Aimee Sword: the hate that turned to incestuous love

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."

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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.