Q: I am 45 and sexually attracted to a woman who looks and behaves alarmingly like a younger version of my mother. Am I a pervert?
Dr Thomas Stuttaford
If Freud was correct, people learn about sexuality through their childhood attraction to the parent of the opposite sex. He taught that resolution of the conflicts induced by this oedipal complex is more important in men than women but admitted that it may have been because he knew more about men. He maintained that men especially continue to have fixations about their parents if the conflicts of their childhood and possibly youth are unresolved. As part of the oedipal complex men would be attracted not only to their mothers, and perhaps to others who had a maternal role such as aunts or nannies, but often without good cause also feel hostile to their fathers.
With successful parenting young people live through their oedipal stage and learn to identify with the parent of the same sex. Thus the father becomes the model for a boy and the mother for a girl. This is a simplification of Freud’s opinion, but experience shows that there is a nugget of truth in it. It is not uncommon to find men unusually attached to their mothers and unjustifiably antagonistic to their fathers.
Other psychologists have suggested that most of us have some narcissistic traits. We may then either fall for those who look like ourselves, or our opposite parent. The root causes of these two patterns of behaviour are often hard to distinguish because as our own appearance and habits have been inherited there is every likelihood that we will look and behave like our parents. The similarities may be so great that it can be difficult to decide if someone is attracted by a lover who looks like their opposite parent or themselves. This may be an advantage. Marriages and partnerships are likely to be more successful long term when there is not an attraction of opposites but when two people are similar and identify easily with each other.
The term perversion sends a shiver down the spine of the politically correct. They prefer to call habits previously known as sexual deviations or perversions as paraphilias. Likewise, people who would have been described as perverts or deviants are known as sexual variants. The term paraphilia, or perversion, describes the condition that renders someone liable to respond to sexual stimuli, activities or objects that their own society doesn’t accept as part of a normal sexual repertoire. It is, therefore, a subjective, rather than objective, judgment. Even so, some sexual practices that are frequently found in most races and cultures are considered perversions. Other practices have been considered acceptable in a culture’s early history, but are now thought to be outrageous. However, these may still be acceptable in other communities.
For example, an overseas doctor then practising in a remote area was seconded to me for an update in genito-urinary medicine. He said that his patients thought it acceptable that pubescent girls and boys learnt their adult sexual behaviour as partners to, by our standards, comparatively young grandmothers and aunts. Another woman told me that her most fulfilling sexual experience had been when she was living with a now distinguished man who as a youth lived with his tribe where he had been introduced, as was customary, to sex by his aunt.
It is common for young people to be attracted by those who look like the parent of the opposite sex (or themselves). This is not perverse, you don’t suffer from a paraphilia but are repeating a standard pattern of behaviour.
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Suzi Godson
Oh boy, would you make a psychoanalyst’s day. Your common or garden Oedipus complex would be a no-brainer for a Freudian shrink, but it would still take ten years’ worth of sessions for your undeveloped psyche to figure out why your inner child wants to kill your father and marry your mother. Now that’s what I call repeat business.
Alternatively, you could save your money and figure that as relationship models go, choosing a partner who bears a strong similarity to the one person who has loved you unconditionally since the day you were born is probably not a bad move. And besides, according to David Perrett, a cognitive psychologist at the University of St Andrews, it’s what all of us ultimately aspire to anyway. Het has developed a computer system that allows him to morph images of his volunteers’ faces into pictures of people of the opposite sex. He then morphs those images further and asks the volunteers to select which face they find the most attractive. Though the students can’t recognise any of the faces as their own, they consistently pick the image that most resembles them. Perrett believes that they find their own faces attractive because they remind them of the faces they looked at constantly in their early childhood years: m um and dad.
According to Dr Martha McClintock, of the University of Chicago, we want someone who smells like our parent, too. Using a rather unscientific process involving sweaty T-shirts, she has shown that women consistently choose men who smell like their father. And arguably, the same theory works in reverse.
Physical studies reveal that the similarities between people and their partners are incredibly specific. In fact, research on couples in long-term relationships has shown correlations between lung volume, middle finger lengths, ear-lobe length, overall ear size, neck and wrist circumferences and even metabolic rate.
Suzi Malin, the author of Love at First Sight, supports this theory. With the help of a host of celebrities and a spot of Photoshop magic, she sets out to prove that we are attracted to people who either remind us visually of ourselves or a key figure (mother/father/nanny) from our childhood. To illustrate her point she shows us that Brad Pitt looks like Jennifer Aniston, Monica Lewinsky looks like Bill Clinton ’s mum and Camilla Parker Bowles looks like the Prince of Wales’s nanny. The book doesn’t offer an explanation as to why Charles married Diana Spencer, or Bill married Hillary or whether Angelina Jolie looks like Brad’s nanny, but hey, no theory is watertight.
Since you have already acknowledged that the woman you fancy is your mother Mk II, and as such are one step ahead of these experts already, what you really need to figure out is whether she is actually the right person for you. You can do this with the help of ten years of therapy, or you could employ the fantastically unscientific but infinitely cheaper matchmaking services of Mabel Lam (www.llewellyn.com/free/mabel.php).
Lam, who looks a bit like Kirstie Ally before the diet, is, according to her website, a “trusted source for advice in her native Argentina” and, amazingly, she can tell you whether you and this woman were made for each other in just 30 seconds. For free. All you have to do is to type your first name and your partner’s first name into a little box and press “go”.
OVER TO YOU
Do you have a sexual dilemma for Suzi Godson and Dr Thomas Stuttaford? Send your e-mails to body&soul@thetimes.co.uk or write to Body&Soul, The Times, 1 Pennington Street, London E98 1TT. The authors regret that, although your letters are much appreciated, they cannot respond personally.
