The Homosexual Neurosis
Date: 2022-03-04T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Homosexuality

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Title: The Homosexual Neurosis

Author: Wilhelm Stekel

Translator: James S. Van Teslaar

Release date: March 4, 2022 [eBook #67557]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Richard G. Badger, 1922

Credits: Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HOMOSEXUAL NEUROSIS ***

Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

Excerpts from the Professional Press on the work of

DR. WM. STEKEL

We have lacked thus far a systematic clinical application of Freudian analysis. Stekel’s work fills this need.

Jung, in Medis. Klinik.

... A standard work; a milestone in the psychiatric and psychotherapeutic literature.

Geh. Sanitätsrat Dr. Gerstor, in Die Neue Generation.

It would be regrettable if the work did not attract fully the attention of the scientific world; its deep sobriety and the fulness of its details render it a treasury of information, primarily for the physician, but, in large measure, of interest also to the educationist, the minister, the teacher and, not least, to the student of criminology....

Horch, in Archiv f. Kriminalogie.

These case histories will be read with great interest by everyone, including those who are inclined to maintain a sceptical attitude towards psychoanalysis.

Eulenburg, in Medizinische Klinik.

Stekel’s work teaches practitioners a great many things they did not know before, particularly about the significance of psychology and sexual science in the practice of medicine.

Hitschmann, in Internat. Zeitschrift f. Psychoanalyse.

It is Stekel’s extraordinary merit that he compels us to take into account a pressing mass of data which he brings to light with a scientific zeal which is unfortunately still rare,—facts and observations so penetrating, so true to life that these often render unnecessary any formal statement of the obvious deductions which flow from them.

Die Neue Generation.

The most modern problems are considered, new viewpoints are brought out, while the excesses in the technique and interpretation of the earlier stages of psychoanalysis are avoided.

Kermauner, in Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift.

All in all, Stekel’s is a work for which I bespeak the widest interest not only among physicians, but also among jurists, educationists, sociologists and ministers. Only an understanding of the mental life of the individual will yield a proper view of our social life.

Liepmann, in Zeitschrift f. Sexualwissensch.

The work is a treasury for all who have occasion to probe the depths of human life and should be a source of considerable information and stimulus to every jurist who takes in earnest his professional duties.

Geh. Justizrat Dr. Horch, in Archiv f. Kriminalogie.

It does not matter from what angle the work of Stekel is approached. Any consideration of it reveals rich material. Stekel is a writer who handles his subjects in a lavish manner; lavish, but with that restraint which bends all to the urgency of his themes. He evidently approaches his clinical work with the same exuberant interest. There he reaps through psychoanalysis a rich harvest of results. He has collected these results and presented them for the dissemination of such knowledge of the sexual disturbances as he thus obtained. Facts are there in great number. They cannot be gainsaid. Stekel’s own evaluation of such facts and his earnest plea for their consideration, both by the medical profession and by the society of men and women where these facts exist, can speak only for themselves to the truly conscientious reader. There is not much in these books that the psychotherapeutist can afford to pass over.

New York Medical Journal.

THE HOMOSEXUAL NEUROSIS

BY
DR. WILLIAM STEKEL
(VIENNA)
Authorized translation by
JAMES S. VAN TESLAAR, M.D.

(For sale only to Members of the Medical Profession.)

BOSTON
RICHARD G. BADGER
THE GORHAM PRESS

Copyright, 1922, by Richard G. Badger
All Rights Reserved
Made in the United States of America
The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A.

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

The present volume completes my English version of the Homosexualität portion of the author’s Onanie und Homosexualität. The first portion has been issued a few months ago, under the title Bisexual Love, and it is very gratifying that the publication of the present volume was made possible so soon after the appearance of the first. The translation of the part dealing with Autoerotism is also completed, and will appear shortly. One of the most important works of clinical psychopathology will thus be available, for the English reading professional ranks, in unabridged form.

These three volumes, though available separately, in some respects form an instructive continuity. At any rate those interested in any of the fundamental problems discussed therein will find most helpful an acquaintance with all three volumes.

Furthermore the student or physician interested in mental problems will find the implications of the principles set forth herein of the utmost practical significance, aside from their specific bearing on the problems of Homosexuality and Autoerotism. These clinical studies stand forth, in the first place, as lessons in analysis and therapy; but incidentally they reveal certain fundamental aspects of human nature more clearly than such a revelation was possible without the aid of the psychoanalytic method of research. The knowledge thus gained for therapeutic purposes is also applicable to many other practical problems of life. One approaching the study of a work like the present, with the intention of improving one’s therapeutic efficiency and of thus increasing one’s professional usefulness, is quite likely to discover before long that his whole outlook, as a professional man, and, above all, as a social being, has undergone a wholesome transformation.

Indeed, all fundamental knowledge has this quality of spreading, fan-like, clearing up with its helpful implications more than appears obvious at the beginning. It is not surprising, therefore, that Psychoanalysis, at the present stage primarily a therapeutic method, but reaching into the inner recesses of the human soul more penetratingly than any other method of inquiry, should also prove the most helpful method of interpreting all other problems generated by the functions of the human instincts and emotions.

Van Teslaar.

September 30, 1922

Brookline, Mass.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER | | PAGE

I

The Relations of the Homosexual to the Other Sex—Fear, Disgust, Hate, and Anger—Homosexuality and Epilepsy—Sadger’s Researches—Hirschfeld’s Theses—Fear of the Sexual Partner—Disgust for Woman—Sadistic Attitude—Epilepsy and Homosexuality—Other Reactions Indicating Revulsion—My First Early Experiences—Sadger’s Investigations

11

II

Rôle of the Father and of Other Members of the Family—Dislike of Children—Letter of a Homosexual Who Fears the “Penetrating Eye” of Women—A Marriage with the Father—Jealousy of the Father—A Homosexual Who Hates His Mother—A Beloved Boy as the Imago of the Sister—Psychology of Love within the Family Circle—Fear of the Child—A Girl Who Hates All Children—Differentiation from the Mother

53

III

Homosexuality and Jealousy—Masked Jealousy—A Jealous Wife of a Physician—Why Women Abuse Servant Girls—Transference of Jealousy to the Surroundings—Jealousy of the Father—Jealousy of the Residence—Jealousy of the Past—A Young Woman Oversensitive to Any Noises

109

IV

Jealousy and Paranoia—Jealousy as Projection of One’s Own Inadequacy—Freud’s Researches on Paranoia—The Investigations of Juliusburger—The Jealousy of a Paranoiac—Jealousy Delusion of a Merchant—Jealousy and Alcoholism—The Evolution of Mankind from Bisexuality to Monosexuality—Metamorphosis Sexualis Paranoica—The Monotheism of Sexuality—Jealousy and Criminality

155

V

Homosexuality and Sadism—The Analysis of a Homosexual—Earliest Memories—First Account of His Attitude—Fear of Tuberculosis—His Attitude towards His Parents—First Dream—Dreams of Urinals—Anal Eroticism—Coprophagia—The Mother as a Tyrant—Transvestitism—An Important Dream—Voyeur and Exhibitionist—Other Dreams—Poems to the Mother—Maternal Body Dreams—Sadistic Phantasies—A Spermatozoan Dream—The Dream About Wild Bears—Summarization of the Analytic Data in the Case—The Formula of Homosexuality

199

VI

History and Analysis of a Homosexual—Childhood Reminiscences—Anal Erotism—Attachment to the Mother—Interpretation of Dream Symbolisms—Lore of the Father—Regression Theory of Homosexuality

227

VII

The Neurotic’s Inability to Love—The Narcissism of the Homosexual—Progressive Sexual Differentiation with the Growth of Culture—The Position of the Homosexual in the Struggle between Sexes—The Social Causes of Homosexuality—Homosexuality among Greeks—Increase of Polar Sexual Tension—Various Therapeutic Measures—Hypnosis—Moll’s Association therapy—Psychoanalysis—The Path towards Cure and the Conditions for Recovery

289

I

THE RELATIONS OF THE HOMOSEXUAL TO THE OTHER SEX—FEAR, DISGUST, HATE, AND ANGER—HOMOSEXUALITY AND EPILEPSY—SADGER’S RESEARCHES—HIRSCHFELD’S THESES—FEAR OF THE SEXUAL PARTNER—DISGUST FOR WOMAN—SADISTIC ATTITUDE—EPILEPSY AND HOMOSEXUALITY—OTHER REACTIONS INDICATING REVULSION—MY FIRST EARLY EXPERIENCES—SADGER’S INVESTIGATIONS.

Jedermann trägt ein Bild des Weibes von der Mutter her in sich: davon wird er bestimmt, die Weiber überhaupt zu verehren oder sie geringzuschätzen oder gegen sie in allgemeinen gleichgültig zu sein.

—Nietzsche.

THE

HOMOSEXUAL NEUROSIS

I

Everyone carries within himself a pattern of womanhood derived from his mother: that determines whether he should respect or depreciate woman; or whether his attitude towards woman in general should be one of indifference.

—Nietzsche.

Our investigations thus far have repeatedly shown us that in the case of homosexuals the heterosexual path is merely blocked, but that it would be incorrect to hold that the pathway is altogether absent. I have proven that the individual, as representative of our modern culture, finds it impossible to maintain his bisexuality; therefore he represses either his homosexuality or his heterosexuality. We also convinced ourselves that organic bisexuality has nothing to do with psychic bisexuality. Hirschfeld expressly emphasizes that he has met with homosexuality among strongly virile men and among persons typically female. The organic theory of homosexuality has broken down completely. One would suppose that the investigators would necessarily turn to the psychologic concept. No. The psychic forces are still underestimated and the heterosexual period of homosexuals is still overlooked. Although Hirschfeld emphasizes that to psychoanalysis belongs the merit of having pointed out first the heterosexual component, why does he not draw the natural deductions from this acknowledged fact? He arrives at the following conclusions:

1. Genuine homosexuality is always an inborn condition.

2. This inborn state is conditioned by a specific homosexual constitution of the brain.

3. That specific brain structure is brought about through a peculiar mixed condition of male and female hereditary plasm.

4. That ambisexual state is found frequently associated with pronounced instability of the nervous system.

5. Between the specific and the nervous constitution there exists an intimate relationship.

6. All external causes are operative only in the presence of the inner homosexual constitution.

7. External causes—provocative—are so common that in 99 per cent. of cases the innate homosexual disposition breaks forth sooner or later and becomes clearly manifest in consciousness.

8. Homosexuality is neither a morbidity nor a degeneration; it is neither a taint nor a criminal trait, representing merely an aspect of natural development, a sexual variant, like many analogous sexual modifications in the animal and vegetal world. (Hirschfeld, Homosexualität, p. 394.)

Our data do not uphold these contentions. How can Hirschfeld speak of an innate homosexual constitution when elsewhere in his work he admits the constant presence of heterosexual instincts? How can he maintain that homosexuality is a trait reaching back to the very roots of individuality when every careful investigation proves the contrary?

The following statements show his contradictions on the subject:

“Here too it has been contended that all these deviations from the sexual type during childhood and puberty do not conclusively lead to the diagnosis of homosexuality, that the earlier periods of life are undifferentiated with respect to sex, that boys as well as girls, young men as well as young women, often become eventually fully heterosexual in spite of pronounced androgyny and sexual incongruities; even the transvestites of both sexes show early traits inharmonious with their respective sex, and certainly many passivists, succubists, or masochists show themselves already as boys somewhat lacking in ‘mannish’ traits while female activists, incubists and sadists lack certain womanly traits already in their girlhood, though all retain the capacity to love the opposite sex and therefore prove themselves later heterosexual....

“At any rate one thing is certain. If a child is a urning, it grows up a heterosexual person with the same unconditional certainty with which the ‘normal’ child becomes heterosexual. Thus the special character of the urning looms forth as something fundamental having its roots in the depths of personality.” (Hirschfeld, Homosexualität, p. 121.)

Naturally, Hirschfeld adopts a safe method of excluding all cases which do present a history of heterosexuality. He calls such cases “pseudohomosexuality” thus placing them in a category apart from the genuine urning. Bloch also calls the heterosexual inclination of typical homosexuals a sort of “pseudoheterosexuality.”[1] This method of dealing with the subject admits of no proofs. Bloch suggests the test that a genuine theory of homosexuality must be capable of embracing all cases. The Hirschfeld theory of “the third sex” cannot do so. It is neither founded nor proven either on organic or on psychologic grounds.

But why is it that the homosexual shifts so completely away from the sexual partner? A. Adler has conceived in these cases the hypothesis of a “fear of the sexual partner.” This observation certainly holds true in the case of many homosexuals, but is not true of all cases. Nature does not operate in such simple ways and a single key does not unlock the riddle of homosexuality.

In accordance with the results of our investigation thus far we may conclude: the homosexual finds closed for him the path which leads to the other sex, and the barrier is psychical. Anxiety, disgust and scorn support the forces of homosexual love. These feelings do not exhaust the range of inhibitory factors and we shall presently turn our attention to others. But we must take up the psychogenesis of these inhibitions in a thorough and systematic manner.

May fear of the sexual partner drive a person into homosexuality? We must answer this question in the affirmative inasmuch as we are able to trace that fear in a number of cases.

First, let us take up the case of Krafft-Ebing (Obs. 159) since it is so simple and obvious:

54. Mrs. X., 26 years of age, married 7 years, confesses herself attracted for some time to persons of her own sex; she respects and even feels a certain sympathy for her husband but marital relations with him she finds repulsive. She has made him abstain from sexual relations with her since the birth of their youngest child. Already at the boarding school she felt a keen interest in other young women, which she can only describe as love attraction. But occasionally she had also felt herself attracted to particular men and lately a certain man had put her resistance to test. She was often afraid she might forget herself with him and therefore avoided being alone with the man. But these are merely passing episodes in contrast with her passionate inclination towards persons of her own sex. Her true love is expressed in kisses, caresses and intimate contact with the latter. Failure to gratify that yearning is painfully uncomfortable and is largely responsible for her present nervous state. The subject does not assume a particular sexual rôle in relation to persons of her own sex, and she did no more than indulge with them in kisses, petting and embracing. The subject considers herself of a passionate nature. Quite likely that she masturbates. Her sexual perversion she looks upon as “unnaturally morbid.” Nothing in the woman’s ordinary conduct or external appearance betrays such an anomaly. About her childhood she is unable to report anything of significance. She was quick to learn, had poetic and æsthetic inclinations, was considered somewhat nervous, loved reading of novels and sentimental romances, was of a neuropathic constitution, and extremely sensitive to changes in temperature. It is noteworthy also that at ten years of age, because she thought that her mother did not love her, the patient dissolved matches in coffee and drank the solution so as to make herself very ill and to draw her mother’s affection to her.

Here we see an inclination to heterosexual relations which is not cultivated on account of fear. This young woman, with a tremendous homosexual leaning as shown already by her attachment to her mother, marries a man, in whose embrace she remains frigid, but fears to be alone with a man who rouses her, because he may prove dangerous to her. We see that her pronounced bisexuality leads her to fall in love with a man, to be his sweetheart, in her fancy, but she hesitates to turn her fancy into a reality, the “fear of sinning” preventing her from carrying out the step. Then she looks upon the heterosexual inclinations as passing whims and turns to her homosexual fancies. She is running away from the male. She fears the man she loves because a strong love implies submission to the male. She gravitates away from him, not because the male is unable to yield her gratification but because she fears him. But we must understand how this flight from the male, which manifests itself also in her dyspareunia, originated. How little such life histories bear on this point, without psychoanalysis! In my study of dyspareunia[2] I describe similar cases and show how aversion towards the male originates in the first place.

Through Freud we have learned that fear, like disgust, is a repressed form of libido. Though this view is correct, it is not always adequate. My own researches have shown that every fear represents in the first place fear of self.

But why should the homosexual entertain any fear of himself during intercourse with woman? What he fears is his excessive sexuality when it is commingled with criminal tendencies.

The frequency with which fear of one’s own criminal aggressiveness stands back of impotence and homosexuality can hardly be overestimated. Krafft-Ebing describes a typical bisexual who had experienced orgasm but once in contact with woman. But that happened during the commission of a delict (Obs. 142, p. 273) on his part.

“It is remarkable that he did experience gratification that one time during the (forced) act. After the act he was overcome with nausea. One hour after the assault he again had coitus with the same woman and with her consent but that time he no longer experienced any satisfaction.” That proves that the orgasm depended on his abuse of force. The fear is fear of violence, the disgust is disgust of self, both coming into play so as to protect one against deeds incompatible with one’s ethical standards.

I know a large number of homosexuals who have actually confessed to me that they are able to have intercourse with women only while they are in a strong rage. But then they are in fear of themselves, so dangerous do they become. One subject confessed to me that he had nearly strangled his sexual partner. Other homosexuals feel an inexpressible rage just after coitus. In such cases the heterosexual act is associatively related to some criminal act. Some unconscious fancies depict and urge cutting up, strangling or beating the female companion. These men are extreme woman-haters and hatred is always deadly.

I reproduce here a single relevant observation:

55. Mr. H. K. is a well-known homosexual who prefers particularly males of low standing. The more powerfully built the men are the greater is his orgasm. He prefers to choose packers, furniture movers, expressmen and generally individuals of strong build. His greatest orgasm he experienced during intimacy with a member of an athletic club, a man who had a very small penis. He feels such a strong fear of women that he does not trust himself in a room alone with one. He does not remember having ever been sensuously stirred by a woman. Several times he tried intercourse with prostitutes but fled each time as soon as he found himself alone in the room with the woman. A cold sweat breaks out over his brow and he runs off precipitately as if pursued by a thousand demons. A short analysis over a few days revealed that this was a typical case of a criminal fancy, the subject having indulged for a long time in the onanistic fancy of strangling a woman. (“All women ought to be exterminated” ... is a favorite sentiment often expressed by this man.) In his phantasies he has also committed assaults on men, and the thought of ripping open the anus of a man has occurred to him already several times.

His fear of women is the fear he may forget himself and strangle one of them. But he is also afraid of men, that is, he also fears he may commit some assault on a man. Therefore he protects himself through choosing men of powerful physique. They should be stronger than he. Thus he feels assured that he will not be able to assault them. Lately he has been seeking a mannish woman who should also be stronger than he. Evidently he proposes to protect himself also in that case ... against himself. The homosexuality showed itself to be a flight from his criminal heterosexual tendencies.

Other homosexuals protect themselves against woman through disgust. How closely hatred, fear, and disgust stand in this connection may be seen in the following observation by Hirschfeld:

“A certain homosexual related to me that he is able to have intercourse with a woman but that immediately afterwards he is seized with a terrible anger against the woman and once after the act he spat at her in disgust; since that, in order to avoid consequences, he leaves the room as hastily as possible immediately after the ejaculation.

“How far the aversion may go is shown by the case of the homosexual Herzog von Praslin-Choiseul who at Paris in 1864 strangled post coitum his young bride, the daughter of General Sebastiani. It may be mentioned in this connection that by far the greater number of sadistic women who prevail upon masochistic males of grossest physical and mental type to carry out acts of violence upon them are in reality homosexual women with a sexual aversion to men. Professor Albert Eulenburg told me that all the alleged sadists among females whom he knows have proven themselves in reality to be homosexuals. I, too, know but three women among twelve sadists who deny homosexuality.” (Hirschfeld, loc. cit. p. 96).

First we learn that this homosexual, through fear of himself, runs off in the nick of time. The act of spitting may be the symbolic substitute for a more serious act. If additional testimony were needed to support the relevance of my conception, the case of the Duke von Praslin-Choiseul stands forth as the clearest proof one could wish. Plainly Hirschfeld, as usual, confuses here cause and effect. The Duke did not strangle his bride because he was homosexual,—he had taken flight in homosexuality, because he felt impelled to commit a “passion crime” and he tried to protect himself against his own wild instincts.

Particularly interesting from the criminologic-psychologic standpoint are the cases of epileptics who during the attack are diverted from their usual sexual path. The epileptic is a criminal who during the attack carries out some criminal deed. Ordinarily the deed is carried out in the phantasy, but here and there the epileptic commits overtly some deed of uncommon cruelty. During his epileptic attack the patient gives expression to his criminal trend. The attack is the equivalent of the crime. Readers interested in this important problem I must refer to my original study.[3] I have been much surprised that it has received so little attention on the part of neurologists and criminologists. It is the fate of psychoanalysts. The current fashion in science has decreed our ban, our works are overlooked and are neglected even when they are of fundamental significance, like my contribution on epilepsy.

