Genetic Sexual Attraction (GSA)

I hope I am in order in assuming that if I give acknowledgments, I have not taken too much liberty in lifting the following, which I hope is (a) relevant and (b) of interest to colleagues. It caught my eye in the current issue of "People", a magazine published for the alumni of University College London and dated Autumn 1998. The story/article appears on page 7. The only thing I didn’t copy was the inset: "One subject told me that looking at his reflection in the mirror was never the same after he had met his mother, says Dr Maurice Greenberg, who finds that many of those reunited as adults after adoption experience sexual attraction".

"Intense erotic feelings felt by some birth relatives who are reunited after many years are increasingly being reported by post-adoptive counsellors", says Dr Maurice Greenberg (Medical School, 1953) of the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioural Sciences. His research challenges strongly held assumptions about incestuous relationships and should lead to improvements in the counselling process.

Dr Greenberg is investigating Genetic Sexual Attraction (GSA) - relationships between biologically related adults who have been separated for many years, usually because of adoption. He interviewed people who had experienced GSA, as well as counsellors who had encountered cases of GSA.

"The experiences described varied from erotic feelings towards their relatives, which was described by all the subjects, through touching and fondling, to actual sexual relationships between parent and child and siblings, both heterosexual and homosexual," says Dr Greenberg.

"It can be a highly charged situation. Both individuals tend to show an intense determination to search for someone whom they lost at a key moment in their own development. Added ingredients include the mutual attractiveness of physical similarity and the fact that the last time they were in contact their physical relationship may well have been intimate, with close skin contact and smelling."

Helping people who are experiencing these emotions is extremely difficult, not least because of the conflict it evokes in counsellors, who themselves are not immune to cultural and personal expectations and pressures. The usual approach has been to attempt to normalise these relationships; however, this has proved difficult in practice, as they inevitably become labelled as incestuous, which results in intense anxiety about the social and legal consequences.

"When a relationship involving GSA is sexually consummated I think it is essential for counsellors, as well as those involved, to distinguish it from intergenerational incest," says Dr Greenberg. "Firstly, GSA involves consenting adults, so there is no betrayal of a child by an adult in a position of trust. And secondly, it avoids the potentially damaging social stigma associated with incestuous relationships."

• Sophocles Strikes Out by Jim Brody, 10/31/98