The Red Lamp of Incest

by Robin Fox

Refutes the widely accepted notion that the taboos against mother-son and father-daughter sexual relations are universal, arguing that our anxiety about the issue is an illuminating indication of our past history and current condition

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychology, Philosophy

271 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

Reviews

[Luna · Rating 2 out of 5]

It started off promising enough. I'm curious about incest, and the psychology behind it, and so this book looked as though it would sate that. Unfortunately, this book wound up being more an anthropological study on the primates that a sociological study on humans. I actually wound up not being able to finish all of it.

Disappointing.

[Jon L]

I whooped heartily at the first few chapters, which take Freud (of all people) at face value vis-a-vis the incest taboo (of all things). A tendentious reading of the anthropological/sociological record would follow, I assumed—and for several pages, my expectations were met. Fox’s assertion that very young siblings are sexually aroused when they engage in physical play—arousal they cannot act upon, lacking the requisite tumescence and lubrication—is a curious (to say the least) claim made even more curious by Fox’s evident satisfaction in having pointed it out. (“Isn’t it obvious?” he seems to say, after ensuring to give credit for this pearl of wisdom to John Whiting.)

Judging from contemporaneous reviews, few readers had the patience to swim out past this dubious kelp, which is a shame. Around Chapter 3 or 4, we reach the (relative) clarity of open water, and the author begins an essayistic romance on the socio-mental life of early hominids. Fox is ultimately less concerned with redeeming or verifying Freud than with following Freud’s beats into a speculative pre-history of which the incest taboo might be a vestige.

The history, briefly: early man was socially divided into three discrete groups (women and children, old men who controlled women, and young men who wanted women). And much of the way that our minds function (including intrinsic and extrinsic aversions to incest) can be interpreted in terms that connect, however distantly, to how these three groups negotiated and competed with one another for food, breeding rights, etc—as well as to the complications that arose when environmental necessities drove our ancestors into nuclear families, partly disrupting this tripartite configuration. Fox also surmises (à la Freud) that conflict between the two groups of males may have even provided sufficient selection pressure for tool-related and other critical adaptations.

It’s a suitably daring thesis—and the meaty core of the book is quite readable, even when it just recaps the research of others (which, incidentally, is what it mostly does). But all of this deserves more skepticism than Fox’s enthusiastic and somewhat relentless prose allows for. While the impact of the primitive social set-up described above is undeniable (assuming that it did exist), the author comes perilously close to identifying it as the central hinge upon which the last ~1M or so years of human evolution have creaked forward. This is, surely, too much, despite the great trouble Fox takes to stick so many different recent discoveries—in brain science, ethnography, etc—to his main argument.

Still, one must marvel at the number of thinkers the author gobbles up and regurgitates—everything from Levi-Strauss to Chomsky to William Golding gets a mention in this echt interdisciplinary text that wants to go everywhere in only a few hundred pages. (The fugue-like structure and mycelium-like colonies of ideas are probably the point of the book. This is not an academic paper but the work of a man who wants to be told “You’re on to something! Keep going!”) Even in the final pages, Fox’s observations continue to sprout strange tendrils, any one of which could serve as the germ for a separate volume. (Some of these, such as those regarding the women’s liberation movement, would be sexist if they could be taken at all seriously.) The implication seems to be that one could continue fathoming the depth of this Freud-Darwin tete-a-tete virtually forever, which is probably true.

[DoctorM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating, engrossing, sometimes infuriating, filled with surprises and aha! moments. A thoughtful, well-sourced, clearly-reasoned analysis of--- and speculations on ----the nature, history, and strength of the incest taboo across cultures.

[G. Branden · Rating 5 out of 5]

An outstanding multidisciplinary exercise in speculative anthropology.

I hope to have time to elaborate at some length on this fascinating book.