that mentality, father-daughter incest isn’t as hidden but has excuses behind the behavior. Victims end up with “a poor self-image, feelings of worthlessness, self-destructive impulses, eating disorders, relationship problems, and so on, seriously handicapping many survivors’ development and achievement, to say nothing of their health, happiness and fulfilment.” Again it’s that lack of narrative that one could enjoy as a healthy father wanting to see their daughter’s potential realized. The pleasure and happiness of those potentials have to outweigh any entitlements to property.
“For example, one survivor stated that, ‘My mother told me I didn’t do well at school after the time my father started doing oral sex on me’. Another reported, ‘I was not achieving at school so I dropped out’. A third said, ‘My academic work went down completely as a result of my father’s abuse’. Marie described the severe job problems she experienced because of her inability to concentrate, her excessive desire to please and her repeated psychological incest-related crises that often made it impossible for her to work at all. Nida’s school performance plummeted after her mother learned about her father’s abuse but did nothing to stop it. From being one of the best students in her class, she ended up failing her final high school examinations.”
Confusion over sexual orientation
Part of the difficulty of being a child is not just the sense of powerlessness, but also boys can often look more effeminate and attract abuse attention. “Are you gay?” is a question often thrown at empathic males. Kindness can send the wrong signals to the wrong people. Phallic men, and even phallic women, find empathy something to objectify and feed on sexually. Then, as described above, the desire to avoid conflict can lead to sexual propositions that condition and groom the child. In Family Secrets of Incest and Sexual Violence in Mexico by Gloria González-López, she describes “Leonardo’s experiences with his family [which became] part of a larger labyrinth of sexual violence that he has been trying to make sense of his entire life. When still in preschool—years before his uncle abused him—Leonardo was already wondering why his classmates and friends bullied him—even in front of his sister, who lovingly defended him and encouraged him to fight back. As a boy, he preferred to spend time and play with girls rather than boys, and cried easily. Throughout his adolescence he gave oral sex to other men, mainly classmates and friends close in age; these were casual encounters that felt voluntary but which he rarely enjoyed…’I didn’t know I was effeminate,’ Leonardo said about his childhood. He eventually learned that the uncle who sexually molested him was gay, and said he’d abused him because he ‘thought that I was the same way, and in the end I was going to be homosexual . . . That I was following his same path.’ Because of the experiences with his uncle, Leonardo called himself ‘bisexual.’ Lately, however, he has felt ‘undecided’ about how he identifies himself sexually. He thinks that marrying a woman and having children would be the ideal for a permanent relationship.”
In all these scenarios, people are being conditioned by others, but without coercion, what would their True Self desire if they could condition themselves? If children could make their own choices about sex and develop sexual skills on their own without coercion from powerful people, what would their developed Ego choose? “Leonardo said, ‘I have met certain people [men] who sexually harassed me so much that I said, ‘Well, if that is what you want, let’s do it, ¡órale! Let’s do it! If you’ll leave me alone if I give you what you want, let’s do it!’ He feels responsible for the harassment. ‘I contribute to it,’ he said. ‘I don’t like my body.’ About a third of the sexual encounters he has had with men happened under this kind of coercion, in a variety of social contexts and circumstances. Of course, some aggression in childhood is impossible to avoid, and part of being a good parent is to be able to protect children to help them to develop their more innate skills, especially skills that lead to future employment, but also skills related to fighting so that the child can learn as soon as possible how to fight back against coercion. The sooner the victim loses their feeling of helplessness the better.
Whether someone identifies as gay or another orientation, it happens more authentically when people feel at peace with their choice because they’re not under coercion. The book has an example of Elias who felt more confident in his orientation than Leonardo. “[My 1st cousin] was the first man I felt attracted to, I loved seeing him, I loved being with him, and the fact that he was a man. In other words, that was one of the key points that told me, that helped me accept myself as a gay man…”
As difficult a subject this is, there’s an underlying lesson for the rest of the population on being able to filter through suggestions and to explore on your own. Certainly I don’t advocate people sleeping with family members simply because there’s a lack of coercion, but a world with less coercion means there are more places for people to develop their authenticity. It’s better for people to explore on their own and decide their own orientation than to hear suggestions from others, and due to a fear of conflict, acquiesce to their demands without listening to one’s own body, and to let go of one’s own rationality and discernment. It leads to confusion, suggestibility, a lack of assertion, and then it’s quite possible for people to end up not actually knowing with great certainty what they want. That repressed aggression, as Ferenczi points out, has to be listened to, along with drawbacks and disgust as with any behavior. This way sexuality doesn’t have to have that tinge of S & M slavery, but instead a mutual respect between partners.
Confusion of Tongues – Sándor Ferenczi: https://icpla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Ferenczi-S-Confusion-of-Tongues-Intl-J-Psychoa.-vol.30-p.225-1949.pdf
Confusion of Tongues: A Return to Sandor Ferenczi – by Miguel Gutierrez-Pelaez: Kindle: https://amzn.to/3o6cO7G Paperback: https://amzn.to/3nUDXKZ
Analysis of the Incest Trauma Retrieval, Recovery, Renewal by Arnold W. Rachman, Susan Klett: Kindle: https://amzn.to/3mStiiB Paperback: https://amzn.to/3nOEJZT
Behind Closed Doors in White South Africa by Diana Russell: Hardcover: https://amzn.to/34NopAZ Paperback: https://amzn.to/3nYuDFS
Family Secrets of Incest and Sexual Violence in Mexico by Gloria González-López: Kindle: https://amzn.to/34NUnxa Paperback: https://amzn.to/37U63jQ
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/