Page:Totem and Taboo (1919).djvu/214

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
202
TOTEM AND TABOO

Westermarck[1] advanced the following to explain the dread of incest: “that an innate aversion against sexual intercourse exists between persons who live together from childhood and that this feeling, since such persons are as a rule consanguinous, finds a natural expression in custom and law through the abhorrence of sexual intercourse between those closely related.” Though Havelock Ellis disputed the instinctive character of this aversion in his “Studies in the Psychology of Sex,” he otherwise supported the same explanation in its essentials by declaring: “The normal absence of the manifestation of the pairing instinct where brothers and sisters or boys and girls living together from childhood are concerned, is a purely negative phenomenon due to the fact that under these circumstances the antecedent conditions for arousing the mating instinct must be entirely lacking. . . . For persons who have grown up together from childhood habit has dulled the sensual attraction of seeing, hearing and touching and has led it into a channel of quiet attachment, robbing it of its power to call forth the necessary erethistic excitement required to produce sexual tumescence.”

  1. “Origin and Development of Moral Conceptions,” Vol. II, “Marriage,” 1909. See also there the author’s defense against familiar objections.