Mackenzie Phillips’ incest revelation (http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26184891/vp/32999699#32999699) is being greeted with shock and disbelief. This tells me that incest and child abuse have still not come out of the closet. Freud’s first theory was that neurosis stemmed from incest. Many of his patients, who would be diagnosed as borderline or psychotic by today's standards, reported sexual abuse by relatives, so frequently in fact that Freud came to believe that they were reporting fantasies, thus he developed the Oedipus complex and drove incest back into the closet. In this blog, I comment on the Phillips' revelation and the public reaction in light of a brief history of psychology's taboo subject, touching on my clinical experience with victims of sexual trauma.
Mackenzie Phillips’ incest revelation (http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26184891/vp/32999699#32999699) is being greeted with shock and disbelief. This tells me that incest and child abuse have still not come out of the closet. Freud’s first theory was that neurosis stemmed from incest. Many of his “neurotic” patients, who would be identified by more serious diagnoses today, reported having been incested by male relatives. Having heard so many reports, Freud believed that incest could not be as common as patient’s reports indicated. So he created the theory of the imagined affair which lead him to the notion of the Oedipus complex. This turn of direction drove incest back into the closet for decades.
As a student therapist at age 19, my first patient reported incest by her father. My shocked, doubting supervisor insisted on reviewing all my tape recorded sessions to try to bust the student client whom he suspected was putting us on. It wasn’t until my internship with the theorists of the mid-80s and early-90s (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&q=judith+herman+trauma+and+reco
very&aq=2&oq=Judith+He&aqi=g10) that people began speaking of it. Of course, it helped that McLean was the most female-governed of all the Harvard teaching hospitals. Many of my supervisors were part of the Stone center and other female-inspired feminist psychology theoretical movements. These supervisors began to talk about it, to try to diagnose it, and to listen sensitively for these incidents that so traumatized our patients. During this time, Judith Herman and others began writing seminal works on trauma that the women’s movement made possible. It was then that we began to understand that Freud’s initial theory was more accurate than anyone had known.
The family suppression of Phillips information early, when MacKenzie first began talking, is common. So too is MacKenzie’s stepmother's current disbelief. The shock and disgust by the some in the public misdirected towards MacKenzie Phillips is also, unfortunately, to be expected. The symptoms of dissociation, or concealing information about the incest and increasing drug use and addiction are common sequelae. Self-loathing stems from incest. It leads to many of the behaviors that the public finds repugnant in Phillips. Ironically, the only point on which Phillips is incorrect is that the “affair” was “consensual” at some point. As a matter of psychology, a sexual relationship beginning as rape by a father cannot be consensual in a psychological sense. In a process similar to hostage mentality phenomena, in which victims look to victimizer for love and approval, Phillips needed the love and approval of her father and her collusive stepmother. The fact that Phillips implores others to see her father as a good guy and believes herself to be somewhat responsible for the “affair,” shows how deeply complicated these traumas are. A girl who is raped at gunpoint stands a much better chance of psychological survival than one who is cajoled and betrayed by innocent love. Hopefully, as this common problem is unmasked, the public will begin to understand and learn to love the messenger, even while loathing the message.