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Aimee Sword: the hate that turned to incestuous love
What made a 36-year-old mother want to start an incestuous affair with her 14-year-old son?
Aimee Sword, an attractive 36-year-old married woman, mother of five, was found guilty yesterday in a Detroit courtroom of incest with her 14-year-old son and sentenced to between 9 and 30 years imprisonment. Pleading guilty so that her son would not have to testify against her, Sword apologised to her children and her sister, saying, "I am remorseful for everything that occurred… I don't understand it."
Fourteen years after giving up her son for adoption, Aimee Sword contacted him through Facebook when the adoptive family failed to send her regular reports. Sword then asked the adoptive family if he could spend time with her in a hotel and visit her in her family home to which they agreed.
This was the beginning of what became a tragic folie a deux between them. As her lawyer explained, "When she saw this boy - something touched off in her - it wasn't a mother-son relationship, it was a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship." He added, "Aimee's searching for a reason why this happened. She can’t understand it. She’s going to get some counselling."
It is hard for most of us to believe that a woman in her mid-thirties could see an adolescent boy as a boyfriend and even harder if the boy happens to be her son. Yet the fact that she and her son convinced themselves that this was the case indicates a psychotic collusion between them that enabled them to commit incest on at least one occasion if not more.
Apart from murder, incest is the most taboo crime in our society - and incest between mother and son, its most prohibited form. Reporting and convictions of mother-son incest are relatively rare and even self-report surveys show that the incidence is low by comparison with father-daughter and father-son incest.
While father-daughter incest most often comes to light as a result of the daughter’s pregnancy, there is usually no such evidence to alert others in the case of mother-son incest. In Sword's case, it was her son who told his counsellor about their relationship.
As in the myth of Oedipus, what is horrifying about incest is that it signifies the killing of the father when the son usurps his role in his mother's bed. The natural order is destroyed - the difference between generations is wiped out along with the need for protection and nurturance. Boundaries and limits are eradicated and there is no authority to curb destructiveness.
The incestuous couple typically believe that they have a special, secret relationship which transcends the rules that govern other people's lives. It is a heady cocktail of the secret love affair that, being outside the law, offers an illusion of living with the gods. It is psychotic in the sense that external reality is denied. What is also denied is any feeling of hate.
Sword's lawyer emphasised that she did not see her son as her son. He said that "something touched off in her". This was the son whom she had rejected and never knew. She could use him to satisfy her own narcissistic needs without having to recognise her responsibility towards him as a parent. At the same time she could mask her hatred for his vulnerability by eroticising the relationship. It is also highly likely that Sword was compelled unconsciously to repeat an incestuous relationship from her own past and to inflict the abuse she had suffered on her son, confusing love with hate.
Sword's son, adopted as an infant, could also mask his own inevitable feelings of hate towards his rejecting mother by becoming her ‘adult’ sexual partner. Through their mad love affair they could avoid having to know about or feel the pain and loss of what had actually happened to both of them.
It is an especially damaging experience for Sword’s son. In most forms of parent-child incest, the child is passive. However, incest in adolescence requires the boy to be active, not passive, and entails the risk of impregnation. This risk is the most horrifying aspect of incest for boys psychologically.
The mother encourages the boy to take an active part not only in killing off/replacing the father but in giving her a child, replacing himself, and in this way abnegating his need for a mother. He is put into a position of denying his need for either parent. The boy then experiences an increase in castration anxiety and guilt that may become intolerable and in some instances can lead to suicide. When Oedipus found out that his wife was in fact his mother, he blinded himself with a pin from her dress.
While Aimee Sword will undoubtedly attempt to understand her own unconscious motivation in seducing her son, her son will be facing a different challenge. If he remains a victim, he will always be the abandoned child. If he can be helped to see his own hate and destructiveness, he will be able to accept the damage that has been done to him and his own guilt without the need to blind himself. There is no innocent victim in incest. As we can see in the story of Oedipus, the real danger is in blinding ourselves to our unconscious. ·
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Ordinarily I find Coline Covington's writings to be enlightening and well-argued. However, the "There is no innocent victim in incest" phrase is, as Hilary Easton comments, clumsily put.
However, "innocence" is not just a legal term meaning the lack of legal guilt of an individual, with respect to a crime (such as incest); it also has cultural connotations, particularly with regard to the lack of experience of guilt and anger. A "loss of innocence" is a common theme in culture and is often seen as an integral part of an individual's coming of age. It is often thought of as an experience or a period in a child's life that widens their awareness of the world around them, including a world containing evil and pain and guilt.
