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You're 40, happily married – and then you meet your long-lost brother
and fall passionately in love
In 1992, Dr Maurice Greenberg [Student Counselling Services], former adviser
to the Post-Adoption Centre, conducted what, incredibly, remains the only academic
study into genetic sexual attraction (GSA). He interviewed eight male and female
adoptees and analysed another 40 cases, including birth parents, reported by
the Post-Adoption Centre; the objective was largely to gather information to
help guide counsellors. Dr Greenberg, who has the gentle, amiably absent-minded
manner that instantly makes you want to tell him your troubles, admits he knew
he was entering an unusual and special area and asked the Post-Adoption Centre
why it did not simply acknowledge that these people were having incestuous relationships,
rather than use the euphemism genetic sexual attraction. But was it really such
a euphemism? What Dr Greenberg couldn’t foresee was how promptly he would
do a u-turn, concluding that the consummation of GSA was ‘incest’
only in the strictest biological sense. Today, he insists that it is essential
to distinguish GSA from incest, and especially from child abuse. “There
is no force, coercion, usually no betrayal of trust. And no victim. If sex occurs,
it involves consenting adults.” He stresses that none of the interviewees
who were sexually aroused by or had sex with a parent or sibling considered
this incestuous, or that their behaviour was wrong, “But when I asked
them if they might ever have similar feelings about members of their adoptive
family, they shuddered at the suggestion.” … Dr Greenberg says that
many used the terms “finding a soulmate” and “like looking
in the mirror for the first time”. Body odour, too, held an especially
powerful attraction: there was, says Dr Greenberg, frequent fascination with
a relative’s characteristic smell – acknowledged to be a potent
factor in both human and animal attraction – as well as the feel of their
skin and the sound of their voice. “The sudden, overwhelming sense of
falling in love, a profound need for unusual closeness and intimacy, was almost
universal. As adults, we have very limited abilities for communicating such
intense feelings, and sometimes sex becomes the only familiar means.”
The intriguing paradox that Dr Greenberg appears to have uncovered is that,
no matter how shocking it appears, GSA is a largely normal response to an extremely
unusual situation: blood relatives meeting as strangers. More crucially, the
existence of GSA, as distinct from habitual incest and child abuse within families,
raises fundamental issues concerning sexual attraction, as well as with the
origins of the ‘incest taboo’.
Alix Kirsta, ‘The Guardian’, 17 May 2003
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