Word: incest
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Carl Hasselmann and his sister Ellie, provincial, supersensitive Americans, dwell in the uneasy revulsions of a sort of spiritual incest. They represent, respectively, the frigid, inhumane predicament of mind-without-spirit and the equally suicidal predicament of spirit-without-mind. Carl's mental drive stretches him flat on the altar he has built before a hypnotic social theorist. Ellie is impelled to sacrifice herself to the "resurrection" of an aging, rich sophisticate. The earlier phases of these relationships are ground out with a skillful, meat-grinder tenacity worthy of tougher meat...
...dint of some ingenious rewriting, and considerable skating on thin ice, Hollywood has produced a version of Kings Row which retains that novel's main outlines without arousing the censors. This is no mean feat, since the book bore down on sadism, incest and assorted abnormalities so heavily that its liberal admixture of seduction seemed a welcome note of normalcy. Although the grislier aspects have been glossed over prettily in deference to the family trade, the picture is still moderately worth-while entertainment...
...late 18th Century-exude that wasted "authenticity" of the Hollywood superproduction. Added attractions: informative data about the slave trade, some warm stuff about a Negro concubine, vignettes of convent and plantation life, a storm at sea, litigations over an estate, miscegenations, a few discreet garlic-whiffs of incest...
...Only one of the 74 girls was mentally deficient. Many were "irresponsible and precocious children who had been running wild." One or two had been assaulted, some of the younger girls "had been the victims of incest," but most of them had entered into sexual relations willingly...
...them something. But for laymen, as Freud's theories spread, he emerged as the greatest killjoy in the history of human thought, transforming man's jokes and gentle pleasures into dreary and mysterious repressions, discovering hatreds at the root of love, malice at the heart of tenderness, incest in filial affections, guilt in generosity and the repressed hatred of one's father as a normal human inheritance...