Unlike her diaries and erotica, House of Incest does not detail the author's relationships with famous lovers like Henry Miller, nor does it contain graphic depiction of sex.

Toward the end of the book, the character called "the modern Christ" puts Nin's use of the word into context: “If only we could all escape from this house of incest, where we only love ourselves in the other."

Rank was an early disciple of Freud, serving as the secretary and youngest member of his Vienna group, but had long since dissented from Freudian orthodoxy and developed his own theoretical school.

Anaïs Nin describes the process as akin to being "[e]jected from a paradise of soundlessness.... thrown up on a rock, the skeleton of a ship choked in its own sails."

In this, they offer the passage from House of Incest wherein Anaïs Nin writes, "Worlds self-made and self-nourished are so full of ghosts and monsters."

Duane Schneider and Benjamin Franklin V write that the prose of House of Incest is so challenging that it requires the total attention of the reader.

[citation needed] As has been discussed above, the "incest" referred to in the book is largely a metaphor for a type of self-love or obsession with what is the same or similar to oneself.