Epilepsy, with the exception of the Jacksonian type, is a particular form of hysteria. In the hysterical attack, too, the unconscious forces break through and the individual carries out various instinctive promptings while his consciousness is side-tracked. The epileptic attack represents more the criminal, the hysterical corresponds more to the sexual urge. Naturally the epileptic attack may also substitute some sexual crime (crime passionelle), and that, frequently, is the theme of the attack. It is thus obvious that homosexuals who shun crimes of passion may fall easily a victim to attacks during which the crimes are carried out vicariously. In our study of sadism we shall analyze in detail such a case.[4] Here I wish to point out merely the interesting fact that during the epileptic attack heterosexuals commit homosexual acts and reversely.

56. Mr. W. H., 39 years of age, a strongly built young man, comes to me to be treated for epilepsy and every time he is accompanied by an attendant. Since his 16th year he suffers attacks and several times he was seized while on the street. For that reason he does not go out alone and is always accompanied by his attendant, a simple fellow to whom he seems much attached. He is totally incapacitated from following any occupation for it turns out that his attacks are more frequent when he endeavors to work. On account of his attacks he has prevailed upon his well-to-do father to keep him in the country where he has nothing to do but to go on walks. He is soft and pliant so long as things go his way. But if contradicted he flies into great rage. He does not burst out with anger but tries to control himself and soon afterwards he has an attack during which he sees red. He reproaches himself a great deal on account of his failure to achieve something in life and because he is the cause of so much trouble to his parents. His ethical standard is a very high one and that is a point of great significance in the differential diagnosis of genuine epilepsy. He bemoans his misspent life and wants to be cured. If only there were some way to free him of the trouble! Regarding his sexual life: he relates that he is decidedly homosexual and that boys and handsome young men particularly attract him. The attendant is clearly a protection against his homosexual excitations. When he meets boys who attract him he clings to his attendant pretending to fear an oncoming attack. While living in the country at the present his attacks come on only at night and in bed. He does not recall the aura, except that he sees red, and he remembers no dream starting or accompanying the attack. He masturbates occasionally; always with the fancy that he is playing with small boys. I suggest to his parents that he ought to be psychoanalyzed. In view of the hopeless character of other current therapy this may be his only chance of recovery. The father agrees. But as the patient lives some distance from Vienna I advise the father to remove him to the city for the duration of the treatment. This he also agrees to do. Next day the mother calls and asks me to use my influence to prevent the boy from staying in Vienna. That would bring him back home and she is tremendously afraid of him. Her husband does not know it, she has kept it from him. During the attacks the son turns on her and attempts to attack her. Once she succeeded to repel him only by the exercise of her strength. During the attack he rolls his eyes fearfully and threatens she must die because she is responsible for everything. I arrange that the patient should see me only twice a week after that. But on the third appointment he failed to appear, because I had stipulated as one of the first conditions of my treatment that he must go to work. The very next day he reacted with several attacks. The father found that the treatment proved “too exciting” for the boy, and I agreed readily to give up the analysis when the father took entirely the son’s side and disagreed with the suggestion that the boy must take up some occupation.

This case shows the outbreak of homosexuality during the attacks and an affective relationship to the mother such as is shown by many homosexuals, as we shall explain more fully later.

The reverse also happens,—heterosexuals committing homosexual deeds during the attacks. The repressed components of sexuality always break through during the attack.

Tarnowsky, too, speaks of “epileptic pederasty.”[5] The “epileptic pederasts” are usually of active character. As an example he mentions the case of a criminal who came under his personal observation. A young man, wealthy, apparently fully heterosexual, goes to the house of his beloved after a sumptuous dinner during which he had imbibed a great amount of wine. The lady of the house not being at home he went to a room where a 14-year-old boy was asleep, assaulted him and also the chamber maid who ran to the spot attracted by the boy’s outcries. After that he fell into a sleep which lasted 12 hours. When he awoke he recalled nothing of the episode. It was found that he was subject to epileptic attacks particularly after wine. Hirschfeld observes in this connection:

“Usually the epileptic neurosis—which, as a matter of fact, I have noticed but rarely among homosexuals—influences homosexuality in the sense of removing the inhibitions and increasing the impulsive energy of the instinctive cravings. I have had under examination a particularly serious case of this character, a man-servant, subject to epilepsy who during a fit of rage and anger strangled to death and then hacked to pieces a boy. In this, as in similar cases, there was a previous history of a fusion of homosexuality and epilepsy. At any rate it is conceivable that during the beclouding of consciousness induced by the epileptic seizure all psychic factors undergo such a complete transformation that even tendencies ordinarily wholly foreign to consciousness and not even tolerated in the foreconscious, insofar as the latter may be revealed, find ready outlet. Burchard, too, has observed an epileptic of normal sexuality who during the seizures committed homosexual assaults on other patients.” (Hirschfeld, loc. cit., p. 214.)

What I have said about the influence of alcoholics holds true also of epileptic attacks. The latter also neutralize the inhibitions and the bisexual and criminal aspects of human nature come clearly to surface. It is noteworthy that Tarnowsky’s patient also indulged in alcohol before the onset of the attack.

The following case shows that the attacks may also be simulated:

57. Mr. Z. T., a bisexual, subject to anxiety attacks, relates that he suffered a great deal once because his mother devoted herself very lovingly to a brother during the latter’s illness. He was 22 years of age at the time and extremely jealous. Once he found himself alone in the room with his mother. Without knowing what he was doing he threw himself on her with the intent of assaulting her. The mother shouted and the sisters and servants came rushing in. He simulated an epileptic fit, threw himself on the floor and remained for an hour apparently in a faint. Physicians were called in and they declared the condition epilepsy. For two days he acted as if he heard nothing of what was said and knew nothing of what was going on. His deed caused him endless shame. He was not reproached on account of it and he spent two months in a comfortable sanatorium.

How closely related are make-believe and illness with every neurotic! This young man suffered also from fear and disgust of women but that, as well as his whole anxiety neurosis, disappeared completely under psychoanalytic treatment. The case stands as one of my most successful therapeutic accomplishments.

We turn our attention now to a consideration of the disgust with which homosexuals are inspired by the other sex. I have already repeatedly stated that the disgust represents a repressed desire, that it stands for the repulsion of unbearable tendencies. Heterosexuals show a similar aversion for their own sex,—a feeling which the homosexuals have repressed. That much the very beginner in psychoanalysis knows; the observation belongs to the a b c of practical psychology. Nevertheless, we still find disgust and scorn of woman pointed out as proofs of homosexuality. Disgust is not a proof of the absence of the proper libido. The true homosexuals would show a complete indifference towards the opposite sex. Occasionally they do assume such indifference for their attitude is always affective and negativistic. Hirschfeld contradicts himself repeatedly on this point.

In one place he emphasizes that the genuine homosexual is indifferent towards woman and shows no disgust:

“On this point also I find myself in agreement with Numa Praetorius,[6] who in one of his essays remarks that most persons ‘show an inclination towards one sex but only indifference towards the other sex.’ He is of the opinion that the disgust of heterosexuals’ feeling-attitude of disgust towards homosexual deeds, too, is an intellectual process induced by the prevailing social attitude and judgment rather than instinctive and innate. If the dislike were genuine heterosexuals would hardly get along so easily and so often with homosexuals nor would the latter carry on so readily masturbatory acts with the opposite sex, even though the acts be limited to mechanical excitations.” (Hirschfeld, loc. cit., p. 218.)

But another passage of the work reveals the opposite view:

“A 26-year-old workingman relates: ‘At 17 years of age an older friend of mine induced me once to have sexual intercourse with a woman—I was unaware at the time of my urning disposition—and I felt such disgust that I vomited. Since that time I have a “holy horror” of any contact with woman, until a few weeks ago when driven to despair I tried to control myself. It was useless, I could attain neither erection nor ejaculation and instead, the continuous irritation brought on an inflammation of the member.’”

“A Bavarian merchant relates: ‘As a result of repeated intercourse with women I have acquired a serious nervous derangement, a strong sense of lassitude associated with vomiting and migraine lasting for days. The odor exhaled by woman causes me greatest distress. I am now unable to gratify a woman, but on the other hand contact with a soldier makes me happy, it strengthens and revives me.’” (Hirschfeld, loc. cit., p. 96.)

In the passage next following he expresses himself even more plainly:

“It is very striking to note that women in executive positions, directresses, etc., are much more severe with the male employees, servants, etc., than with the female personnel. There are homosexual males who avoid any service by women and chiefly for that reason dislike restaurants employing female waitresses. Also, there are homosexual women who avoid business relations with men for similar reasons. Without knowing why, homosexually predisposed girls begin early to feel that being conducted home by gentlemen is something superfluous as well as unpleasant. Many urnings and urlinds actually experience a physical distress when some member of the opposite sex so much as helps them on with their coat. I know several homosexual physicians of extreme sensitiveness whose aversion to the female characters is so strong that physical examinations of women, particularly of their sexual parts or breasts, is highly repulsive to them and the aversion may go so far as to make it impossible for them to undertake such an examination.” (Hirschfeld, loc. cit., p. 98.)

Such accounts prove that the attitude of the homosexual towards the opposite sex is not one of indifference. Where that is claimed it may be doubted; at any rate it does not correspond with psychoanalytic experience. Hatred, anger, disgust, physical discomfort serve as protections against the other sex. That is true of male as well as of the female homosexuals.

For a short space I shall now limit my observations to male homosexuals. I shall attempt to make clear how I have arrived at my present conception. The homosexual’s scorn of woman, his emotional revulsion-attitude against the other sex, is precisely what led me to formulate my new conceptions. I had the opportunity to analyze a homosexual. During the very first consultation hours there was revealed that heterosexual stage through which every homosexual must pass. Previously it was my custom to refuse to analyze homosexuals because I had assumed Hirschfeld’s view that uranism is an innate condition. This particular patient suffered of various anxiety attacks and came to be treated for his anxiety not for his homosexuality. His anxiety state showed itself particularly as a fear of woman so that he could not trust himself to be alone with one. Among his acquaintances there was also a very sympathetic spinster. They went on walks together for hours but his fear still dominated him and he could never trust himself with her alone in a room. They held their conversations either in a public garden or at a restaurant. Naturally I looked into this anxiety condition and began to investigate this homosexual who had maintained relations with an elderly gentleman for years, with reference to his heterosexuality. I was surprised when he brought forth countless heterosexual reminiscences from his childhood. During the first few days I heard the usual history of urnings: the liking for girls’ games, womanly behavior, he had always been more like a girl in everything, etc. But soon the picture changed and the heterosexual tendency became gradually more evident. His dependence on the attachment to the mother was striking. One-sided as my attitude was at the time, I made certain deductions, somewhat hastily, regarding the roots of homosexuality, and in the first edition of my Angstzustände (1908), after several similar experiences, I wrote:

“As is shown by my latest investigations these cases are frequently neuroses. Some time homosexuality improves or may disappear under psychoanalysis. Homosexuality represents merely the complete revulsion of infantile incestuous thoughts. Homosexual males never experience any erotic feeling in contact with a strange woman; they confess that they can feel towards these women only as towards a sister or the mother. That discloses to us the roots of homosexuality. The concept ‘woman’ is unalterably fused with the concepts ‘mother’ and ‘sister.’ The Abwehr of incestuous fancies determines the flight into homosexuality. That transposition naturally is facilitated through corresponding somatic changes. The homosexual, too, is a victim of infantile reminiscences. Thus homosexuality turns out to be but a special form of the neurotic repression.”

With youthful impetuosity I formulated the results of my investigations somewhat hastily at the time and expressed the therapeutic results in too optimistic a tone. In the course of time I learned to know better. Many patients who considered themselves cured were only improved and stuck to their uranism. We shall have to speak of that with full particulars.

For the present I must consider more fully the theme “mother and homosexuality.” The relationship between the two I had originally conceived according to the Freudian formula. I did not see at the time the influence of other forces, such as I have already pointed out here. The earliest dream of my first homosexual, for instance, was about a murder, the victim being a woman; I did not understand that dream. I did not know that the fear of woman stood for the fear of criminal tendencies, that the subject was a sadist who had saved himself through homosexuality from committing some regrettable deed. These impulses accompanied the incest phantasies which were unusually strong and of which he was fully aware long before analysis. The latter were merely pushed out of consciousness as unbearable. A short time later Sadger published his first analysis of a homosexual and in that contribution he formulated the thesis that like every other neurosis homosexuality arises during the fourth year and that the task of analysis, therefore, must be to reach back to the fourth year.[7]

Sadger emphasized: “From the very first I assumed that the homosexual tendencies may be acquired only if they are formed during the first four years, precisely as in the case of hysteria and compulsive neurosis and that psychoanalysis ought to uncover the fact. What stood beyond psychoanalysis must be innate and corresponds to the sexual constitution proper.”

That work, extremely one-sided and full of contradictions, still attempts to reduce homosexuality to the love of the father. The mother plays a limited rôle. It is mentioned passingly that the subject of the analysis had never loved a being so dearly as the mother; but even before the mother’s death an aunt had attracted to herself the boy’s love.

But what are the conclusions drawn by Sadger from the case? None whatever! He is pleased that he has been able to bring to light such interesting material but knows not what to do with it. Among the various questions and answers there is a very significant passage suggesting an important conclusion. Concerning his attachment to the mother the subject states: “And my love arose chiefly through compassion, because father drank a great deal lately and paid attention to other women and mother often wept and that made me feel badly.”

That is a fact which I have had occasion frequently to corroborate. The children of drinkers and “woman-chasers” turn easily homosexual, in the endeavor to be unlike the father. They then hate woman and scorn everything that the father liked in particular. They become abstinent and try to behave contrary to the father in every respect.

Sadger’s patient actually points out this tendency. He states: “Father clearly had no homosexual inclination as he was a great admirer of women. From the time he began telling me about the school—he was particularly fond of French women—he also advised me to marry only a French woman and showed me French pictures and the photos of various French women. It was thus instilled in me that I ought to marry a French woman.” And what did the father accomplish thereby? Was it jealousy or pity and love for the mother? The father accomplished the contrary of what he set out to do. Instead of obedience he was met with spite. The subject relates: “Later when I became aware of my homosexual inclinations, everything French-like was particularly hateful to me, especially the French women, I no longer liked the French language or anything whatever related to French....”

The subject had a pronounced fear of marriage, having seen a sad example of it in his own home. He dreams of getting married, a minister is about to perform the ceremony, and he is so unhappy in the midst of it that upon awakening his happiness knows no bounds. He fears every great passion. “I am afraid of a really tremendous love, because such a passion always makes me unhappy.” The analysis discloses other relations to the father which are of greatest significance.

The feeling-attitude in question dates in fact from the earliest childhood. As yet we are ignorant of child nature and we do not fully appreciate that the fundamental traits of life show themselves very definitely during early childhood. This boy must have conceived early the thought: I must not be like the father! and so he turned away from women because the father was an admirer of that sex. Whether this choice of attitude was also influenced directly by love for the father I am unable to assert in that particular case. It seems to play a contributory rôle and greatly denied love may enhance the child’s attachment to the mother. But does not the example of a drinking “woman-chaser” contrasted to the picture of a quiet suffering mother seem to be enough to induce the differentiation and to maintain it as its underlying determining motive? Back of the homosexuality of the first case of the kind analyzed by Sadger stands the subject’s fear of becoming like his father. The violent fancies disclosed in the course of the analysis show that there are also other reasons for the subject’s fear of woman. He is so constituted that he cannot see blood. This peculiarity denotes the conversion of a craving for violence and signifies a repressed sadism.

In Russia he once witnessed how a man split his wife’s head open with a stone.... The occurrence so impressed him that he could never get it out of his mind, and he also likes to dwell on wars and other bloody scenes.

There can be no doubt the man is a sadist and that with reference to women in particular. He has full reason to fear woman. His fear is fear of himself. He must turn to man, towards whom he does not feel the instinctive sexual hatred which makes heterosexual excitations impossible for him. When he has intercourse with a woman, he feels subsequently a tremendous disgust and revulsion, the whole thing seems to him unnatural. In the end he gives up all such attempts.

Obviously he is all the time seeking a kindly preeminent father for he falls in love with an elderly philosopher, out of respect for philosophy, as he paralogizes, because he looks to philosophy to redeem him from his suffering. The differentiation is an attempt at gaining freedom, a tendency to overcome the nature of the father. The love of the philosopher is a substitution for the love of the father.

Thus we see the importance of the early life history of every subject for the understanding of homosexuality. The constellation of childhood permits the reading of the horoscope for the future. Perhaps this uncontrovertible truth contains the root of all astrologic art, “the planetary laws governing the facts of life.” The father as the sun, the mother as the milder moon and the children, the stars. Our fate arranges itself in accordance with the constellation of these planets. Blind accident and innate forces cooperate to create man as he is.

But let us look further into the investigations of Sadger to whom the credit must not be denied of having applied himself earnestly to the attempt of solving the problem of homosexuality.

His next publication appeared also in 1908.[8] Here we find clearly taken into account the infantile heterosexual attitude which all homosexuals usually forget but which always precedes genuine homosexuality.

“The young student, 21 years of age at the time, was sent to me, because he was tormented by various homosexual inclinations, especially directed towards young boys 14–20 years of age, associated with all sorts of masochistic feelings. In contact with woman (a prostitute with whom he sought intercourse three times till then, the first two times spontaneously, to see whether he is at all potent, the third time, on medical advice as well as upon his father’s insistence) he found himself entirely impotent. Questioned whether he ever felt any inclination towards the opposite sex, he only recalls that when he was two or three years of age he once opened the garden gate for a girl of about his own age, with a flourish of extreme gallantry. Concerning any hereditary factors he can only relate that a brother of his mother’s had some mental trouble. The mother herself seemed to have something boy-like and manly about her, on the other hand the father showed very little sensuousness and rather pronounced inverted traits, while a sister, who died early, had a very boy-like facial expression. She preferred boyish games and at 4 or 5 years of age she chose a boy’s hobby horse for her Christmas present. Some female cousins—on mother’s as well as on father’s side—were clearly amphigenously inverted. The subject himself had unusually broad hips and the growth of his facial hair was noticeably scant. As a child he is supposed to have played only with dolls, never with soldiers, he never took part in boys’ games and he also learned embroidery.

“Plainly a clear case of inversion with masochistic traits. What was revealed through the analysis of this particularly intelligent subject? In the first place, a remarkable peculiarity: his earliest inclinations were directed towards women,—not some one in particular, but a number of them. His first beloved was the mother and, of course, after a time he turned away from her. After that he felt himself tremendously attracted to an elderly mother of children, proposed marriage to her and that woman later figured in many of his pubertal coitus dreams. Next he displayed such an extreme gallantry towards a girl of his own age that it became very noticeable and his mother spoke to him about it and he felt very ashamed and uneasy.

“During his childhood a servant maid also had made a deep impression on his feelings and she reappears in various male types. Among the homosexual inclinations traceable to the first years I look upon his attachment to a couple of uncles as the strongest and most significant, next the love of a 9-year-old boy belonging to the nobility (baron). In his fourth year the attachment to a boy who taught him masturbation, in his sixth and seventh years the influence of a private teacher. During his fourth year, on account of his mother’s condition, following childbirth, he slept for a time with his father in one bed and this suggested various homosexual wishes and fancies. When a little sister came into the world he promptly fell in love with her. Even more striking is the subject’s normal sexual calf-love affairs in his seventh and eighth years with three or four schoolgirl mates of about his age. It turned out that each one of these girls contributed some traits to the types, both male and female, which later were alone capable of rousing his emotional interest.

“These facts, of which the subject was entirely unconscious and which had to be brought to surface after months of diligent analysis, yield an entirely new picture. First of all they show us how little even the most intelligent person knows himself, and, consequently, how careful we must be in accepting even the most candid statements. Secondly,—that even pure cases of inversion do not exclude the presence of normal sexual inclinations, indeed, that the latter may actually be present, though the subject be unaware of the fact. Thirdly,—and finally,—that the inversion is traceable as far back as the fourth year although it may reach consciousness only during puberty.”