Along with the witnessing of murder, surely childhood sexual abuse by the adult responsible for his/her care must be one of the most powerful experiences of evil and pain (and misplaced guilt) that a child can encounter? Such an experience robs them of their innocence and, thanks to the perpetrator's devious grooming techniques, frequently leaves the victim believing they must have "led on" the perpetrator and that the victim has, somehow, contributed responsibility for what has taken place.
Perhaps, if Ms Covington had substituted the word "untarnished" for "innocent" it would not have caused such a reaction and misinterpretation.
One, perhaps unfortunate, choice of word should not diminish an otherwise excellent piece of writing that draws on the ancient story of Oedipus and its relevance for life in the modern day, particularly: "the real danger is in blinding ourselves to our unconscious".
Coline Covington responds:
"Children who are in incestuous relationships with their parents are undoubtedly victims. It is the parent who is responsible for protecting his or her child and for ensuring that they do not use their child for their own narcissistic gratification. Nevertheless, incestuous desire is a fundamental force within the psyche. How this desire is understood and met by the parent determines the child's subsequent psychological development and health. When a mother colludes with her son's wish to be her sexual partner and allows for this to happen, she is enabling his omnipotent fantasies to take over and to become reality. She is not helping him to separate from her in order to grow and develop, she is, paradoxically, keeping him in a state of regressed infancy. This is her crime.
However, no child is entirely innocent in this process because we all harbour incestuous wishes - the wish to have mother or father to ourselves, to circumvent the need to be separate and to grow up, and to obliterate awareness of what we lack. If a child is allowed to enter into an incestuous relationship, it is vital for the child's recovery that he be helped to see that he is not purely a victim of parental abuse. It is important that the child be helped to recognize his own destructive desire to possess the mother as a way of avoiding facing the frustrations and painful separations of life, and of avoiding having a mind. Without this understanding, the child will not be able to internalise a protective father who can mediate these desires so that the child can learn the difference between love and hate and is not caught within a cycle of destructiveness.
Even in cases in which the child is not the willing partner, as in Fritzl's daughter, she will need help in untangling her inevitable identification with her abuser so that she does not continue to unconsciously repeat the abuse she has been subjected to.
In the myth of Oedipus, Jocasta and her husband Laius gave up their son for adoption out of fear that the prophecy that their son would kill his father and marry his mother would come true. It was their failure to understand the prophecy on a psychological, as opposed to a literal, level that led to tragic consequences. In being blind to their own incestuous desires and to those of their son, they had no means of stemming their destructiveness."
Covington's comment that 'there is no innocent victim in incest' is factually incorrect and shows her to be dangerously incompetent to write for publication on any aspect of psychology. What she fails to mention is that it is very well known and documented that parents, children and siblings who are reunited after long separation such as adoption often feel extreme sexual desire towards the relative with whom they are reunited. Any counsellor worth their salt advises the parties concerned about this well in advance of any reunion so that the feelings do not come as a shock and are not acted upon. The article above only leads me to speculate that Covington once attended evening classes on psychoanalysis but failed to turn up after the first term.
Boo hoo hoo! The only reason the media are making these disgusting attempts to turn this into a tragic love story for both participants is because the paedophile in question is a woman. If the media, well know for its open loathing of men, truly believes in equality, then let's have some sympathy for all the fathers and daughters who have relationships which are usually referred to as paedophilia shall we? Shall we re-brand them 'incestuous' as well? My own personal beilef is that most fourteen year olds these days are intelligent enough to make up their own minds as to whether they wish to have sex with an adult but the adult should bear total responsibility for anything that goes wrong. Simple but effective way of making people think twice before embarking on such ill advised relationships. Worth pointing out I think also, that the age of consent was created by an all male Parliament. Given that females are so often touted as more mature than boys, shouldn't the age of consent for girls be lowered, perhaps in line with Germanies, fourteen I believe? Or would the same women crying into their hankies for this particular child abuser suddeny find things distasteful and we'd get a whole load of 'Ooh it's different', 'Why'? 'Ooh, it just is'! These cases are all unique and should be treated as such and judges and the police should be given leeway to excersise personal discretion when it comes to charges or sentencing, but two groups of people should have precious little say in the matter. Feminist groups falsely claiming to represent women and girls and the man bashing media.
Like Mark Wallace, I am outraged at the suggestion that 'there is no innocent victim in incest'. Perhaps this is a clumsy way of saying that many incest victims (wrongly) feel that they are not innocent because they have become aroused sexually by the contact initiated by the adult. I hope that is what is meant or we are in the realms of blaming the victim.
I am appalled that a psychologist and 'analyst' could state 'there are no innocent victims in incest'. One shouldn't have to point out to an expert the very many and far too tragic cases of innocent victims of incest.
"There is no innocent victim in incest"
What nonsense - it is undeniable that there are plenty of innocent victims in incest. Ask Ms. Fritzl.