The Life Is in the Blood

The Life Is In the Blood
LEVITICUS : 17: 1- 18: 30

A month ago a woman came to see me to talk about the general difficulties of her life. Her mother had died some time previously. She was barely on speaking terms with her father. She certainly was not on speaking terms with her married adoptive brother. She longed to be married but seemed to set her sights on people with whom it was never going to happen, such as the celibate priest of her Roman Catholic church. Eventually the basis for her anger with her brother emerged, and along with it (I suspected) something that underlay her other difficulties in relationships and her ambivalent attitudes to them. Her adoptive brother had had sex with her several times when he was eighteen and she was sixteen. She adored him, and he had not forced her, but her father had discovered and had thrown the boy out. It was neither a biologically incestuous relationship nor an illegal one (she was above the age of consent in their state), but it was a toxic one...