Here already I must point out the first contradiction. It is not a fact that the inversion is traceable back to the fourth year. I have analyzed a number of cases in which the inversion arose after puberty and much later. The beginnings of the homosexual disposition reach into childhood with all persons. This turning away from the other sex may break forth early in some cases and in others much later. But it is a fact that every analysis discloses the heterosexual trait which the homosexuals forget, or speaking more correctly, repress, because it does not appear to fit into their system. Analytically this case of Sadger’s seems to me to be an instance of fixation upon the sister. The boys are substitutes for the sister. We will give the histories of several such cases. He who understands the neurotic’s art of metamorphosing his ideals, he who has learned through their dreams to appreciate this trick of substitution, will readily appreciate that a girl may be loved through falling in love with a boy. It is related of Platen that he possessed a marvelous phantasy. For a long time a colleague was changed for him into an owl whom he avoided on the way. In Neapel he kept for days a cat on his lap pretending it was an enchanted princess. Genuine fetichism shows to what unbelievable metamorphoses the sexual ideal is subjected. With the homosexuals to find a boy who stands as symbol for self or for a sister is a common experience. Like all neurotics they do not possess the capacity to distinguish between the world of fancy and that of reality. I have called neurosis the tyranny of symbolisms. This is particularly true of the neurotic who becomes homosexual. All values are transformed, the object becomes subject and vice versa. In the midst of this transformation of all facts one thing remains fast and true: the infantile ideal which is yearned for with the persistence generated by the eternally ungratified craving.

In his next contribution Sadger reports the results of the analysis of an invert during a period of six months (Zur Ætiologie der konträren Sexualempfindung, Med. Klinik, 1909, No. 2). The special preference of his patient for passive pederasty he traces to the frequent use of enemas during childhood. (In fact it seems to me that the many unnecessary enemas administered during early childhood may contribute towards the fixation of the anus as an erogenous zone.) He also traces out in this case the repressed heterosexuality. “The vacillations of the libido between male and female are like the facial innervation which, as is well known, is based on the equilibrium between the muscles innervated simultaneously by the pair of facialis nerves. Paralysis of the facialis nerve on one side causes not only weakness of the muscles on the affected side but induces also contractures of the muscles on the opposite side.” The patient referred to was attached exclusively to his father, who, himself somewhat homosexually inclined, won the child’s heart through his excessive tenderness, in contrast to the rather severe mother. During his fourth year, on account of the mother’s pregnant state, he slept with his father, an occurrence to which Sadger attaches great significance. The objects of the boy’s homosexual attachments bore some resemblance to the beloved sister. He weaned himself away from his attachment to his mother during his fifteenth year, when he saw his mother deformed with a tremendous ascites on account of which she had to be tapped a number of times. Her appearance at the time filled him with disgust for all women. As over-determination of this feeling-attitude of aversion he recalls the following: after the puerperium referred to above his mother had a profuse leucorrheal discharge which the boy, already sensitive to all scents—he was four years of age at the time—found very repulsive whenever he approached his mother. The subject also recalls vividly how his mother repulsed his aggressive ways with her, between his 3rd and 6th year. (“He always wanted to grab her by the breasts and tried to go to her room and to the bathroom as soon as she went in.”)

Much as physicians unacquainted with infantile sexuality may ignore such aggressions they do take place and some mothers have verified them for me. On the other hand it is hardly likely that a child four years of age should be repelled from the mother on account of scent. At that early age scent is rather a stimulant and is never accompanied by disgust.

I turn now to the last and most comprehensive deductions formulated by Sadger in his study entitled: Ein Fall von multipler perversion mit hysterischen Absenzen (‘A case of multiple perversions with hysterical amnesias’).[9]

This work contains a chapter entitled “New Contributions to the Theory of Homosexuality.” Here Sadger abandons entirely his former notion about the significance of the fourth year and states: “Permanent inclination towards one’s own sex usually comes to surface and is certainly increased during puberty, or during the prepubescent period at the earliest, in our latitude around the tenth or eleventh year. Occasionally an earlier onset is recorded and every case of that kind is due to some special factors.” Permanent homosexuality is established through some significant incident which leads to the repression of the mother in her rôle as helper and teacher. Such incidents are death, sudden financial reverse, and consequent serious neurosis, making sanatorium treatment necessary, inconsiderate persecution of the boy on account of masturbation and similar traumata. The love feeling is turned from the mother to the father, or to older comrades, or to comrades of about the same age, who stand as substitutes for the mother and initiate the boy into the facts of love....

The path to homosexuality leads over love of self, through narcissism. “The state of being in love with one’s own person, which shows itself also in the admiration of one’s own genitalia (sic), is never absent as a developmental phase.” Every person has two aboriginal sexual objectives to which he clings throughout life: the mother and self. The father replaces self only for a short period because as the primary rival in his relationship to the mother the child early assumes an antagonistic attitude towards him. The urning hates woman for an obvious reason: “when the best of women, my own mother, amounts to no more than that, what can there be to any other woman?”

Here follows a convincing proof that the urning identifies himself with his mother. The urning always plans to instruct his beloved, for the mother does it. (Does not the father, rather, do it?) The patient has instructed a waiter in geology and history of art, subjects which did not interest the latter. But the mother had done the same....

Most urnings are said to be “only” children. (This statement like many another of Sadger’s, is positively false. Among 500 homosexuals Hirschfeld found only 67 “only” children and among them only 54 were sons. My own statistical figures are even smaller. But the percentage among my neurotics is practically the same.)

Sadger summarizes his findings in five fundamental statements:

“1. The urning is a victim of withdrawal from the mother (the first caretaker or nurse, respectively) in whom he is himself seriously disappointed. He represses the mother by identifying himself completely with her.

2. The path to homosexuality leads through narcissism, that is, love of self, as one was, or as one may ideally be.

3. The sexual ideal of the invert includes not only traits of former female and male sexual objectives but also features of one’s own beloved self.

4. Being brought up in surroundings exclusively feminine—the father does not count in such circumstances—fosters homosexuality in the male as well as in the female, for reasons that are not sufficiently clear as yet. Moreover the urning is usually an only child.

5. Finally inversion may be fostered by a sort of ‘latter-day obedience’ to the mother’s commands. I have observed not rarely that mothers warn their children against harmless, though warm and friendly contact with the other sex, as something unpermissible and bad and that the teaching thus instilled may unfortunately increase the disposition to one’s own sex through later obedience.”

The first of these conclusions is a false one. The homosexual is not a victim of withdrawal from the mother, but rather of a fixation on her. But this subject will be discussed fully later.

One represses no person with whom one identifies one’s self. Identification is direct love, differentiation means repression. Many homosexuals identify themselves with the mother—of that there can be no doubt. But that identification already implies the repression of the father-ideal. The problem of homosexuality cannot be solved one-sidedly, and I have the records of a number of cases in which the mother plays no rôle whatever.

The only psychologic hypothesis we possess—Sadger’s—fails to satisfy on account of its onesidedness. It holds true of certain cases. But it neglects entirely the great significance of sadism, it overlooks the fact that the attachment to the father is more important and more deeply repressed than the love for the mother, it overlooks entirely the identification with the father and the differentiation from him and it fails altogether to explain the occurrence of later homosexuality, which is of particular interest to us (tardive Homosexualität). The awakening of homosexuality is ascribed to a period which varies according to the different investigators all the way from the fifth to the twentieth year, and even later. I mention here the ages shown in the first twenty of my cases taken at random. Homosexuality became manifest at 12, 10, 12, 15, 16, 22, 13, 11, 14, 8, 14, 12, 17, 17, 17, 13, 21, 15, 17, 24 (Average, 15).

The ages as given are generally high,—only in one subject did the homosexual attitude become manifest as early as the eighth year. But that, certainly, is incorrect. For we know that the homosexual leaning is present already during the earliest period and positively that children’s feeling-attitude is bisexual during the first few years. The figures are significant only as showing us that “genuine homosexuality” is preceded by a lengthy period of latency.

II

RÔLE OF THE FATHER AND OF OTHER MEMBERS OF THE FAMILY—DISLIKE OF CHILDREN—LETTER OF A HOMOSEXUAL WHO FEARS THE “PENETRATING EYE” OF WOMEN—A MARRIAGE WITH THE FATHER—JEALOUSY OF THE FATHER—A HOMOSEXUAL WHO HATES HIS MOTHER—A BELOVED BOY AS THE IMAGO OF THE SISTER—PSYCHOLOGY OF LOVE WITHIN THE FAMILY CIRCLE—FEAR OF THE CHILD—A GIRL WHO HATES ALL CHILDREN—DIFFERENTIATION FROM THE MOTHER.

Wenn wir nun alles dieses uns vergegenwärtigen und wohl erwägen so sehen wir die Päderastie zu allen Zeiten und in allen Ländern auf eine weise auftreten, die gar weit entfernt ist von der, welche wir zuerst, als wir sie bloss an sich selbst betrachteten, also a priori, vorausgesetzt hatten. Nämlich die gänzliche Allgemeinheit und beharrliche Unausrottbarkeit der Sache beweist, dass sie irgendwie aus der menschlichen Natur selbst herausgeht; da sie nur aus diesem Grunde jederzeit and überall unausbleiblich auftreten kann als Beleg zu dem naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurrent.

—Schopenhauer.

II

Considering all that and taking everything carefully into account we find that pederasty has been manifest at all times and in all countries in a manner very unlike what we had at first presumed a priori, that is, by considering abstractly the subject. Precisely its complete universality and irradicable character everywhere shows that the thing somehow flows out of human nature itself; only in that way could it persist at all times and everywhere as an accompaniment to naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurrent.

—Schopenhauer.

I begin this chapter with the history of a case, a subject with whom I have never spoken. I know him only through correspondence. Nevertheless the case seems to me of great significance as it substantiates many of my previous conclusions. The need of psychologic insight as shown by our necessarily brief histories of homosexuals becomes more fully obvious as we become acquainted with a complete analysis of a homosexual.

62. Mr. G. L. writes me:

“I shall attempt to conform with your request and give you a cursive and true insight into my sexual and mental life. Born and raised the youngest of ten children, three of whom died early of children’s diseases, I lived in the country till my 5th year, when I started going to school and I remember nothing of that period except that I was tremendously fond of playing with fire and that I kept up till then, more or less, the habit of bed-wetting, an act which was associated with the pleasurable feeling that I was sitting on the chamber. I know also that I envied my sisters a great deal. My unusually strict and religious parents naturally subjected me to rigorous training and thus I learned early to distinguish between mine and thine, good and evil, truth and falsehood. Continually watched over by parents and instructors—a custom contrary to the modern spirit—I was kept from many of the children’s games.

“When I did play, it was mostly with boys and I do not recall having preferred the company of girls. My free time was taken up a great deal with agricultural pursuits and I was about 8 years of age when the first sexual episode took place which left an impression on my mind, having witnessed that year how some boys of my own age played with the sexual parts of a dog and, another time, how the same boys played with their own sexual parts, taking one another’s member in the mouth,—but without feeling on my part any desire to imitate them. With girls I came but little into contact as a child, but I remember once having been present when several boys, 11–12 years of age, abused a girl but I took no part in the deed. At about that period I put on women’s clothes a few times though today a man in women’s clothes rather disgusts me. Two incidents concerning me personally are still vivid in my memory, namely, playing once with my privates, in the presence of other boys, and another time, warmly embracing the naked body of another boy while playing a ‘mother and father’ game. Thirteen years thus passed with nothing eventful taking place, except a fall from a tree as the result of which I hurt myself rather seriously. It was at that period that my teacher, who considered me not only a bright boy but a model student as well, prevailed upon my struggling parents to permit me to continue my schooling. I was able to secure, in fact, a free scholarship at an Institute. Shortly after that a schoolmate grew attached to me and he taught me to masturbate. Although I had already erections, there was no seminal loss, probably on account of deficient development. He and another schoolmate prevailed on me to masturbate then—but nothing more. About that time other comrades were in the habit of speaking of some girl or other, admiring her beauty. This talk about a ‘pretty girl’ struck me as strange, so far as I remember. It was during my second high school year (gymnasial-klasse),—I may have been just over my 14th year, at the time,—when a teacher appeared in class with the trousers absent-mindedly unbuttoned and when I noticed it my eyes became glued on his trouser fly as though in a trance, and thus I awoke, for the first time, to the sad realization of my sexual bend. From that time on I noticed that I was extraordinarily attracted to this teacher although he did not like me in school. It was then that my first struggles, the first wishes in my awakened boyish soul, began to shape themselves. There were two boys in particular who, among others, charmed me with their attractiveness. I masturbated a great deal during that period, without indulging in any particular phantasies,—occasionally in the company of other boys. But I had the feeling of being sexually attracted to boys and in my dreams appeared the wish to be their friend. But the stimuli were not of a character which I found impossible to curb. Next I felt myself irresistibly attracted to an elderly man. Neither in the waking state nor in my dreams did I think at all of women during that time. Around my 18th year I experienced the first stormy upheaval which nearly unbalanced me. I came into close touch with a distant relative, an attractive, interesting and splendid intellectual man who, moreover, was happily married. I then passed through the anguish of unrequited love, kept dreaming of what was beyond my reach, and endeavored to still my unnatural passion through excessive onanism. The keen struggle to preserve my secret, the intense mental torture, caused me one day to break down. The strict but kind-hearted talk of my relative in whom, of necessity, I forced myself to confide, saved me that time from suicide. The next day the house physician was called, a cordial and kindly young man, who took a strong professional interest in me. Day after day he spoke to me and tried to influence my mind and he succeeded in shifting my sexual feelings entirely into the background and in about five months he thought I was ready to try regular intercourse. But the attempt proved a new defeat for me. The secret aversion, the fear of infection, made me prove myself impotent at the critical moment. But I did not tell the physician and shortly thereafter he dismissed me as cured. There followed again years of struggle. Fearing mental breakdown I was driven to the idea of seeking final release through suicide. But I lacked courage for the deed.... Was it cowardice, was it the yearning of my sickly body that prevented me from ending then a life unblessed by a single experience of that highest yearning of a healthy body,—the consummation of love? During that time my relative also died and my anguish was unbearable. For I was absorbed in that great passion of mine so deeply that I had forgotten all about the rest of the world. I was hardly reconciled to that misfortune when further anguish came into my life; several men crossed my path with whom I would have no doubt entered into intimacy if I had found any points of contact. In my despairing mood I confided in Hofrat W., who consoled me saying that my misfortune could not be very deep rooted since I had come to him about it. He advised me to seek intimacy with girls (I came a great deal in contact with girls in the course of my daily work and also forced myself to learn dancing). In accordance with his advice I resorted to puellæ publicæ and had intercourse a number of times but without particular pleasure or satisfaction. Yes, I went so far as to propose marriage to a girl of a good family. It was my fate not to meet with a favorable response, although secretly I was gratified at that. For I could not think that my supreme passion intimately and indissolubly linked to the nature, the appearance and form of boyhood and charming old age would ever be overcome. Springtide and autumn, boyhood and old age, evoke in me the wonders of development and suggest the soft quiet stealing in of blissful eternal peace. Although the sense of touch alone is enough to rouse in me the most wonderful feeling of bliss, contact with a woman leaves me indifferent, if it does not actually inspire me with disgust. Thus I kept up for a time longer, greatly agitated but unyielding, the fear of being discovered keeping me back. Tortured at night by the yearnings of the day while dreaming of endless bliss by conjuring up the most intimate scenes depicting contact, dreaming and thinking also of oral (lip) contact, but never of any love act a posteriori. In terror of being found out—I blushed at the lightest pointed joke when in company—I often thought of joining the foreign legion or to migrate to some country where homosexual love is not looked upon as a crime or as something shameful.

“Often I heard of places where persons of my bent may be found but I never had the courage to look them up, fearing that I would be recognized, that I would be put to shame and that I should lose my means of subsistence. I am particularly pained at the thought that I must pass for an inferior dissolute type while millions and millions of insignificant tramps are placed on a higher level in the eyes of the law, enjoy life and are even honored and respected while I, in spite of possessing the qualities of a truer manhood, must waste my life in joyless existence. Two women came into my life with whom I became somewhat intimate, one attracting me temporarily because her physical appearance was like that of a boy underdeveloped, the other, because I was at the time under the influence of alcohol. But I noticed in connection with those two experiences that I felt no particular satisfaction during bodily contact with the women or while kissing them, in fact, many women cause me nausea if I so much as take food out of their hand. Several puellæ publicæ have tried to rouse my sexual feelings (lambentes glandem membri), but in spite of erection I felt no particular pleasure, and the act was always followed by a feeling of despair—the same old story. Sometimes in my anguish I sought the church and there I broke into tears and I yearningly clasped my hands in prayer without being a believer at heart. Ofttimes I thought my mind must be affected and thought I had to go to an asylum for the insane but it would make my trouble known to do so and I feared I should have to forego contact with men forever after that. Occasionally I dreamed also of women, but without any particular feelings, while if I dreamed of clasping in a warm embrace or only touching or even merely looking at a boy, or at an elderly man, I felt great pleasure. I dreamed of contact with the lips. Something more about the family: On account of father’s strict discipline I inclined more to mother who was more indulgent. One of four sisters is married, also both brothers, happy and satisfied, I believe. (I am very bashful with all my relations, old and young.) One uncle only showed eccentricities and he remained single. All my other habits of life are not unlike those of any normal young man, I have friends who are married and who are unaware of my condition. But time after time I am tremendously agitated on account of my mental struggle. Finally, to conclude: my dear doctor, you cannot prevail upon me again to try to look you up at your office because the penetrating look of your office girl inspires me with the fear that my condition is recognized and diagnosed at a glance. If you feel inclined to advise me how best to withstand this craving or to mention some country where I may go, I should be very grateful to you—if not, I have learned to bear defeat.”...

One of the usual confessions, overlooking most important features. The self-incriminating feeling of the masochist who has “learned to bear defeat,” is indicated by the ridiculous fear of the “penetrating look” of my office girl. This fear would probably be traced through analysis to his sadistic attitude towards women. There are a number of other interesting statements. He belongs to a family of many children, a severe father, a negligent mother, he is jealously envious of his sisters. A large number of homosexual episodes are related about his childhood and his habit of putting on women’s clothes. That shows clearly the tendency to identify himself with the mother or sister. But why did he want to be a woman? Why did he want to assume the rôle of mother? He wanted to supply a woman, to substitute the mother to his father. Here it was the strong father who so attracted the boy that the latter wanted to be everything to him; Subsequently he falls in love repeatedly with elderly men who stand for substitutes of his father. The elderly man is always the Imago of the father. During the homosexual episodes with elderly men, either actual or occurring merely in the boy’s fancy, he finds himself still a child towards whom the father displays tenderness and who is permitted by the father to carry on fellatio upon the latter. He is also drawn to young boys. There he plays the rôle of the father while the boy supplies the picture of his own youth.

Interesting is his distinct disgust at women which disappears after alcoholic drinks enough so as to enable him to carry out coitus. He was also near falling in love with a girl who had a boyish appearance. That betrays certain relations between boy and girl. The boys are loved when they show the traits of a beloved sister, the old men when they recall the father.

His path towards woman is blocked. Disgust and fear of infections cover more significant motives bearing a religious coloring. Every prostitute becomes the sister, a younger edition of the mother. Without analysis the genesis of this paraphilia cannot be understood. He avoids me because he is unwilling to discover the truth. The over-severe father seems to have roused in him the yearning for a kindlier one and to have determined the development of his feeling-attitude. An attachment to the sister seems also clearly discernible.

63. Mr. T. D., 26 years of age, has struggled vainly for years against his homosexual disposition. He is attracted to old, gray-bearded men, who always represent to his mind an erotic ideal, and loves to be in their company, go on walks with them, play cards or perform music, and loves also the company of very simple fellows, preferably sailormen, plasterers, and soldiers, and among the latter prefers artillerists. His sexual activity consists in holding the friend’s membrum virile in his hand and giving his own to be held by the other likewise. Orgasm follows rapidly at that. After the deed, regrets and strong avowals never to repeat it. The last time he tried it a watchman caught him in the act and brought him together with his companion, a workingman, to court.

Analysis discloses the following facts: He has repeatedly tried to have intercourse with women but each time great fear and disgust prevented. Strong erections, but before immissio penis, the membrum turns soft and useless. Accomplishment of the orgasm through manual friction of the organ by the woman’s hand is possible, but is followed by a powerful feeling-attitude of disgust and he must leave immediately. He has had various opportunities to become intimate with certain women and girls, they have even incited him to it, but he does not feel tempted.

His family history is as follows: He is the only son of a very kindly man who died four years previously. The mother died at his birth and that has established in his mind an intimate association between coitus and death. He cannot help thinking of that association when with women. His father was extraordinarily tender with him, and for his sake never married again. When he was still young his father always played with him, devoting to him all his spare time. Later their relationship became even more intimate. There was a sort of marriage situation with his father.

He began to masturbate at a very early age and claims to have indulged in phantasies only about common men, imagining they were handling his membrum virile.

His attachment to his father was decidedly morbid. If the father stayed away from the house a quarter of an hour longer than usual, he began to cry and could not be consoled. The whole object of his life was to bring joy to his father and to replace in the latter’s life the lost mother. When the father fell ill he took it so much to heart that it was feared his mind would break down. After the death of his father he attempted suicide and was thwarted in the act by his father’s faithful servant. He made all sorts of resolutions, among others, not to masturbate during the year of mourning. He did not live up to that.... At first he is unable to recall heterosexual episodes from his childhood and his memory fails him equally regarding homosexual facts. But suddenly the cloud which seemed to cover his childhood lifts and a vast number of reminiscences come to surface, showing the developmental course of his homosexual tendency. His father had always been a strong admirer of the other sex and even as a child he had observed that the father was maintaining intimate relations with the nurse, the cook, as well as with the maid servant. Once he surprised his father in the act of embracing the cook while the two were alone in the room. The irate father boxed his ear because he entered without knocking at the door. That was one of the rare occasions on which his father punished him. He also overheard at night how his father crawled into the nurse’s bed, who was still very young and pretty at the time and carried on all sorts of doings with her. Later he received private instruction from a male tutor who conformed to the genius loci and was also intimate with the servant girl. As a child he often wished he were a woman so as to take the cook’s place in gratifying his father. The father seemed to fear that the boy might fall into the women’s hands and did not delay warning his son with appropriate teachings. At 12 years of age his father instructed him frankly about the dangers of masturbation, with the result that he struggled hard against the habit without, however, overcoming it. A few years later his father spoke to him about the terrible dangers of venereal diseases, warning him against prostitutes. He was told he must watch out, for he would have frequently occasion to go through the city, and the prostitutes are always eager to seduce such innocent young boys so that many a one is ruined for life.

It is significant also that at 5 years of age he played with a girl from the neighborhood, trying to imitate the father. He must have hurt the girl for she cried out, the nurse rushed in, a serious scene ensued, and he was severely chastised by the nurse.

An ugly impression was produced on him when he witnessed a terrible quarrel between their cook and the nurse who were jealous of each other on account of the father’s attentions. They grabbed each other by the hair and the whole household was in an uproar. The cook had to leave the house at once. He believes that after that incident his father gave up all intimate relations with the women in the house. At 19 years of age he fell in love with the cashier of a coffee house and would have very much liked to possess her. But his father, to whom he told everything, warned him against all cashier women because they are usually diseased and infected. As a warning he told him that in his youth he once suffered very unpleasant consequences as the result of an affair with that kind of a woman and was even subjected to blackmail.

He filled his heart with a gruesome fear of woman. In addition to that he placed in his hands a book relating all about the evil consequences of sexual diseases, so that after that he did not dare come near a woman without the protection of a condom. After intercourse, which consisted merely of digital manipulations in his case, he had to bathe at once and to wash his genitals with soap several times. After homosexual acts he did not feel the compulsion to carry out these ablutions.

We now come to the analysis of his acts, which show themselves veritable compulsive manifestations. Suddenly he becomes restless, energetically tries to control himself, then paces back and forth for hours, until he falls into the hands of one of the male prostitutes who easily recognize their prospective victims. But as he never mentioned any name and never established any lasting intimate relations, he escaped blackmail. Once he thought that a certain masseur had studied his physiognomy and had later recognized him. He saw that fellow a few times in front of his home. Immediately he left Vienna and undertook an extensive journey which kept him for some months in foreign countries.

In the act he tried to find the love caresses of his father. He split love into its well recognized two components. The erotic side he reserved for elderly men, physicians, and the faithful elderly friends,—while for sexuality proper he turned exclusively towards men of low rank. Similarly he divided his father’s personality into two parts, the high-striving, intellectual, lofty-minded father, and the woman fancier, the lover of ordinary servant girls. He was still playing the rôle of a male but during the act he regressed back to childhood, becoming again a child who longs for the father’s tender love squandered on servant girls. Moreover the ordinary males also had the traits of servants, they were of the servant class.

We have here an instance of the transposition of the love of servant girls to males. He had always a weakness for servant girls and since he feared he might yet get tangled up in marriage with a cook, he tried to keep away from them. Only once in the home of a friend he embraced suddenly a cook and passionately kissed her. “I could have without a doubt cohabited with her,” he told me. But he soon quit visiting that particular friend....

He identified himself completely with the father. He lived in his own house, acted like the father, had the same kind of wardrobe, although his father had aged a great deal. But in one respect he wanted to be different. He engaged therefore a male servant and always took his meals outside, so as to have no cook in the house. But that servant he kept always at a certain distance. He did not care to have any love affairs with servants in the house, like his father.

The analysis disclosed his repressed sadistic attitude towards woman. His first attempts at intercourse with women failed him and he was able to carry out coitus successfully only under the influence of alcohol. Later he did recall a single successful coitus without that aid. The girl had roused his anger with the remark that he was merely an insolent fellow. He jumped at her, ready to strike her, and was tremendously excited. In that roused state he carried out coitus. But he would have rather strangled her.

He showed an idiosyncrasy against certain female occupations. Nurses in their garb he would have gladly torn to pieces. He also hated all nuns. It was not well for any woman to rouse his anger. He could be very dangerous when roused. He confesses entertaining as his favorite phantasy the thought of tearing to pieces a woman.

The reason for this sadistic attitude: His infantile jealousy of all women since woman had robbed him of his father’s love. Among them was also a nurse who had taken care of the father during a prolonged illness.

That hatred of women made him impotent and drove him into the homosexual path. For he was afraid of himself when finding himself alone in the presence of a woman. He rushed away from houses of prostitution suddenly, as if a thousand demons were after him.

I succeeded in convincing him that this sadistic attitude was a rudiment of his early feelings, that he was really fighting against ghosts which he had long since dispelled. Now it was up to him to avow consciously his criminal tendencies and to render them innocuous through meeting them in the open. Presently he began having intercourse with puellæ publicæ, before the analysis was ended, and even undertook to carry out coitus lege artis. He forced himself to do it because he no longer cared to incur the risk of coming into conflict with the law. (The legal case against him was squashed because there had been committed no overt act and such manipulations ordinarily are unpunished in Austria, if they cause no open scandal.) Later he chose a sweetheart who accompanied him on his travels and whom he suddenly abandoned. He had meanwhile met a woman who captivated him mentally and spiritually. Two years later I received their engagement card. In this case the analysis accomplished a complete recovery.

Here we found a complete fixation on the father, which had to be overcome first in order to free the path to woman which had become obstructed by all sorts of infantile imperatives. Neither the mother nor the persons who trained him during his earlier years play any rôle in the psychogenesis of his homosexuality; on the other hand there was his strong sadistic attitude towards women which showed itself in a personally baffling fear of women.

This case shows how one-sided Sadger’s explanation is of homosexuality, when he traces its psychogenesis solely to the relations with the mother and overlooks entirely the rôle of the father.

We must also bear in mind that many children gravitate to the mother only because they feel themselves neglected by the father, because they hate the father, and are unable to attain a proper feeling-attitude towards him. Precisely that overstressed love of the mother and the obvious antagonism against the father adroitly covers the fixation on the father.

I will now report three similar cases from my own practice, relating only the important details:

64. Mr. S. L. has not worked as bank employee for the past three years or more. Three years ago he began to complain of various nervous ailments and was granted a leave of absence to recover his health. That leave proved his undoing. He did not improve; instead, he became totally unable to work and is now no longer able to return to his duties. His father always maintained that the whole trouble was imaginary, and wanted to hear nothing of a prolongation of the leave. But the man’s suffering became gradually worse. Out of spite for his father’s attitude he at first simulated the aggravation of his trouble and his condition in the end actually grew so much worse that it shattered him to pieces and he lost control over himself. He experienced attacks of dyspnea so severe that he could not talk. The dyspnea occurred in paroxysms. After one year he lost his position with the bank and, reduced to want, he appealed to his well-to-do father for aid. The father denied him any assistance because he did not consider the son unable to work; he thought the son was simulating so as to impose on him. S. L. sued his father for sustenance and won, aided by the testimony of a number of physicians who certified that his case was one of severe neurasthenia, so that his father had to give him a monthly allowance. Father and son broke all personal relations so that the payment was made through an attorney. Thereafter S. L. was inspired by no other thought than revenge on his father. He was very clever in thinking out new legal issues and additional suits against him. Finally he came to the conclusion he was not the rightful son of his father and threatened a law suit which only his love for his mother prevented him from actually starting. She was revolted at the son’s terrible accusation but so strongly under his influence that she did not have the will power to break with him. She met him clandestinely, placing money into his hands. He loved his mother above all else and urged her to leave the father. He put detectives on his father’s trail, hoping to be able to fasten against him the accusation of being untrue to the mother. He always spoke of his father as “the old rascal,” “the old scamp,” “that miserable, quarrelsome rake.” “Should I see him today writhe in agony it would be the best and most pleasant day I ever had.” I had never seen before so bitter a hatred of the father.

He was a confirmed homosexual, hating all women with the exception of his mother, whom he held in divine veneration. The alleged breach of faithfulness which he alleged her to have committed with a person of high position (the well-known family romance of the neurotic) he excused as natural for it would have been a miracle for that noble soul to have remained true to so terrible a man. The father compelled her to coitus with brute force. He was the offspring of such a coercion, etc.... He loved only younger men, even boys, and he was fairly brutal towards them. Occasionally he carried on deeds with older men towards whom he then preserved an attitude of submissiveness and passivity, trying to please them in every way. He permitted pederasty on his person and did not shrink from fellatio.

The analysis showed a passionate love of the father, a feeling which on account of its unattainable aspect turned into bitter hatred. He thought the father was partial to the other sons and fled to the mother to whom he often complained about the father’s severity and lack of affection. In his homosexual acts he played actively the rôle of the father, becoming at such times very severe and almost cruel, passively he carried out the act as if he were with the father, being then very submissive, and thus allowing his whole repressed love to outflow as if bent on showing him: that is how loving I would be with you always if you only were agreeable! Cruel phantasies revolving around revenge upon the father as the central theme were confessed under strong resistances. Several times he came near shooting his father. He often fancied himself in situations in which his father depended altogether on his compassion and magnanimity. For instance, he would imagine his father had committed some great fraud. He himself had become a millionaire through an ingenious invention of his own. His father comes begging at his feet and is refused any aid. His favorite reading is books describing cruel punishments, the inquisition tortures, etc. The well-known work of Octave Mirbeau, “Le jardin des supplices,” threw him into ecstasy.

The other roots of this subject’s homosexuality I do not dwell upon because I am concerned here only with the rôle of the father....

The next case shows a very similar situation:

65. Mr. G. Z. for some years has had intimate relations with an elderly man, an artist, whose studio is the meeting place of a number of young men exclusively. He is not a musician like the others, but a jurist, and had met incidentally Mr. X, his fatherly friend, as he calls the man. Before that time he had been entirely abstinent. He became Mr. X’s friend only at the age of 21. The friendship was wholly platonic until they undertook a journey together. At Salzburg they occupied together the same room, because the hotel was filled. They carried on intercourse (coitus inter femora), he playing the female rôle on that occasion as well as subsequently. G. Z.’s relations with his father are very stressed. They hardly speak to each other. He is employed in his father’s office, but has only business relations with him. His whole spare time he devotes to his mother. One day he surprised his mother with the information that he had had his father watched and found out that the father maintained clandestine relations with a number of women. He requested his mother to break with the father. He raised a terrible row with his father, ordering the father to withdraw from the office and leave the business entirely to him, and at that the father showed him the door. A letter from the mother convinces him that he is not the son of his father; thereupon he locks himself in the room and commits suicide by shooting himself.

Jealousy of the father had driven him to suicide. During the acts with the fatherly friend he played the rôle of the son replacing the women in the life of the father.

66. Mr. T. B., 32 years of age, like Case 64, is also unable to work. He has tried everything but cannot make anything go. His father is a common employee reduced to seek occasionally the son’s financial aid. But the young man now stays at home and complains of attacks which he describes as of an epileptic nature, occurring only at night, but which prove to be hysterical anxiety attacks. His brother is diligent and hard-working, the favorite of the family. When the brother is praised he turns so wild that he is boiling with rage. He speaks but little with the brother, exchanging with him only necessary words. Regarding his father he declares that living together with him he finds most painful. He has delicate tastes. But his father’s manner of eating and talking rouses his anger. He will bless the day when he shall once more be working and in a position to leave the parental home. The mother was on his side, believed in his illness and in the genuineness of his attacks, and comes at night during his attacks to his bed, trying to help him and to quiet him to the best of her powers. The mother alone knows that he is homosexual and she does not disturb him in the least on that score. But she turns jealous as soon as she sees him pay any attention to a girl, and every night, too, she comes to the kitchen to make sure that her sons are not taking advantage of the servant girls. She accompanies the ailing son on his errands and is his confidante. She does not get along at all well with her husband and they have ceased marital relations long ago. There are thus two parties in the house, he with his mother, and the father with the other son.

Moreover, the ailing son raises various issues so that there are daily quarrels and conflicts in the house. The father published a statement in the newspaper to the effect that he will no longer be responsible for debts and obligations contracted by the son. Thereupon the mother, who earns an independent income with her piano lessons, left the house together with her favorite son. They rented another home for themselves and the mother hopes that the separation and the quiet care will bring about her son’s complete recovery. At this stage T. B. is brought to me for analysis. Two days later I am called to the father. T. B. had gone there under an excuse and while searching among the books he was seized with a very severe attack and had to be put to bed. He was now so ill that he could not leave the bed. It was the love of the father that had driven him to the place. He could not live without seeing his father and could not endure the thought of leaving the father alone with the brother. The mother moved back to the old home. As prerequisites for my analysis I suggested isolation of the subject and moderate occupation, and the mother apparently agreed. Next day the patient wrote me that on account of his attacks he would be unable to live among strangers, and that therefore he must give up the treatment. An experience similar to that I had with the epileptic, Case No. 51.

The specific phantasy during his indulgences in which he played always a passive rôle, represented him as the mother who gives herself up to the father. The following dream yielded some light on the matter:

“I lie on the bed in a remarkable attire, a hood on my head and dressed in a green robe. I gaze in a looking-glass and instead of my person I see my mother, and father in the act of bending over her to give her a kiss. Now the image in the looking-glass fuses with the original, the two coming together and forming a single picture. I feel myself turning into a woman and everything male about me falls off or disappears. I have long black hair, a white skin and a high voice. My arms stretch out to embrace a man and I awake with a feeling of anxiety and a rapid heart beat.”

An analysis of this dream is superfluous. The subject was unwilling to see its meaning.

But the fixation upon the mother is often also marked with hatred. It must not be thought that the homosexual is always disposed pleasantly towards the mother. It also happens that the love for the mother is covered under an overt hatred and an unnatural disgust, as is shown by the following case:

67. H. U., 24-year-old sculptor, homosexual as long as he can remember. His inclination is always towards waiters and restaurant employees. Has four sisters and an older brother who had to go to America and is lost to them. His father is a writer, a genial but impractical man who stuck to journalism. He clings to his father with every fiber of his heart, protecting him against the attacks of the mother who is tired of her husband’s continual love affairs and cannot stand them any longer. The father lives in a dreamy state continuously, passing from one ecstasy, lasting from several days to a week, into another. He is not finicky in his love adventures, drawing the line neither at servant girls nor at prostitutes; daily he has some new rendezvous and in that way squanders a great portion of his income. There are always quarrels in the house, and the father does not like to stay at home, preferring to spend his evenings in the public houses. The relations between mother and son are as unpleasant as between the parents. The son always lets his mother know that she is repulsive to him. If she attempts to come near him in the room he avoids her, shouting: “Don’t touch me, mir graust vor dir,—you give me the shivers!” He never permits her to fondle him, and has no good word for the poor tortured woman. Towards his sister he is also always sarcastic, aloof, and likes to meet her admirers to make uncomplimentary remarks about her to them. The situation became seriously aggravated, he had to leave the house, and now wants to meet no one of the family except the father, whom he sees daily at the newspaper office. He hates fanatically all women and dotes on Strindberg and Weininger.

Back of this hatred of women stands his great love for the mother, the sisters, and all women. In that respect he is exactly like his father, whose fate he does not want to share. He protects himself against the love for his mother because he would be lost and subordinate to women if he yielded. The gruesome quarrels which he witnessed during his childhood showed him a father who ruined himself on account of women, a man unable to achieve the full expression of his high ideal because he squandered his energies on numerous love adventures. Homosexuality serves him as a protection against all womanhood. His attachment to waiters is explained through the fact that his mother had been a waitress whom his father had married after she had become pregnant by him so as to legitimatize the child. After two weeks he breaks up the analysis because he feels that his attitude towards women is being changed. In that attitude lies his security. Among waiters he prefers small young boys who remind him of his sister.

This fixation upon the sister is not so rare, as is shown by the next case, which dates back to my earlier psychoanalytic experience.

68. Mr. P. G., teacher in a high school (Realschule professor), consults me on account of an ailment which began a few weeks ago and which threatens to destroy all his joy of living. He is 26 years of age and has had no sexual intercourse. In fact, he has not had even one genuine love affair. A few months ago he met a girl whom he liked very much and they became engaged. They were to be married in six months. She is a friend of his sister’s, a girl to whom he had not previously paid any particular attention but during an outing he got to know her and to appreciate her so well that he fell suddenly in love with her. It was not a great consuming passion,—rather a mutual understanding and a strong spiritual kinship. He was abstinent through conviction. He wanted to enter the marriage bond a pure man and was proud that in that respect he was unlike his friends and colleagues. Then something happened in his life which threatened to break him to pieces and even drove him to thoughts of suicide. I relate the occurrence in his own words:

“In my class there is a very beautiful, physically imposing, slim, bright young fellow whom I liked on account of his excellent answers and fine manners. I directed my questions at him with great pleasure, whenever the other boys could not answer, knowing that I would always receive from him the correct answer, and I have often held this favorite scholar of mine up to the others as an example of how they ought to be. One night I dreamed that the boy was lying in my bed and that I embraced and kissed him. I woke up, scared, and presently quieted down. ‘Nonsense,’ I said to myself. ‘Anything may come up in a dream!’ At school that day I found myself somewhat uneasy towards that boy because I could not help thinking about my dream. I avoided putting any questions to him. As was frequently his habit, the boy waited for me after school hours and asked permission to accompany me on the way. We had to go the same road and I was pleased to pass the time talking with him. He entertained me. I heard a great deal about what the pupils were saying about the teachers and it seemed to me very interesting. Teaching means building up souls, and so I wanted to implant every noble and high ideal in the soul of this child.

“I granted him also that day, gladly, permission to come along. I was strikingly distracted and silent. Whereas formerly I had been in the habit of taking him by the arm now and then, this time I avoided all intimate contact, because the dream stood between me and the handsome young boy, rendering any intimacy or informality impossible. I reached home and very promptly went to my bride. She found me absent-minded, wanted to know the reason,—and about that, naturally, I could but be silent. I wanted to show her tenderness; she goaded me with her kisses and caresses. But, oh, horrors! In the midst of her kisses my mind turned to the young fellow and when I felt her lips, so warm, I thought it was the boy’s lips. I pushed her, scared, out of my arms, pretending I did not feel well, and hurried back home.

“I was so excited that for a long time I could not fall asleep. I decided I would fight the insane passion. I had heard before passingly about boy love, knew also that it was the custom and fashion of the day in ancient Greece, but I myself had never before entertained the least thought of a man or boy. I felt I ought to remain a teacher no longer if I failed to conquer the feeling and to master the impression of the dream picture on my mind, conjured up, undoubtedly, by unconscious wishes. I resolved to be strict with myself, to give up the attachment to the boy, and to avoid his company after school hours. For it was I who first spoke up and invited him to keep me company on the way home. I resolved to be strong and to devote once more all my affection and my love to my bride.

“Next school day I forced myself not to turn my gaze towards the boy’s seat. But I could not help looking that way and the first glance rushed the blood to my cheeks. He was as beautiful as a Greek boy, his form so delicate, his eyes so smiling,—I could have lost myself for hours in the contemplation of that wonderful face. I roused from my day dreaming, which, fortunately, had passed unnoticed by the class. But I wanted to neutralize the impression that my gazing at the boy may have made upon the class and called upon the boy. I was severe, unmercifully severe with him, and sought to catch him in some error. And who fails to find an error when looking hard for it? Then I reprimanded the boy so severely that he began to cry and returned to his seat weeping, and he was unable to quiet down for some time after that. Then I became really angry. I was trying to stifle the inner voice which was whispering: ‘It is unfair for you to torture thus the innocent boy; he is not responsible for your awful thoughts....’ I disregarded that and scolded him.

“On the street the boy did not dare to offer to join me. I hurried past him and wandered for hours on the streets like a madman. I reproached myself, regretting the lost opportunity for enjoying the boy’s company and wept over the breaking up of the beautiful friendship between scholar and teacher. I resolved to be fair the next day with the boy and to pay no attention to him. But a wild demoniac power, stronger than my good resolutions, impelled me once more to hurt the boy’s feelings and to humiliate him before the class. It looked as if I was bent on revenging myself on him for the trouble he had cost me. I knew that I punished myself doing so, that I suffered far more than the boy, although he, too, changed in appearance, became timid, looked badly and obviously suffered under the unjust treatment. I also became irritable, morose, nervous. I lost completely my nervous equilibrium. I began to avoid my bride’s company. It seemed to me a profanation on my part of her pure love so long as I was consumed with such passion for a boy. She also became cooler and more reserved, because she could not understand me.

“Eventually things improved at school. I learned to control myself and to act more fairly. We resumed the walks once more; the boy accompanied me again after school hours; sometimes we walked on and on for hours, and we even met specially during the holidays. In his company I felt happy and all my wishes seemed gratified. I enjoyed his beauty and his lively mind and counted the minutes to pass when we should meet again.

“Then something happened which opened my eyes. My bride wrote me a letter breaking up our engagement. It did not even affect me as deeply as I had thought it would, whenever reflecting previously on the possibility. Very well—I thought to myself—now you can devote yourself entirely to your beloved boy! At the same time I felt during the day the same physical excitation which I had theretofore experienced only in my dreams. Then I realized that I must avoid the boy if I was to keep from committing a crime. My first task, I thought, would be to make up again with the bride; secondly, I must give up the school so as to not meet the boy again. My bride was resolute, however, insisting that she had become convinced that I did not love her. I kept secrets from her. I was on the very point of confessing everything and of telling her the whole truth. I threw myself, weeping, to her feet. She said quietly: ‘Don’t! What is done cannot be undone. It is better that we should part. Don’t make the parting hard for me. Let’s leave one another good friends and think kindly of me.’ Then she hurried out of the room and left me to myself.

“Next day when I went to the school the boy was not there; he was ill. Another boy reported he was kept at home on account of scarlet fever. My anxiety about him was boundless. I could think of nothing but that boy. A schoolmate had to bring me daily reports about his condition. Often I wandered in the neighborhood of his home, up and down the streets, and at night I watched the lamplit window of the room where a sister was taking care of him. Finally I heard that he was convalescing, that all danger was over, and that he would return to school in a few weeks. I had to keep a strong grip on myself at school to be able to carry on my lectures at all. My thoughts were perpetually centered on my beloved boy pupil. Continually I kept thinking: How many days longer must I keep longing? In three weeks he will be here! My heart danced with joy at the thought....

“There had to be a change. I could not keep on living that way. I took my father into confidence and he sent me to you, thinking that you would be able to furnish good advice and aid in this difficult case.”

I offered at first no advice and no help. To begin with, I allowed the love-sick fellow to speak out everything that was on his mind and that in itself lightened his burden. Then I undertook to obtain an insight into his mental life before the advent of his boy love.

It turned out that he had really loved and still loves but one person in the wide world: his sister. The affection for the bride was but a substitute for his love of the sister. His bride was also homosexual and loved in him but the brother of her best girl friend. As the girl friend (his sister) cooled off during their engagement, preferring another friendship (obviously led thereto by unconscious jealousy of the brother), her own affection for the young man cooled off and she promptly made use of the opportunity to break off with him. The opportunity arose conveniently enough and the severing of the engagement reacted most painfully upon the school teacher who had reasons of his own for reproaching himself most bitterly.

The more his bride kept away from his sister the greater was his indifference to the bride. But the boy resembled his sister very closely.

He never thought of this similarity before. They had the same eyes, the same color of hair, and the same voice, and these played a strong rôle with him. During that critical period his sister was interested in a certain physician. He felt he was about to lose her affection and sought a substitute for her and that he found in his pupil....

Now he was in a position to come to an understanding with his sister. She had the requisite psychologic insight to understand him fully and to lend him intelligent assistance towards his recovery.

His whole tremendous excitation simmered down. The love for the boy calmed down to an attitude of kindly interest which no longer troubled him. He took his walks only with his sister who often called for him at the school. Months later I heard that he was very quiet and had no reason to complain. He succeeded in sublimating his affection for the sister into joint intellectual interests, insofar as that is possible. But frank relations create a healthy atmosphere in which it is easier to overcome incestuous phantasies than in the byways and hidden bypaths of repression and transference.

I have given a detailed account of this case because it is typical and because the transference of affection from the sister to a boy is more common than would be recognized a priori in the light of our current contributions on homosexuality. We must also bear in mind that the sister represents a younger likeness of the mother Imago.[10]

But father, mother and sister do not exhaust the ideal of the homosexual. I also know cases—one I have described in a previous chapter—in which the love of an older brother plays a tremendous rôle.[11] We are thus led to the conclusion that fixation on the family plays a determinative rôle in the genesis of homosexuality, that homosexuality often may represent a flight from incest. True, we have also seen cases in which these roots are not traceable, particularly cases of late homosexuality. But why may not other psychic forces, manifesting themselves as hatred, disgust, fear and shame, likewise lead to homosexuality?

Love of the family is a form of narcissism. Every member of the family is a mirrored image of one’s own personality. One may love one’s self in one’s parents or other members of the intimate family circle more readily than through strangers. Leo Berg was the first to express this truth and he has done it very clearly. In his inspiring work, Geschlechter (Kulturprobleme der Gegenwart, 2nd ser., Vol. II, Berlin, 1906), he states:

“What does the homosexual substitute for procreation? In the first place self-seeking, the love of like (die Liebe zum Gleichen), plays a greater rôle in his case than with the heterosexual who is responsive to the unlike, and that is why the instinct of procreation is as a rule very much weaker in the former though not entirely absent. A young physician who confessed to me that he was homosexual, told me of a colleague who was passionately attached to a child. It was a powerful motherly instinct in him, a sign of his female sensitiveness in a male body; he is wholly womanly, a submissive being, and loves like a woman cursed only because he cannot bear a child for the man of his heart.”

Berg also points out that the homosexuals transfer to the intellectual sphere their reproductive and creative urge.

The case mentioned by Berg shows nothing in itself more than a complete identification with the mother. But I have observed long ago that this love of the like bears some relations to purposive sterility. The homosexual renounces the immortality implied in procreation. (Many homosexual artists achieve immortality in the realm of spiritual endeavor.) Such an attitude discloses a revolt against natural law and order. The homosexual, in fact, always conceives himself as unique. The world contains not his equal and that feeling is the hidden source of his pride. The “bearing of aloofness,” already pointed out by Freimark,[12] the pride of being “different,” determine also his opposition to the procreative instinct. He does not care to be like others. Against the notion that God had ordained man to have offspring he wants to oppose all teleology and, in spite of God, maintain a purposeless, meaningless love, contrary to nature, a love for its own sake. Conceivably women manifest even more clearly the corresponding revulsion against the motherly instinct.

Who will deny that fear of children, of motherhood, is an important social manifestation? Can it be that this fear is characteristic only of women and is not shared also by men? May it not manifest itself as a form of flight from sexual determinism? We need only look around us. There are any number of married couples who want no children and others who want no more than a child or two. Undoubtedly this state of things is partly due to homosexuality, to a deviation from the biblical injunction concerning the duty of increasing offspring. But let us also glance over our professional experience. The relationship between children and their parents carries within itself the beginnings of a new phase. The everlasting conflict between the new and the old generation, between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, children and parents, requires, fosters new forms. Not without reason has our age been called “the century of the child” with its slogan raised about the Rights of Children. The greater the (unconsciously motivated) antagonism of the child against his parents, the stronger will be the fear of its own children, who loom up as potential enemies and rivals.[13] It seems that our own image attracts and repels us at the same time, that there is a fear of the like as strong as the fear of the unlike. The aboriginal conflict between the old and the new goes on forever within us. Hungry for the new though we be, yet we cling to the old. Having acquired the new we turn longingly to the old.

This bipolarity shows itself nowhere so distinctly as upon the sexual sphere. It means that contraries have the power of sexual attraction. That is an observation substantiated by everyday experience. But there is an extreme point at which the opposite touches upon the like. Les extrêmes se touchent, extremes meet. In each of us there lives also another who is the precise counterpart of ourselves. In the other sex we love our counterpart and through the love for our own sex we endeavor to run away from that counterpart.

The mother instinct and hatred of motherhood are not split in the human soul. The homosexual woman always shows the hatred of motherhood and her alleged love of children, when such a sentiment is claimed at all, proves but a self-deception and lip-service at best. In our study of female dyspareunia we propose fully to prove that conclusion in connection with the histories of several homosexual women. We do find many instances of alleged affection for children but in reality these are only caricatures of the true sentiment and only rarely the affection as it is characteristic of normal woman. Our school teacher in love with the boy pupil, whose case we gave in full in the preceding pages, did not love children as such and did not care to have children of his own. Through his love for the boy the repressed father instinct also found outlet.

The life histories of homosexual women differ from those of males only in the fact that occasionally there seems present a certain yearning for children, as if the child could bring about release from the passion and a new state of bliss. Beyond that the urlind shows the same psychogenesis as the urning. There is a strong fixation on the family, though not always on the father, as Hirschfeld claims. In addition to that, rather commonly there is found affection for the mother which is fairly open, and tenderness for some sister which persists through life and assumes remarkable masks.

I want to conclude this chapter with the histories of some cases of female homosexuality which may serve to illustrate clearly the points I have just made:

69. Miss Ilse—we shall call her by that name—after a series of various exciting episodes has fallen a victim to depression, during which she lost a great deal of weight, but in spite of a successful fattening régime her stay at a sanitarium did not effect a complete cure. She is an impressively attractive girl, 24 years of age, voluptuous, feminine in every way up to her angular, somewhat energetic nose and prominent, curved eyebrows. Her mother, of whom the girl speaks with much feeling, believes that the girl’s breakdown dates from the death of the father. Ilse irritatedly contradicts the mother several times, breaking into a quarrelsome attitude towards her mother over trifles. Reprimanded by her mother, she falls into her depression and speaks no word. I take her under treatment and for a week I have in her a heavy burden on my hands. She hardly says anything, is very negativistic in her attitude, only muttering from time to time: “Don’t trouble yourself. It will never be any different. Better give me something that will put me quickly out of the way.” She livens up somewhat only when referring to her father,—thinks he should have not passed away. The mother should have called in a specialist. In fact, it was as much her fault as anybody’s, for she had failed to insist on calling the best aid while there was time.

Gradually she extends me her confidence and one day she appears,—like a changed person. She must tell me the truth. She is not a normal person. Since childhood she has been homosexual and had never cared for men. Her mother had implied as much when she said to me: “I cannot understand the girl. She always fled from the room when young men called on Alfred (her brother). The girl is a man hater.” This fact the girl had denied during the first visit, but now she herself admitted. She had never cared for men. On the other hand, at 11 years of age she had already fallen passionately in love with a woman school teacher. She was a frolicsome girl, often wore her brother’s clothes, and played with all the young boys of the neighborhood. At 14 years of age she again fell in love with a girl friend.

Her current depression is due to a terrible disappointment. She had maintained a love affair with a French woman and was happy. She said nothing about the character of the relations, but admitted that they were very intimate. Suddenly she found out that the French woman was not true to her, but was keeping up intimate relations more often with other girls than with her. She suffered tremendously on account of her jealousy. She began to feel a disgust against all women not unlike her former aversion to men. Asked why she was so antagonistic to men, she answered: “Because they are, all, without exception, disgusting brutes....”

At this point Ilse begins to relate her past experiences. She was seven years of age when she visited an uncle. He showed her his big membrum virile and asked her to hold it in her hand. She did this as well as other things he requested her usque et ejaculationem. “How shall I have any respect for men when they don’t hesitate thus to poison the innocent soul of a child?” The uncle is still living.... She has since thought that it must be some morbid tendency and has forgiven him. “It happened only a few times and the uncle believes I have forgotten it....”

Another traumatic incident impressed her more seriously; it was, in fact, a series of traumas. Her mother was a light-minded person and is so to this day, despite her 50 years. But she knows enough to dress herself so attractively and with such a display of refinement that she is still capable of achieving conquests. There follow a number of serious complaints against the mother, which must have been true, for I have had opportunity to convince myself of the truth of some of the statements. The mother always kept on the string a number of lovers who gratified her extravagant requirements. As a child she had been taken along to a number of rendezvous and has repeatedly witnessed the display of tendernesses between the lovers. She also recalled various household scenes from her early childhood. As a child she was already very sensuous and masturbated jointly with the sister and the brother. She was precocious as well as prematurely spoiled and every one thought she would early turn out to be like her mother. Then her sister underwent a great change in character. She became religious and wanted to join a nunnery. She made fun of her religious-minded sister but secretly admired her for her chastity. She was 14 years of age at the time. She now knows that she was in love with the family physician and that she was interested in men, but at the same time she was in love at different times with various teachers and girl friends. When her sister was 16 years of age she had a love affair with an army lieutenant and had to go to a sanitarium to be curetted, fever set in after the operation, and for several weeks the girl was seriously ill.

Her sister’s experience shook her to pieces. Inwardly she had been proud that there was such a pure, innocent girl in the family. Now that her sister followed the example of her mother it seemed to her that she, too, was fated to follow in the same path and that there could be no escape for her. During that period her character underwent a change and she acquired a tremendous dislike for all small children. She could not suffer to see a small child. She thought to herself, if she were its mother she would strangle it. The feeling was so horrible that she could not sleep. In time she improved somewhat, but the dislike of children or, rather, the fear of them, that is, the fear that she might do some harm to them, never left her.

I suspected that back of this feeling-attitude towards the children might be found the solution of her problem. I reverted back to her sixteenth year, for it was at that period that she turned definitely against all men.

“Why do you hate children?”

“Not that, exactly.... In fact, I was at one time foolish over them. I have always wanted children. When I told you that I always played boyish games it was not exactly the truth. I remember now that I played nurse to my doll and that we often played the game of childbirth. Brother was the doctor and I was the pregnant lady in bed.”

“Did you happen to witness childbirth as a little girl?”

“Yes, everything.... Our aunt gave birth to a child in our home,—a romantic story. An illegitimate child; her parents were not to know anything about the birth, or they would have disowned her. But we children knew everything. Afterwards she married the man but was very unhappy with him. The little baby was with us for a time. I was very fond of it and carried it around....”

“Have you other such aunts in the family?”

“Between us: mother’s family has a poor reputation. There were six sisters, each more flighty than the next. None was a virgin at marriage. Things were always happening and there was never any peace. That is why I was so shocked over sister’s experience. I was getting to think it was my fate also to become ... merely a prostitute. You will pardon me for speaking so harshly about my own mother. But unfortunately it is the truth....”

“A prostitute is purchasable.... There is some difference whether one is light-minded through passion or for gain.”

(After a lengthy pause.) “Just what I did find out at the time. Mother was to be had for money. Father was a humble employee, an unsuccessful jurist, who eked out a living doing secretarial service for an attorney. He could not keep up with the large household expenses even though he occasionally transacted a business deal on the side which netted him a considerable sum. Mother always had a friend who took care of our needs. Thus we were brought up rather well educated, my brother could afford to study, we did everything.”

“Did you know all that already as a child?”

“I knew it at a very early age....”

“You think, then, that your sister was also paid and that she sold herself?”

“No, nothing like that. In addition to the paying lover mother always had one, a purely heart affair, on the side. It was funny! The men always brought us candies and all sorts of presents. When we grew older mother became a little more careful. Still, there was enough going on to bring shame as I look back. And so there came into our house also a young lieutenant whom mother had picked up—God knows where. This fellow was mother’s avowed lover and could do as he pleased. The terrible thing was that he began to pursue also sister and after a few jealousy quarrels mother had to put up with it,—she perhaps even encouraged the affair. For I overheard once a talk between them and heard mother reproach ‘Shikki,’—that was the lieutenant’s nickname,—that he had used sister. She could have obtained a large sum of money for the girl because she was a virgin and the girl would have been provided for. Then there followed bitter quarrels between mother and sister.”

I interrupt the conversation at this point. It turns out that she, too, was in love with the lieutenant, and so were the others of the household, including the father and the brother; she was also jealous of her mother. Her jealousy opened her eyes. That is how it happened that she heard the unpleasant rumors about her mother circulating among the neighbors. She began hating her mother, but that continued only for a short time. Then her hatred turned to children. She hated first herself, the child who bore no respect for the mother. She did not want to be like her mother and her sister. She knew that she would have to submit to similar experiences; that her fate was sealed. She strove against her feminine and motherly instincts. But the analysis disclosed that she really entertained one supreme wish which she was unwilling to countenance openly: she wanted to be a mother and to bear many, many children. But the neurotic reaction thwarted her powerful motherly instinct. To be a mother meant identification with the despised mother. Her better feelings prompted her to draw herself far apart from the mother.

She did not want to be a woman. She did not want to be so easy-going as her mother. At that time her brother also showed a temperamental change. He became serious-minded, began to write verses, and to take an interest in all sorts of idealistic endeavors. She linked herself to him and before long she differentiated herself completely from the rest of the household, and particularly from the mother. She sought earnest-minded girl friends and came into frequent contact with her brother’s companions, but was unapproachable, even though she expressed herself freely and frankly about all subjects. Her strongly sensuous temperament threw her next into the arms of the Frenchwoman and she preferred that to a love affair with a man as she was afraid of children. After the Frenchwoman’s breach of loyalty she fell into her depression.

This circumstance also disclosed an interesting sidelight. She confessed to me that the Frenchwoman was also her brother’s sweetheart. It had never been mentioned by the woman but she knew it even before she entered into intimate relations with her. Nevertheless it was her happiest period.

The depression is thus traceable to a second source. The brother had abandoned the Frenchwoman, having chosen another sweetheart, of whom he was very fond and whom he intended to marry. The Frenchwoman was only a sensuous play affair with him, the brother belonged wholly to her. They were always together and she knew all his secrets. She was never jealous when she knew that he kept up relations with some girl or woman so long as he did not love soulfully. But now the brother became acquainted with a wealthy, beautiful girl, with whom he fell in love and whom he was going actually to marry. This, for the brother, lucky event,—came to nothing in the end on account of the opposition of the girl’s family,—left her cool. All she saw was that she was losing her brother, and that he no longer belonged to her. He could not marry the girl because her parents required that he should first prove his ability to support her. But the two lovers agreed to wait for one another and the brother had gone already pretty far and he may yet succeed to marry the girl, despite the mother’s deplorable reputation. He lives no longer with his family and avoids the old home. He only sees her from time to time and they are still good old pals, whenever they meet....

This interesting analysis illustrates all the chief points to be found in the psychogenesis of male homosexuality. In fact the girl was on the point of becoming as fond of men as her mother, perhaps of indulging in bisexual activities. Her sister’s experience opened her eyes and acted as a terrible warning. The yearning for purity which animates every soul and is the polar counterpart of the desire for tasting every sort of experience, became uppermost in her case, the fear of becoming like the sister, or like the mother, and her hatred of the mother, jointly, had the effect of shaping her into a different being. She probably would have not yielded to the homosexual love of the Frenchwoman had she not been overcome by the fact that the woman was her brother’s sweetheart. It was a case of incest through a third person.... She hated her mother and had to protect herself against the danger of having children who grow up to be one’s enemies. Thus children became her enemies. The father played a negligible rôle in her life and had no influence on the development of her homosexuality.

I do not know well her subsequent history. Her depression was soon relieved and her hatred of children disappeared entirely. But she left Vienna and went to another country, obviously to get away from her family and to forget her whole past. I had advised her to do so and the fact that she had followed my advice permits us to hope that, after the tempestuous course of her past life, she may have succeeded, at last, in finding a friendlier harbor.

III

HOMOSEXUALITY AND JEALOUSY—MASKED JEALOUSY—THE JEALOUS WIFE OF A PHYSICIAN—WHY WOMEN ABUSE SERVANT GIRLS—TRANSFERENCE OF JEALOUSY TO THE SURROUNDINGS—JEALOUSY OF THE FATHER—JEALOUSY OF THE RESIDENCE—JEALOUSY OF THE PAST—A YOUNG WOMAN OVERSENSITIVE TO ANY NOISES.

In der Eifersucht liegt mehr Eigenliebe als Liebe.

—Rochefoucauld.

III

Jealousy involves self-love rather than love.

—Rochefoucauld.

Jealousy is the projection of one’s own insufficiencies to the surroundings.[14] It is an atavistic awakening of the brutal sense of self such as was common to the primordial man protecting his possessions. All children are jealous. Jealousy leads us back to the sources of man’s instinctive life.

It is not my intention to take up the whole subject of jealousy. But morbid jealousy shows certain definite, almost regular, relations to homosexuality which we must consider. We have seen that homosexuality may be hidden from consciousness. That is also true of jealousy. I have seen many neurotics who have suffered tremendously on account of their jealousy, without being aware of it. In the masking of neurosis jealousy assumes most remarkable forms.

The next case illustrates the masking of jealousy, its fusion with homosexuality, and contains various points of psychologic interest:

70. A highly intelligent subject, H. J., writes me: “Have you already reflected on how we discern certain similarities on certain days and fail to do so at other times? You are undoubtedly aware that neurotics and normal persons are fond of finding resemblances when they formulate identifications. The lover finds that the beloved walks like mother, or that she talks like the latter, and if physically no resemblance can be established he finds the same mental characteristics, the same soul, perhaps the same shortcomings. But I want to speak of an entirely different peculiarity. One forenoon I see a man, who looked enough like my friend, X, the painter, to be taken for the latter. I walk up to him and say: Hello, X,—still under the impression of that mistake. A strange face wearing a beard of familiar form is staring at me. I offer the usual apologetic explanation and go my way. After a while I see again my friend X, this time somewhat dimly, not quite so certain of it as before. I recover from this illusion quickly enough.

“By that time my psychologic curiosity is roused and it occurs to me that my wife told me that morning she was going to visit the painter, X, during the forenoon. I listened indifferently to the statement, merely asking her to give him my greetings. But a certain unrest must have risen in the unconscious: your wife goes to the painter who likes her and makes love to her. Nothing of that in consciousness at all. Painters are a light-minded class who do not take such things seriously. Who knows whether your wife will be strong enough to resist?

“These secret fears led to a symptomatic act. I accosted a stranger as X, the painter. In other words,—a wish fulfilment. For if I meet X on the street he cannot possibly be in his studio at this time. My wish is that he shall not be at home. My wife shall go to the studio and find: Mr. X is not in.... That wish came up on three different occasions that morning. For I thought I saw Mr. X in the street three different times. Moreover, I project X upon strange faces. Because I think constantly of X, because my mind is wholly preoccupied with him, because I am innerly preoccupied with the uncountenanced thought: what does X now do with your wife?—I see X everywhere. Ringstrasse is filled with men looking like him; every man is a Mr. X.

“The illusion at this juncture denotes also another suspicion. An additional thought renders the first one pregnant with significance. Yesterday I heard the opinion expressed at a gathering, ‘Any woman may be had and there is no such thing as a virtuous woman!’ I opposed vehemently that cynical thought (Pauschalverdächtigung) and I tried to the best of my ability to point out the ridiculous and unfair implications of this notion. And today I am surprised to find myself entertaining the thought. These men who look like X, the great unknown, are alike attractive and powerful men, just like X. You are reflecting: Who knows whether this or that man is not actually your wife’s lover? Why do the words from Faust come into my mind: ‘The whole town has her’?... In justice to my wife’s honor I must now state that she is in fact an exemplary woman and that I entertain no trace of suspicion about her conduct. But I am deliberately looking for excuses to vindicate myself. I mean to believe that every woman is guilty, including therefore my own wife, so as to justify in my eyes my new love affairs.... I am envious of X, of his free ways with women, and would like to be in his place, receiving ladies in the studio. I would like to be X. In my phantasy I am X, and see myself as X in every stranger.

“A lady of my acquaintance always saw her deceased husband on the street in the person of some stranger who seemed closely to resemble him. This peculiar resemblance to strangers was noticeable particularly when her mind turned to light and frivolous thoughts. As if the image of the husband came forward to warn and protect her: ‘It is only three years since I have passed away and already you begin to turn your mind to trivial joys? Beware. I watch you from Heaven and I see everything you do.’”

We admit freely that our subject is a keen-minded psychologist possessing an extraordinary capacity for introspection, yet this excellent piece of self-analysis seemed to me to overlook something important. I therefore write Mr. H. J. that I should like to talk this interesting episode over with him and I invite him to call on me. He accepts the invitation. From our conversation I report only some of the more important points:

“Has it not struck you that the men who impressed you as bearing resemblance were exclusively attractive and powerful men?”

“No, because my friend, X, the painter, is also an attractive and well built man. Others would not look like him....”

“Are you also otherwise jealous?”

“No; not in the least; only about X,—and even that I did not know or was perhaps too proud to admit to myself.”

“What is your attitude towards X? Do you care for him also as you do...?”

“... For my wife, you mean? I do. I love him. He is a charming fellow.”

“Is it not strange that you should be jealous precisely of the one man whom you also like so well?”

He reflects a while and finds no answer. I explain to him that it shows a repressed homosexual disposition towards his friend. The trend of his unconscious thought is: “If I were a woman I could not withstand him.” Perhaps the thought goes even further than that: “Too bad I am not a woman for then I would enjoy that beautiful man....”

He sees at once the relationship between his jealousy and the unrecognized inner homosexual disposition. He relates that this man is the only friend whom he greets with a kiss after a prolonged absence, that he likes to take him by the arm and to hold his hand.

In short, he himself is in love with his friend. He sees his friend everywhere and the slightest resemblances impress themselves strongly on his mind. They are emanations from his one thought: I like him and I wish I were a woman to yield to him.

It is very tempting to try to trace the various paths of unconscious jealousy. But that would lead us too far off our present theme. As we are confronted with a very complicated condition which may have the most varied roots I propose to give a few clinical illustrations from my own practice and to discuss the various forms of jealousy on the basis of these data.

71. The first case of jealousy which I had occasion to observe was that of a physician’s wife. The woman, 45 years of age, relates: “Perhaps you can free me from a painful condition which embitters my whole life and turns my marriage into a veritable hell. I have been married already 22 years and can assert that I have not yet had a happy day except when my husband is all day alone with me and we have no occasion to come into contact with another female person. He is a physician and already during our engagement I was jealous of all his women patients. I did not know this awful trait in myself before. At any rate it was not so pronounced or I should have not married my husband. At first I was jealous of my immediate acquaintances and friends, particularly of the very pretty women among them. After marriage my condition grew worse and worse. During the consultation hours I watched behind the door and shivered with actual nervous chills in my excitement. My husband was a woman specialist and a very popular woman specialist at that. I implored him to abandon that specialty and to take up any other. I admit that the fact of his being a woman specialist had at first excited my interest in him and had a great deal to do with my choice of the man. I thought to myself: the man sees so many beautiful women, he sees them naked, and yet has chosen you,—the thought flattered me immensely. That was well enough at first, but later the feeling of jealousy grew in its stead.

“I had a very pretty woman friend who was taking treatment from my husband. What I endured during her visits is beyond my powers to describe. I said to myself: ‘She is now taking off her blouse and now her petticoat. He is now examining, looking at her bosom, and now she lifts herself upon the examination table, she stretches her limbs apart....’ I suffered hellish torments. I was convinced that my husband could not withstand this woman’s charms and would kiss her. I had a serious quarrel with him; I quarreled with my friend, who turned from me with indignation. Our marriage relations grew worse on that account. I tortured my husband so that he had to allow me to watch through a carefully hidden peep-hole what was going on in the consultation room. In that manner I convinced myself that my husband was physically true to me. But even though he swore a thousand times that the women did not excite him in the least I could not believe him. I stuck to one thing which I harped on daily: ‘Give up your specialty.’ Years thus passed in quarrels and dispute. I have now a married daughter of my own and I thought to myself that with advancing age my condition would change. But not at all! It grows worse and I transfer now my jealousy also to my son-in-law, I am jealous for my daughter. Fortunately, she has no real reason to feel jealous and laughs at me....

“I am also jealous of my daughter. I would like to preserve her love for myself only and I begrudge her husband. Although she made an excellent match, I was not satisfied and treated my son-in-law very unfairly. I was unhappy over it but could not help it. I have consulted already the most famous specialists, have been for six weeks under hypnotic treatment by Prof. X. I have already kept away from my husband for three months at a stretch,—nothing has helped.”

That is the sufferer’s history. What is the meaning of this jealousy?

The root of this jealousy is a non-conscious homosexuality. She is jealous of her woman friend because she herself is in love with the friend. She puts herself in the rôle of the man, the physician, and concludes that in his position she could not resist the temptation. She imagines herself in the man’s place; she scrutinizes every woman with hungry looks. The peep-hole in the consultation room serves on the one hand the purpose of calming down her jealousy and of giving the poor husband a few quiet hours; on the other hand it enables her to participate in everything that is taking place and to gratify her craving as voyeuse. This control is her daily homosexual excitant, the means through which she rouses the flames of her passion only to still them afterwards upon her husband.

After the explanation was reached there was a marked improvement in her condition. The woman saw that her love for the daughter was homosexual and that this was the reason why she was so jealous of her son-in-law.

The occurrence is far from rare, and many a marriage has been wrecked on account of it. The angry mother-in-law is always the mother who cannot live without her daughter and who wants to show her daughter that the husband is untrue and does not appreciate her and how much more she truly loves the daughter.... I have also often seen the daughter, after a timorous attempt at married life, return penitently back to the mother. I have seen mothers who fight for their daughters with a lover’s passion and with their tremendous jealousy putting all sorts of difficulties in the way of any pretenders to the daughter’s hand. I have found that kind of jealousy frequently as the root of melancholia. I refer in this connection to Case 132 in my “Nervöse Angstzustände” (2nd ed., p. 363).

72. The next case of jealousy shows the same roots. A married woman, 30 years of age, consults me on account of an unexplainable jealousy which has been torturing her for about four weeks. She tells the story of her jealousy: She engaged a new servant, a very young girl, somewhat coquettish, but who at first glance seemed to her very sympathetic. After one week she felt jealous and found that her husband, who usually did not so much as look at the servants in the house, was extremely friendly and courteous towards that girl. It seemed to her even that he was bestowing longing glances on the girl. At first she kept silent because she hesitated to speak of the matter to her husband. But after a time she reproached him about it: he must be more strict. She requested him to assume a more severe tone in his relations with the girl. Her husband laughed at her. He said he talked to the girl in his usual manner and nothing more. It was all imagination on her part. The girl was very good; he had no reason to call her down or to assume a more severe tone towards her. That reassured her somewhat but only for a short while. She watched her husband more carefully than ever and thought he was much charmed by the girl. She arose several times during the night to go into the servant’s room and investigate. Once her husband had some gastric trouble and he had to leave the room several times that night. She was convinced that it was but an excuse to go to the girl and several times she followed him along the chilly passage into the hall, so that her husband asked: “What is the matter with you this time?” She said she was worried over his condition and wanted to watch and see that he was all right. Finally her jealousy broke to surface a number of times and she reproached her husband very bitterly with her suspicions. She was absolutely certain that he was intimate with the girl. Her husband was indignant and asked her to dismiss the girl at once so that there might be an end to that “foolish notion.” The remarkable thing was that she felt unable or unwilling to dismiss the girl. The girl was so good and so faithful, it is so hard nowadays to find an efficient girl servant, she insisted only that her husband must show himself more strict with her. He had to declare on his oath again that there was no intimacy between them. Towards the girl she felt a peculiar anger which she could not understand. At times she could have flown at the girl to strike her, which was very baffling as she had never been in the habit of striking a servant. But it would have been a great satisfaction to her to have pummelled this girl who caused her so much anguish. She had to restrain herself forcefully so as not to give vent to her rage. She was very “touchy” with the girl and tolerated not the least contradiction on her part.

Nevertheless she could not make up her mind to dismiss the girl, and yet she was afraid to be alone with her.

All her troubles arose on account of her homosexual attitude towards the girl who was in fact a charming blonde type of beauty. She herself was in love with the girl; that is why she could not conceive that her husband might be indifferent towards her. She figured: If I were a man I would love this girl! Interesting, and at the same time typical, is her rage and desire to strike the girl. The love feeling is converted into its opposite and the longing to touch the girl (that is, to come into contact with her body) manifests itself in the inclination to strike her. How often love contacts disguise themselves as angry blows under the mask of anger!

I explain to the woman that she must dismiss the girl when she saw clearly the meaning of her jealousy. After the girl left all the unpleasant symptoms mentioned above vanished.

Another form of jealousy transfers itself from one object to another, or to the whole surroundings. Such transference of jealousy serves the purpose of masking from self and from others the real object of the original jealousy.

73. Mrs. H. G. is a woman, 38 years of age, who has been living happily with her husband. At present she is unhappy on account of jealousy. Here is her statement: “I have called on you to ask you to relieve me of a condition which I find simply unbearable. I have a good, fine husband against whom I cannot complain of anything. He is a splendid and model man in every way. I am the more distressed therefore to be so jealous of him. I felt that way, first, while my husband was ill with typhus which left him with heart trouble. He has to be more careful of himself because of the illness he has been through, and whereas formerly he had intercourse with me two and three times a week, now it happens only about once a month. My husband is not well,—I know it; his physician has expressly told me that he must keep very quiet and avoid all excitement. Nevertheless I cannot help feeling that he is untrue to me. I am so ashamed of it that I have not yet breathed a word about my jealousy to my husband. In fact, we are nearly always together. I know all his affairs and I often go along wherever he goes. But I cannot hang on to him every minute. So I hold the watch in hand and count the minutes, even the seconds, for him to return. Always the one thought: He is untrue to you this very minute! If he goes to another office, I think he does it because there is a pretty office girl there with whom he is in love. If he takes a meal at a restaurant, it is because he has a rendezvous. If he is a few minutes late coming home from the office, he was with a street woman. In short, I am tormented all the time by these evil thoughts, I struggle against them but cannot put them out of my mind.”

“How long have you been in that state?”

“It began when he went to Franzensbad on account of his heart trouble. There he became acquainted with a spinster, a girl 46 years of age, who was also alone. They two got together and kept each other company. I know the girl; she is very honorable, and when my judgment is uppermost, I say to myself: Nothing has happened; the two have merely felt a temporary intellectual interest in one another. But in my evil hours my mind conjures up the worst thoughts. I have once read a letter which that woman had written my husband. She thanked him for his interesting company during the cure. A few weeks after the Franzensbad cure, there came a box of flowers and a letter for my husband. The woman wrote thanking him for his pleasant company during the cure,—she was very glad to have made the acquaintance of so prominent and intellectual a gentleman and hoped their friendship would endure beyond the time of the cure. At that I reproached my husband and tortured him with my jealousy. He gave me his word of honor that his relations with the woman were strictly of a friendly and formal character; aside of his own considerations, he was a sick man and satisfied to be left alone. But I asked him to give up all further correspondence with the woman and he readily consented. He is really a fine fellow who grants me everything I want, a man who reads in my eyes every wish of mine, and I am ashamed to think ill of him all the time.”

Here we see one source of her jealousy. The woman was married to a man who gratified her in every respect; suddenly she had to restrict herself to an abstinent life. The enforced abstinence suggested the thought: You are still young and attractive, so many men are after you! Take a lover. She was filled with fancies of longing and projected them unto her husband. If he were unfaithful it would furnish an excuse for her. She needed it; she wanted him to be unfaithful, for that would have served her as a defense. Her compulsive thinking is the masking of the thought: Oh, that my husband were unfaithful so that I, too, might take a lover!

The thought was suggested to her by the fact that the wife of one of her husband’s colleagues, a very light-minded person, was able, nevertheless, to keep up a very handsome social position. She spoke with great feeling about that woman.

“Does that woman not take loyalty so seriously as you do?”

“That woman? She does not have one lover; she has six at a time, and even more! She certainly enjoys life. And the lovers pay for everything. She has the finest wardrobe, the prettiest hats, takes wonderful journeys and her husband knows everything.”

“Isn’t her husband jealous?”

“Oh, no! He knows everything, and consoles himself in his own way. But, do you know the curious part of it all? That flighty woman is jealous of her husband! She quarrels bitterly with him when she hears of his escapades, although she has no right. The two have taken reciprocal freedom....”

This is also a common occurrence and very interesting. Married couples living apart, each carrying on all sorts of adventures and love affairs, yet jealous of each other, though usually they do not show it.[15] There are persons who love each other very warmly, but in the struggle between the sexes they regard loyalty as submissiveness, as a humbling before the partner, and they would perish rather than submit to such a love.[16]

Her calculating friend is a sophisticated woman possessing wonderful tact, she tastes all forms of pleasure, plays a certain social rôle, and enjoys every phase of life. Moreover she is a very attractive woman appealing strongly to our jealous subject.

Back of her jealous thoughts, again, there stand homosexual fancies. At the time when her husband began to restrict his marital indulgences her homosexual longing began to assert itself. She did not want to be unfaithful. She was thus inhibited against taking up a man. Therefore her thoughts could only turn to woman. Her inner reflection was: If I were a man, I would enjoy a pretty woman every little while and more particularly that flighty friend whom I like so well.

The flighty woman had roused every feeling in her. Not only her homosexuality, but also all those prostituting tendencies which either slumber deeply hidden in every woman’s soul or break to surface before self and before the whole world. To be paid for the service of love, to receive actual coin in recognition of her sexual charm—that is a fancy looming up under various cover-symptoms among the neurotics.

That polygamic friend of hers achieved everything that a woman may wish, and in spite of that she maintained her good social standing. She moved in a select circle, folks merely shutting one eye so long as she was so clever in covering her tracks.

That example is constantly before her eyes. She herself is sexually ungratified, financially she can hardly make both ends meet, and she sees the other woman getting everything she needs: money and love. The question, Does it pay to be honest? continually recurs to her mind.

She unburdens herself of a mass of similar reflections but does not think that the real cause of her jealousy depends on herself. She is jealous also of the servant girl, the man-servant, and the children. She is even jealous of her male friends. She has a certain good friend whom she put in touch, so to speak, with a woman friend because he did not mean anything to her. Since that time he has been keeping up a close acquaintance with that woman and she is very jealous; she would like to get him away from her and to have him entirely to herself. She cannot bear to see a child familiar with other persons and is wild even when the servant girl receives a letter or a show post card through the mail. It is the perseverance of the instinct of possession on account of diminished sexual gratification. She is reduced, so to speak, to small rations and therefore wants to accumulate and reserve for herself everything the environment yields in the form of love. The little she has she wants to preserve for herself only and to protect as her own exclusive possession. The same attitude is seen on the part of children who have a favorite older brother or sister. They are extremely jealous of their trifling possessions and are enraged when the other children in the house attempt to touch their toys. The others may have more, but what little they possess they want to preserve exclusively for themselves.

The subject thus tells about her jealousy of everything and everybody. But she displays but little understanding of psychic relationships, she is afraid to come to me because while at my office she cannot watch her husband, and stays away a few days. It seems as if she had something important to tell me but does not quite find the courage to do so.

Soon she calls at my office again complaining that her jealousy grows worse; she suffered terribly that day, and all through the previous night she had hardly closed her eyes. And presently she confesses that the jealousy actually began after the death of her mother.

“Do you know—dear doctor—my mother was the model of a noble woman. She was virtuous, diligent, well educated, sweet tempered, a veritable angel in human form. In spite of it all—I don’t know why—I was more strongly attached to father. Possibly because he played more with us and paid more attention to our games and excursions while mother was more strict in her training and careful to inculcate in us a sense of orderliness. Mother died of a painful growth. I said to myself: ‘Now you must take mother’s place with father. You must take care of him.’ Father was already 62 years of age, and suffered occasionally of gouty attacks. I was tremendously shocked to see my father put aside mourning after a few weeks and change into an elegant man-about-town,—he the respectable town official, who had never before gone a step without mother.... He started to frequent nightly disreputable dives and I soon heard that he was having relations with various disreputable women of the town. I was so disconsolate, in my anguish I visited daily mother’s grave. There I threw myself to the ground and out of the bitterness of my heart I implored mother and prayed to her. ‘Mother,’ I cried, ‘you must not let this go on, you must not allow your good name and honor to be dragged down that way. Mother, put an end to these shameful doings. Make father so ill that he shall be unable to sin any more and besmirch your memory.’ Thus I implored and prayed. But it did not do any good. Soon I observed that father was intimate with our young servant girl and that she was trying to get hold of his money. I drove her out of the house with the aid of the police because I discovered that she was stealing money from father. O, I was like a fury and irreconcilable because the honor of my mother was at stake, and I had ceased to respect my father who had been the dearest person in the world to me! After that I had peace for a few weeks because father suffered one of his gout attacks. I prayed to God and to the virgin mother to keep father confined to his bed so that he should be able no longer to add to his sins. But father got well soon and resumed his former care-free nocturnal rounds of amusement places. Chorus girls, dancers, street women and others of that ilk gathered at our house and were lavishly entertained. Then one day I heard that father intended to marry again. He had become engaged to a 42-year-old widow. I knew at once that the woman had her eye on father’s money. I bought a revolver and, I tell you frankly: I should have killed either the woman or my father if there had been any marriage. Perhaps I would have done away with both, for I was determined to protect mother’s memory against this insult and shame. I went to that woman’s house and gave her such a warning that the engagement was soon given up. I told that shameless adventuress: ‘You will never reach the altar alive; that I swear solemnly on mother’s memory!’ I was fully determined to shoot them both. You can appreciate how excited I was.

“After that father avoided me and my sisters. But the proposed marriage did not take place,—I had accomplished that much. I went no longer to his house when he had suddenly a light stroke and was forced to appeal to us children. Then we had a complete family reconciliation and since that time I have again my father. Now I see him daily, we children take turns in looking after him.”

“Have you no feeling of guilt and did you never think that your father fell ill because you wished it? Did you not want him to be so crippled and reduced to your care that he should be able no longer to carry on?”

“I don’t feel guilty and I have no regrets. Only satisfaction.... I wished it to be that way and it has come out as I wished. For now I have once more a father of whom I need not be ashamed. But you must not think that I was jealous on my own account. I only felt myself the representative of my mother.”

“You are not jealous of your sister?”

“Yes ... when father is very demonstrative with her, I feel the same wild jealousy come over me, but I control myself....”

Here we see jealousy rising out of an incestuous wish first directed upon a man, then transferred to the whole environment. This transference of jealousy to every one serves more effectively to cover the genuine jealousy of the father. The death of the mother left this young woman in a critical position. Obviously her wish as a child was: “When mother dies I will marry father.” A wish which so many girls entertain and even openly express. With the death of the mother the new situation presented itself. A place close to father was vacated and now other women filled it. The old father’s behavior showed that he was still a man. But one thing stood against this fancy: her husband. So long as he lived she could not go to live with her father. Her husband’s illness brought matters prospectively nearer to an issue. The physician had declared that he could not live long, his heart trouble was serious. She might yet be free! Her agitation explains a number of peculiar dreams she had. She dreamed repeatedly of quarreling with her husband and of striking him. Several times already she has beaten him up and she has even shot him in her dreams. She is also unfair to the child, turning against it with hatred on slightest provocation.

We see that the jealousy of the husband also has the rôle of legitimizing a hatred which has its roots in other causes. For she confesses that during her fits of jealousy, when she thinks that her husband is unfaithful, she feels a bitter hatred against him and could murder him.... The husband is in the way, her hatred corresponds to the idea that he is a hindrance. During the night the hatred breaks forth but during the waking hours it is rationalized as due to jealousy. For she admits that she has really never fully loved her husband. Her affection goes to her father. She imagines that she is fighting for the preservation of her mother’s pure memory; that furnishes an ethical cover and masks the true motives.

The relationship of this jealousy to homosexuality is interesting. It furnishes an excellent proof of our findings concerning homosexuality. One must bear in mind, first of all, that many factors contribute in this instance to bring about the regression to the infantile level: her husband’s serious illness, his relative impotence and abstinence, her mother’s illness, the father’s change to a devil-may-care attitude, showing her that one may change even in late years, and that it is never too late fully to enjoy the fruits of love. Her homosexuality was always ready to break forth in her. She identified herself with her father looking at women through his eyes. She had protected herself at first by a passionate love for her husband and minor various trivial homosexual traits of her childhood were thus readily overcome. Her swing to heterosexuality was very successful with the aid of her husband. Her homosexuality was repressed, only to reappear at the beginning of the menopause,—woman’s critical age. The involutive processes taking place in the genital glands, and the general physical changes in woman at the time play a certain rôle in that connection. Her husband’s impotence and the friend’s exciting example of her attractive friend, with whom she herself was secretly in love, again roused her homosexual feelings, though the attitude showed itself only under the guise of jealousy. But the father’s conduct, since her father was the deepest cause of her aversion against man, was what really made her lose her balance. She might have become an urlind, had her father remained the old, kindly, bland and quiet gentleman. But since he abandoned the mask after the death of the mother, he roused all the daughter’s evil instincts. Not only the infantile erotic predisposition but the infantile criminal tendencies as well. In her dreams she murdered her husband who prevented her from turning entirely to her father and fulfill an infantile wish to become her father’s wife. She also repeatedly killed the children and her beloved friends. This woman during her critical period displayed not only the craving for love but also the aboriginal emotion, the primordial stuff, out of which everything beautiful and great has evolved: hatred.

Hatred against the other sex and against her rivals, hatred against the children whom she could have killed when anger seized her soul....

74. This is the case of a 30-year-old woman, victim of a remarkable form of jealousy. She is jealous of her home, watching over it like one might watch and protect a beloved. She has an older sister who has been married for five years past and lives outside Vienna. That sister was more to her than her mother or any other friend. She looked upon her as a second mother, confided all her secrets in her and allowed herself to be guided and advised by her at every step. She was supremely happy in her companionship and desired nothing better. She loved only that one sister,—towards the other members of the family she was more or less indifferent. Suddenly the family decided to marry off that sister and an aunt brought a suitor to the house. She found that suitor ridiculous, unsuitable for the sister, and fought with all her limited powers against the match. But the mother showed the greatest eagerness for an early marriage. Then it happened that the girl awoke suddenly in the night. Like a thunder a terrible thought flashed through her mind: “You must do away with your mother!” (It was the last desperate soul cry in the attempt to hold on forever to her sister. The mother was the original cause of her misfortune. She could not live without the sister.) The thought so shocked her, the subsequent regrets over it kept her in a very depressed mood. She developed a severe neurosis, consisting chiefly of a series of punishments and expiations to which she deliberately subjected herself. And shortly after that she developed her jealousy of the home. Her sister lived outside Vienna at a small place in Hungary and occasionally came to Vienna. It was natural that she should find a place in the comfortable old home of seven rooms which the family occupied alone. But the girl could not tolerate the sister’s presence in the house. She became depressed, began to cry, found that the furniture was being abused and ruined, could not sleep nights, and daily asked her sister: “How long are you going to stay in town?” so that the sister cut her visit as short as possible.

This went on for several years. Year after year the sister brought a new baby into the world and she could not tolerate her sister’s children in the old home. Every time a visit with the children made her so seriously ill that finally the mother begged the sister to find some other rooming place. The children were hardly tolerated in the house; they had to be kept in one certain room. The girl was always afraid that something in the house would be ruined. That this was not jealousy of her mother is shown by the fact that it did not affect her to have the mother visit the sister. In fact she joined the mother readily on such visits and behaved very pleasantly and quietly at her sister’s. Only when it was a question of the old home she became a storming avenging angel. Naturally she also wanted to have her mother to herself. Her boundless jealousy of the sister had apparently disappeared altogether and had switched over to the old home where the two had been once so supremely happy. Thoughts of hatred against the sister’s children and phantasies about doing away with them, also occurred. She thought of a subtle poison that could be given with the food in her home. Perhaps she feared the presence of her sister and sister’s children in the house for that very reason and the fear may have been a protection against her criminal tendencies.

She had loved truly but one person: her sister. The latter was everything in the world to her. She called her the second mother, her friend, her beloved. Her first thought when she awoke in the morning was of her sister, the endeavor to please her filled her life, and the last thing she did before going to bed was to offer a prayer for her sister. She was good and upright because she loved her sister and because she felt happy that her sister gave all her spare time up to her. She was trained by her, they went on walks together, her sister trained her heart. She was supremely happy and wished nothing more than always so to live beside her sister.

Then came the engagement and her sister’s marriage. Her heart bled at that terrible act of treason and her feelings hardened. She hated everything, she was against the whole world: against the mother who instigated the match, against the other sisters, who had also favored it, against the brothers who did not oppose it. Only an old nurse woman who had always stood by her and was her staff of support, exceptionally escaped her hatred remaining a sort of solitary ray of affection. But the house was filled with memories of the beloved sister. The pieces of furniture were mute but eloquent witnesses of her former happy love state. They should not be profaned by the presence of the unfaithful, changed sister! She hated the children, wishing they were dead and at the same time she was afraid she might hurt them. Two souls struggled in her breast: one a criminal, the other ethical. The sight of the children was repulsive to her. They bore the traits of the sister and of the man who had stolen her away.

Her whole possessions consisted now of her memory and the household goods, the old rooms furnished the necessary real background for her phantasies. “Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be driven out,” said Jean Paul. Her residence became to her a temple of memory, a sanctuary where every piece of furniture recalled the past happiness in which she still projected herself. For her days passed in dreaming and weaving of fancies. She idled away sweet hours and days continually dreaming only of her sister. Criminal fancies of poisoning all the others finally led her, by way of punishment, to fear poisoning. She quit eating anything at the table, as she formerly did. She suspected poison in every food. She began to vomit after her meals. She kept away from everybody except one woman friend who stuck to her faithfully and who shared her revulsion of feeling against the sister. She lived continually in fear she might kill her mother because the imperative (kill her!) kept cropping up all the time. She avoided men. All attempts to interest her in some man eventually to get her married off proved fruitless....

The home was her temple which must not be soiled. All her devotion and her affection were centered daily on that spot.

The case approaches closely the realm of psychosis.

After a course of psychoanalysis lasting about one half year she improved a great deal. She was able to tolerate her sister’s visits, was free of the obsessive thought of killing her mother, was again able to eat any food and her “nervous” vomiting ceased altogether. A very favorable offer of marriage she rejected. She still avoided men as resolutely as ever.

We turn to the next case.

75. Mr. R. T., a well-known poet, only 31 years of age, is also a victim of morbid jealousy and has already experienced very serious conflicts on that account. He was always fixed on his family and lived exclusively for his parents and other members of the immediate family circle. He clung particularly to the mother, with worshipful affection. At 18 years of age he began to fall in love with all his friends’ “girls.” He even fell in love with a street woman whom his best friend often visited. Already at that time he showed a strong jealous streak and he asked that woman to give up her unfortunate way of living. (That is a typical experience with young fellows who are fixed on the mother. They seek out a polar obverse to their mother’s character and associate with that person a fancy of being the savior. The savior phantasy covers, according to my investigation, merely the wish to save one’s self....) He was soon through with this love affair, although it had broken out with great passion, and had to leave Berlin because he could not get along with his parents. He always quarreled with his mother and that interfered with his creative work.

Meanwhile he became very famous and was earning a very comfortable income. He fell into the habit of spending his nights at restaurants and other amusement places in the company of friends and of returning home in the early morning hours. He woke up at noon and wrote a few hours during the afternoon,—that was his only work.

At a certain cabaret he became acquainted with a girl who was in charge of the bar. She was 35 years of age at the time, but gave her age as 28, and in fact looked much younger than she was. He began having relations with that girl, looking upon the affair as a trivial adventure, at first. He knew that she was being supported by a Count but this did not prevent him from allowing her to choose him for her “heart love.” He was tremendously flattered that this girl, or perhaps we would better say, this woman, preferred him to all others and loved him so disinterestedly. His affection grew daily, also her love for him. She finally gave up her Count and told our young man that she loved him only, and would never again give herself to any other man. It made him very happy; they rented lodgings together. But soon he requested her to give up her position at the bar, because there she came into too close contact with men. She did that very willingly. Before they had taken up lodgings together he had asked her to give him a complete history of her past life. She told him a very romantic life history and mentioned four men who had had sexual relations with her. (As a matter of fact dozens of men had cohabited with her.)

He was madly jealous of these men. She had to repeat to him the story of her past over and over, then he became angry, also sexually very excited, figured how he would revenge himself on his rivals, how he would beat them, box their ears or shoot them down in a duel or cut them up with his sword; his rage against the unfortunate woman grew all the time, he scolded her, called her every bad name, threatened to leave her at once, struck her, and in the end had intercourse with her, experiencing powerful orgasm.

Before long he began to be troubled with the uncertainty whether she had told the whole truth. He investigated her past, looking up questionable episodes. A detective was engaged to watch her during his absence and to look up her past. The fellow quickly picked up the gossip of the neighborhood and reported the talk as true. Besides the adventures frankly confessed to him a number of other liaisons were traced, which the woman had failed to mention. She also had to admit that she was older than she had held herself out to be.

There followed years of terrible torture and continual torture. First thing in the morning he began to wonder who else among his acquaintances or among strangers may have possessed the woman. He questioned her persistently, his rage growing, he made her take a solemn oath, then he struck her and tried to extract from her a forced confession. In vain she implored him, begging him to realize that she was not responsible for her past, that she did not know him at the time, that she was but a child when she already had to support the whole household and a sick mother; nothing helped, he was implacable.

When his investigations led accidentally to the discovery of another man who had not previously figured in the list of her adventures he threw a glass at her head and hurt her so seriously that she was ill several weeks. He sought quarrels with her former sweethearts and challenged them on the least provocation, wounding several in duel, as he was an excellent duellist.

Finally the lovers separated. The woman could stand it no longer and threatened to take her life. But, in a few weeks she fell ill and had him called to her sick bed. Another time the reverse occurred. In short—the pair could not keep away from each other. It was the last love of this woman who had lost her early first charms. Through this love she hoped to save herself and either marry or attain the quasi-respectability of a similar state. But he had entered this relationship lightly as he had done in similar cases and he now suddenly found himself entangled in a tight net which isolated him from the world. For he did not dare to go out with her. He always had the unpleasant thought he might meet one of her former lovers,—he even watched the faces of all passers-by to see whether they did not laugh at him.

He had a friend who was very devoted to him. That friend hated his partner, because she had robbed him of his best friend. That friend was his complete slave. He became the poor woman’s guardian. But the friend had a peculiar passion. He desired to possess all women who belonged to his friends. (This is a transparent homosexual mask as I have already pointed out in the present work.) Therefore he made love also to this woman, who planned her revenge by apparently accepting his advances and when she had in her hands proofs of the fellow’s intention, she turned the proofs over to her beloved. A terrible scene ensued, including revolver shots, but fortunately no one was hurt.

Next he began to torment the woman regarding her relations with that friend. He obviously looked for an excuse to break with her, and solemnly resolved to leave her for good if he should discover the least thing out of the way in her conduct. But she was so cowed by his snares that she did not dare to go out on the street alone....

The motives of his conduct are clear. We have here a pronounced case of homosexuality manifesting itself as jealousy of other men. The thought that this or that other man had possessed her is precisely what constituted the woman’s highest charm in his eyes. When the man declares that he would have been happy if he could have met this woman in her virgin purity, he is mistaken. He will always seek the street walker, the disreputable woman. She is the more charming because she is older than he. For he is longing for the mother Imago and therefore he is most happy, too, when she mothers him. Like most homosexuals he is strongly attached to the mother. But unlike the overt homosexuals he has not carried out his flight all the way to the male, but has fled, instead, to the puella publica, the dishonored woman....

He would like to get rid of this woman. But he has become more deeply enmeshed with her through his feeling of guilt on account of the wound he had caused her and which had left an ugly scar on her face. Since he wishes she were dead in order to be free of her, his conscience indissolubly binds him tenfold to his victim. His criminal fancies center continually on the poor tortured woman and her former lovers. Under the mask of his jealousy he gives free rein to his criminal fancies. In addition, like most artists he is very superstitious and believes that the woman had brought him good luck. Since he has her, he has created his best work and under the inspiration of the strong excitement, he has achieved his best results. It thus seems that the relationship is fixed for life and he may never be able to give it up....

Naturally there are also other forms of jealousy. But when it appears in this pathologic form, it is never difficult to trace the homosexual factor and with it the criminal tendencies back of it. The last case given above is particularly convincing and the friend’s behavior very characteristic.

Our subject feels impelled to think of the woman’s lovers driven thereto by his homosexual longing. He thinks of them in a roundabout way, so to speak, through and around the woman. Jealousy enables him to dwell on the picture of the naked man; he thinks of the phallus of his rival, compares it with his own; he drinks in the bliss which his beloved must have tasted through another man; he places himself entirely in the woman’s rôle, so that, in his fancy, he is the woman. He hates the woman in himself and transfers that hatred upon his second self, his beloved. He hates the woman also because she cannot successfully substitute the man for him. Before that liaison he spent his nights in cafès and wine rooms in the exclusive company of men. He no longer does that. He does not leave his beloved alone any more, thus lacking the excitation of manly company. He tortures his mother as he does his beloved whenever he goes home for a few days. He loves her so dearly that he cannot live through a day without calling her up from Vienna all the way to Berlin, where she lives, to talk to her. If he is somewhere where he cannot be reached by telephone his mother must wire him daily. It is very interesting how this love of the mother covers the deeper love of the father. He plays the love of his mother as his trump card against the father. He flees from the sexual love of the father, while yet he has been repeatedly conscious of his incest phantasies towards the mother. He always adds to his mother Imago some kind of a father. He was most jealous of an attorney, already grey haired and a married man, who therefore stood as a symbol of the father. He has even gone so far as to look up that man to demand an explanation from him, thereby making himself ridiculous. His jealousy was particularly suitable as a means for his latent sadism to become manifest. It enabled him to dwell on bloodcurdling phantasies, it made it reasonable for him to injure his beloved sweetheart, and to justify that insane deed as due to excess of love. The analysis brought about a distinct improvement in the situation. He joined again his comrades at the public houses and peace was seldom disturbed after that.

How difficult it is at times to ferret out the homosexual root of jealousy in such situations is shown by the next case, in which jealousy is again masked before the subject’s consciousness.

76. Miss K. N. consults me for a peculiar trouble about her sleep. She is extremely sensitive to noise. She lives with her sister who keeps a very small apartment where one little room is rented to a gentleman. Her nervousness consists of uncontrollable reflections, as soon as evening begins, about the lodger’s return home. If he returns and goes to sleep early, she herself is soon quiet and sleeps well through the night. But if he is away, she cannot sleep. She may fall into slumber but sleeps so lightly that she is awake at the least noise until she hears the lodger return at last to his room. Then a terrible feeling of dread comes over her and her heart begins to beat fast. Other noises also seem to disturb her. The house in which she lives is near a railroad track. But the trains do not disturb her, nor the electric cars. But voices in the next room, and the sound of steps on the floor above, keep her awake.

One would suppose that she wishes the lodger would come to her and is afraid of that. But she insists that the gentleman is indifferent to her, she would not kiss him if he gave her millions in money for it. She is an unlucky person. She will undoubtedly have to give up her sister’s lodging. She has already had a similar experience. She was the mother’s favorite, petted and fondled in every way. Her mother had a stroke of paralysis and lost consciousness. After she came to herself, she clung to the delusion that her favorite child had turned untrue to her and began terribly to torture the poor child.[17] She reproached her with occurrences wholly imaginary, scolded her as being cold, selfish and indifferent. The girl could do nothing and finally had to leave the house and go to live with strangers. She returned home only after the death of the mother. Meanwhile the father had also passed away. The two girls remained alone in the world and now only had each other. But things were at sixes and sevens between them and they seldom had a quiet hour between themselves.

At last the sister became actually abusive. She begged her sister “with uplifted hands” to dismiss the lodger. She was willing to cover the room rent out of her own pocket. She could not stand it any longer. She could not sleep nights and was going physically and mentally to pieces. But the sister became wild and started to scold her, using the same terrible terms which she had heard her mother hurl at her. They rushed at each other’s hair. She was so enraged she could have strangled her sister at the time.

After that scene she came again to me in despair. I advised her to move out. She cannot have everything her way and she must have quiet. But what was her answer.

“That I cannot do. I cannot.”

“Why not? Does not your sister let you?”

“Oh no, it isn’t that ... only yesterday sister said to me: ‘Move out. I will cherish the day when I will get rid of you.’”

“And you stand for that?”

“I cannot move out because....”

“You are in love with your sister and cannot live without her.”

“That’s it. I cannot live without sister and even her scoldings and her angry words I will put up with rather than stand a day without seeing her.”

“Still you will have to do it.... The conditions are unhealthy.”

“Yes.... Only yesterday I said to sister: ‘I am going to move out and you can keep your rooms and do with your lodger whatever you want. I won’t protect you any more.’”

Thus it came out clearly that she was watching every night, whether the lodger was going to the sister and that she dreaded moving out because she knew that the sister would then be alone with the lodger in the house and he could go to her every night. I made this clear to her but she did not seem to see it at first. She admitted her homosexual love for the sister....

She moved to other quarters. It was a quiet little room over a garden in the home of an elderly woman living alone. But here also she could not sleep. The old woman snored and she could not stand that. Then the ticking of a clock disturbed her continually and kept her from falling asleep, the striking of the hours even waking her up. She thus continually sought everywhere for the reasons of her unrest which were only in herself. The palpitation of her heart (symbolic substitute for it: the clock) gave her no peace. She looked for other quarters, kept looking and looking but found no place so satisfactory and quiet as the sister’s lodging. She went there every evening returning to her outside lodgings late in the night. She took advantage of a light illness of her sister’s as an excuse and returned to her little room, again shivering with dread whenever the lodger was late coming home. Even after she chose for herself a lover who gave her complete sexual gratification her quiet was temporary. The heterosexual component of her instincts drove her more and more to her lover trying to forget her sister in his arms. But she succeeded only intermittently and her thoughts kept revolving again and again between her sister and that lodger. Finally her sister gave in and the lodger had to move. An elderly young woman became the new lodger. Then she quieted down and was able to sleep once more.

It is interesting that nearly all narcotic drugs not only proved useless but made her worse. She did not want to sleep so as to keep watch over her sister’s virtue.

As in all the cases previously mentioned, here, too, developments led to overt attitudes, the subject stood on the brink of criminal passional deeds. Hatred and love showed intimate relationships. She was also afraid of murderers, barricaded the doors and shivered at every little noise. That was the fear of her own criminal thoughts. Her infantile criminal tendencies arose with her infantile love for the sister.

This case, like the former, illustrates the inner relations between jealousy, homosexuality and sadism. For during her fits of anger she entertained terrible thoughts of revenge. She thought of burning down the home; of killing her sister, as well as herself, by turning on the gas in the room; she tried to secure a revolver, supposedly as a protection against thieves. Her dreams show a criminal personality in sharp contrast to her customary mild character. Emotionally the criminal in her was much more powerful than her cultural self, she could have assaulted her sister and once actually drew a knife. After such emotional outbreaks she crumpled and became again the quiet, soft girl, beloved of everybody on account of her good nature.

IV

JEALOUSY AND PARANOIA—JEALOUSY AS PROJECTION OF ONE’S OWN INADEQUACY—FREUD’S RESEARCHES ON PARANOIA—THE INVESTIGATIONS OF JULIUSBURGER—THE JEALOUSY OF A PARANOIAC—JEALOUSY DELUSION OF A MERCHANT—JEALOUSY AND ALCOHOLISM—THE EVOLUTION OF MANKIND FROM BISEXUALITY TO MONOSEXUALITY—METAMORPHOSIS SEXUALIS PARANOICA—THE MONOTHEISM OF SEXUALITY—JEALOUSY AND CRIMINALITY.

Die Eifersucht wird immer mit der Liebe geboren aber stirbt nicht immer mit ihr.

—La Rochefoucauld.

IV

Jealousy always arises with love but does not always die out with it.

—La Rochefoucauld.

It is very striking that the feeling of jealousy breaks through all the barriers of culture. Extraordinarily frequent are suspicions of incest,[18] of homosexuality, of masturbation, and zoöphily. Women accuse their husbands of relations with their daughter; or they accuse the man of homosexual relations with a friend. Men bring similar accusations against their wives. All such accusations are projections of subjective sexual tendencies upon the object of their jealousy. Beaussart (La Jalousie; Annales Psychiques, vol. LXXI, 1913), who maintains erroneously that morbid jealousy is more frequent among men than among women, brings out very strongly this peculiarity of jealousy and bases it on the absence of true motivation. But the motivation is transparent enough. Among the cases reported by him I note that of a 75-year-old woman who tortured her husband to death with her groundless jealousy and who, in a rage, one day, attacked him with a razor. Jealousy is clearly a rationalization of hatred, it harks back to the primary egoistic attitude of the aboriginal man. The phyletic raw sexuality and criminality corresponds to man’s primary ontogenetic attitude towards his environment.

Other jealous persons see their criminal tendencies reflected in the surroundings. A jealous person has the hallucination that the supposed lover of his wife intends to knife him. In this manner the killing of the lover looms up as a logical necessity. Whereas men make use of swords, revolvers, whips, tortures and shackles, woman’s criminality breaks out in such jealousy acts as anonymous letters, libel, poisoning, castration and throwing of acid (Beaussart).

In many cases the barrier between jealousy and insanity, between neurosis and psychosis, is hardly to be distinguished. Often jealousy is the first symptom of paranoia.

The next two cases have also pronounced paranoiac features. We are indebted to Freud for his significant contributions to our understanding of the nature of paranoia, or paraphrenia, as Freud terms the condition. In his fundamental contribution, Psychoanalytische Bemerkungen über einen autobiographisch beschriebenen Fall von Paranoia (Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, 3rd ed., Franz Deuticke, Leipzig and Vienna, 1913), he has shown that paranoiac insanity is traceable back to the repressed homosexual components of the sexual instinct. The persecution ideas of paranoiacs (by men) is the projection outward of their own thoughts. The subject is pursued by his own homosexual phantasies and out of those fancies he constructs his notion of a pursuer. Love is transmuted by the subject into its bipolar opposite, hatred. Freud states on this point:

“‘I do not love him, in fact I hate him.’ This contrary attitude, which cannot mean anything else in the unconscious does not assume that form in the paranoiac’s consciousness. The mechanism governing the formation of symptoms in paranoia requires that the inner apperception,—the feeling of subjection,—should be replaced by some perception from without. The proposition: ‘in fact I hate him,’ is thus changed through projection into another: ‘he hates (pursues) me which consequently justifies me in hating him.’ The unconscious feeling-motive thus appears as though it were an objective perception, a deduction:

“‘I do not love him, in fact I hate him, because he pursues me.’”

Observation leaves no doubt that the pursuer is none other than the formerly beloved person.

Freud here overlooks entirely the relations of paranoia to criminality. Having persistently overlooked thus far the tremendous significance of latent criminality in the psychogenesis of neurosis and having emphasized only the sexual factors underlying all psychotic and nervous manifestations, he neglects here also the important rôle of criminality in the dynamics of paranoia. That is the reason why his explanation does not fit all cases. For there is also a paranoia which stands for a flight from criminality, even representing a rationalization of criminal tendencies without any homosexuality. Such cases are exceptional but they do occur. The fear of insanity which oppresses so many neurotics, involves as a polar component the wish to lose one’s mind. For the insane is responsible neither to himself nor before the law. “He cannot help it.” That is why paranoiac conditions break out so often with the commission of some crime. On the other hand the paranoiac turns insane as a defence against committing a crime. We shall yet find that isolation in an asylum for the insane corresponds with many a victim’s hidden wish, because there they find peace of mind and security.

The jealousy of paranoia like every other form of jealousy is an expression of rage. But it serves to rationalize the anger and lends force as well as a measure of emotional justification to the criminal impulse. Many crimes of passion, so-called, are caused by the passion for crime. We have as yet penetrated but little through the mask which covers the inner criminal. We are still too anxiously concerned with the superficial motivations which bring about sadism to find the path leading towards the fundamental fact. The best measure of culture is the manner in which the man’s primordial character manifests itself in us, our conscious conduct. That is why the advancement of culture is bound to lead to an increase of insanity in the proportion that the jails are emptied.

I must again point out that Juliusburger was the first to recognize and describe clearly these relations. In fact the credit of having discovered the relations between homosexuality and paranoia belongs to him. In his work entitled, “Die Homosexualität im Vorentwurf zu einem deutschen Strafgesetzbuch” (Allgemeine Zeitschrift f. Psychiatrie, 1911), he already stated:

“Furthermore we find in the insane the well-known delusion of persecution and its motive is often derived from homosexuality inasmuch as the patients complain that they are pursued with homosexual intent, of which they themselves disclaim any guilt. Or, in their morbid state of mind, they believe themselves victims of persecution because it is proposed that they should be driven into the alleged ranks of homosexuals, something they resent most scornfully. In both cases we see a peculiar psychic process which must be conceived as a projection to the surroundings, to the world of external reality, of unconscious subjective notions. When an individual breaks down mentally complaining to be a victim of watchfulness and persecution for alleged homosexual purposes, the condition may be explained only in the sense that the individual in question actually harbors within himself a powerful homosexual tendency and the latter is projected unto the world of external reality through a peculiar mental mechanism. The old proposition: ex nihilo nihil fit holds true also of the mental sphere and it would be utterly unscientific to fail to recognize in this sphere as well the law of strict causality or motivation. A careful examination of the mental life of our insane man’s unconscious shows that homosexuality is a powerful motive force much more frequently than is ordinarily recognized and this attempt to turn the unconscious subjective feeling of homosexuality into an objective reality, constitutes a pathway for the release of inner psychic tension, so a means for the individual to escape the feeling of guilt roused by his erroneous perception of facts and to pass the responsibility onto other shoulders. Many of the insane notions of our patients become intelligible and we grasp their meaning only when we recognize the powerful rôle which homosexuality plays in man’s unconscious.”

Juliusburger also recognizes the significance of sadism and its tremendous rôle in the psychogenesis of the delusion of jealousy. In his contribution referred to previously, “Zur Psychologie des Alkoholismus” (Zentralblatt f. Psychoanalyse, Vol. III, 1913), he makes the following relevant observations:

“I agree with Freud that the homosexual or homopsychic component of man and woman finds one of its outlets, as sublimation, in the form of companionship and social drinking. But thus far I remain unconvinced that homosexuality or its psychic substitute plays also a similar rôle in the pathogenesis of the delusion of jealousy. Therefore I still adhere to the view expressed by my colleague, Hans Oppenheim, in his contribution, “Zur Frage der Genese des Eifersuchtswahns” (published in: Zentralblatt f. Psychoanalyse, 1911). As formerly I still regard the sadistic-masochistic instinctive cravings as the strongest root of the delusion of jealousy. I found particularly instructive a certain case in which sadism broke forth in a jealous drinker more quickly than I had ever seen that happen before. This man’s sadism manifested itself concurrently in an incredible cruelty to dogs which could be only explained by his sadism. The oft-recorded fact that the jealous drinker is not satisfied and does not release his victim even after the latter, in an attempt to quiet him, submits to some disgusting act, the continual repetition by him of tortures and cruelties, may be explained only as due to a deeply rooted sadistic impulse everlastingly craving gratification. The delusion of jealousy is rooted in sadism, the overstressed images accompanying the morbid feeling of jealousy are generated by the sadistic tendency. Sadism is the fertile soil giving rise to the delusions of persecution of the jealous alcoholics, and intimately linked with sadism stands masochism, upon which the feeling of jealousy feeds and grows.”

“Besides the sadistic-masochistic components the pathogenesis of the delusion of jealousy displays also the transposition of a certain feeling of guilt. In my cases at least it was easy to prove that the jealous drinker who forces his wife to commit some punishable offence, is himself inclined to carry out the incriminating acts and controls himself only with difficulty. I found a similar situation in the case of women, victims of delusions of jealousy. The more or less conscious projection of their feeling of guilt upon the partner brings on mental release and a certain sense of freedom, and at the same time furnishes new fuel for the sadistic impulse. Finally for the explanation of the delusion of jealousy we must take into consideration also another factor which may be explained on the basis of atavism. We shall see later that certain atavistic reminiscences play a great rôle in the psychology of alcoholism. The will to power, the yearning to dominate and subdue woman still lies dormant in man’s soul,—a remnant from old. The soul of the alcoholic is particularly prolific in atavistic remnants which show themselves upon close analysis and, besides, the chronic intoxication rouses the dormant atavistic trends which lie dormant at the bottom of the soul and brings them to surface. The aboriginal tyrannical self awakens in the drinker and flays a controlling whip over the cowering woman; in the case of female victims of the delusion of jealousy the reverse happens and the primordial matriarchal instinct becomes manifest. We learn progressively to see and appreciate how atavistic remnants break to the surface in the psyche of the insane.”

That conception of jealousy as the “projection upon the surroundings of a subjective feeling of inadequacy” was at one time my starting point in my characterological investigations of jealousy. But I soon learned that the problem is much more complicated. When I found that the neurotics represent regressive stages of development, I conceived jealousy to be a primitive feeling of hatred, characteristic of man in his primordial state. Paranoia discloses the primary tendencies which are glossed over by our cultural development. One’s true character betrays itself in one’s emotions. Jealousy shows us the true inner man in all his passionate cravings and his hidden desires.

The next case illustrates all the characteristic features: the delusion of persecution, the morbid jealousy and the brutal sadism. There is no insight into the condition. The feeling of jealousy is adjudged as justified. Ridiculous incidents are held forth as grounds for suspicion in order to remove from self the sense of guilt. All the alleged “persecutions,” which are looked upon as dangerous, lack any objective grounds. Often sadism breaks through, though under the guise of emotional paralogisms.

77. Mr. A. W., a manufacturer, 29 years of age, consults me for anxiety, a condition which has already plunged him into very unpleasant situations. His anxiety broke out in Tyrol the first time. He wanted to meet a certain party and asked his landlord for directions. The latter conducted him personally over the road, which was a very rough and badly neglected one. Suddenly the man saw in front of him some suspicious-looking persons. But he controlled himself, although he surmised they were tramps if not a gang of highwaymen. Next he saw a number of men on the hill hurrying in his direction. At that he broke into a run, and kept running as fast as he could. A shot rang out in the distance, intended for him.... He reached the valley, out of breath, and reported the occurrence to the officer. The latter shook his head and did not even care to question the landlord, who explained that he had merely conducted the gentleman through a short cut in the road which is also used by hunters. That short cut leads to the next broad highway. But A. insisted that all was not well and that an attempt had been made to hold him up. The officer said that in his 30-year experience such a thing had never happened in that locality. But A. remained unconvinced and to this day he believes that he had narrowly escaped a hold-up. That might be thought possibly true if the occurrence stood alone. But he had very many such experiences. During a journey through Sweden he saw the hotel proprietor talk in subdued tones in Swedish with a number of guests who thereupon stared at him queerly. There was no key to his room and the room could not be locked. He could not sleep and kept peering through the window. Then he saw a number of queer fellows foregathering in the hall. He could not stay longer in that house. The owner told him that as he had engaged the room he would have to keep it. They could not come to an understanding. He saw an officer passing by and called upon the representative of law to help him extricate himself. The officer knew a few German words, he stepped in, and they went to the police station together, and there a record was made of his remarkable adventures. He left his lodgings a third time on similar grounds. On his excursions he always carries a revolver and that gives him a certain sense of security.

It is easy to diagnose this as a case of paranoia. The absence of insight after the emotional episodes shows the psychotic character of the trouble. A victim of anxiety neurosis may have similar experiences. But afterwards, perhaps only a few hours after the occurrence, he says to himself: “It was nonsense,” and is ashamed to speak of it later. But this man dwells on his adventures trying to convince me of the dangers he has gone through.

The notion of being watched and pursued is a product of his homosexual leaning which he is unable to control. We inquire into his personal habits and past life and find that his mother died when he was very young and his father assumed also the place of a mother to him. With his father he maintained a sort of “spiritual marriage” relationship up to a few months ago. They always went out together, never one without the other, and they slept in one room. The latter habit was but seldom broken by the presence of friends.

A remarkable episode is brought to memory such as is always found among the homosexuals. He once fell in love with a girl, an employee’s sweetheart. That passion soon blew over. Another love affair, however, almost turned him away from his customary leaning. There was another girl employed in the office, a slim, diminutive figure, rather plain-looking, and underdeveloped (a type resembling the male). That girl was engaged and her young man was in the habit of calling to take her home. Everybody in the store knew that the young man was waiting outside at the closing hour (he claims she was cordial also with some other men in the store). He fell in love with the girl and soon showed that uncontrollable passion which is characteristic of homosexuals when they attempt to save themselves from man,—when they try to fly from homosexuality. He soon succeeded in winning her favor against his rival, who was but a poor employee. The poor girl was supremely happy and proud that the wealthy manufacturer’s son had his eye on her. He promptly showed the girl that his intentions were honorable. He withdrew entirely from his father who was bitterly opposed to the affair. He lived with his thoughts exclusively on and for the girl. She had to leave the office. The father requested it and, besides, the other employees gossiped and spread rumors which were unpleasant to him. He received anonymous communications pointing out to him that the girl was flighty. Another employee told him that he had kissed the girl and she was not at all a prude. These persons naturally did not know that their tales only increased his passion for the girl. For it was precisely the thought that she had been kissed by another man that made her so irresistible in his sight. It made him angry and raging mad but his excitation reacted upon his homosexual component. The more he was roused against the girl the more closely he was enmeshed with her. He met her three times daily. He called for her in the morning, at noon they took a walk together, and the evenings, often the nights, belonged to the girl who proved with a physician’s certificate that she was still virgo intacta. His relations with her were of such a nature that her virginity was not endangered. This attitude, this fearsome withholding from the task of defloration under the excuse of ethical considerations, is typical of the neurotic’s feeling of uncertainty and lack of confidence in himself, fear of binding himself, and fear of consequences, and shows an insufficient libido. The passion was something rather spiritual, a transference, something unreal. For they passed some nights together and he was satisfied merely to be in the same room (they never slept in one bed). Her presence had chiefly a quieting effect on him. Through her he felt himself protected against his homosexual thoughts. He also needed a love affair to show the whole world that he was not homosexual and that he was capable of loving a woman.

But during the very first days of this love affair his jealousy began to assert itself, a peculiarity characteristic of these subjects, permitting them to concentrate their mind perpetually on the subject of men. First he began to investigate her past. She had to confess everything to him. Then there followed endless torture over endless days. In the morning he began to look questioningly at her. If she showed blue dark streaks under her eyes, or looked pale, he felt sure that she had been untrue to him that night. Although he conducted her home late at night and called for her early next morning he still thought that she slipped out of the house to meet some strange lover somewhere. Often he stood on watch all night in the front of her home. He saw curious shadows moving across her window blind and was sure that it must be a man. He endured hellish torments over it. He engaged a detective to watch the girl and caught her in an innocent lie. His persistent questionings had cowed her and sometimes she had to lie in order to pacify him. An innocent fib of that character was the starting point of a quarrel which kept up for many weeks. She saw him patrol up and down in front of her house. He looked badly run down as he did not sleep nights and he neglected his affairs at the factory. She made him promise that he would go home nights. He promised and immediately afterwards felt uneasy over it. For he was certain that she made him give that promise so as to be able to deceive him more easily.

Then terrible thoughts of revenge flashed through his mind. He wanted to shoot the unknown lover and strangle the girl. Perhaps he sought a proof of unfaithfulness so as to get rid of the girl and justify his own disloyalty towards her.

He naturally pretended once to go on a journey only to return unexpectedly to the girl. He thought he smelled cigar smoke, dragged her by the hair, and wanted to force a confession from her. He also accused her of intimacy with her 70-year-old guardian.

Such cases are not favorable for analysis and rather hopeless. I am not as lucky as Bjerre[19] to be able to report a complete cure of a case of paranoia. Usually these patients abandon the psychoanalysis, finding some pretext to turn from the consultant. It is useless to explain to them the mechanism of transference. From the moment when they perceive a leaning towards their consultant that sympathetic feeling is changed into anxiety and distrust. They are unwilling to recognize their homosexuality. Their psychic disturbance is too deep and a correction is no longer possible. Often the subjects stay away after only a few visits. This sudden abandonment stands in sharp contrast to their initial enthusiasm for the new method of treatment. Others stay on with the analysis for a few weeks but make little or no progress. So long as their homosexual tendencies are not touched upon, it is possible to keep up the psychoanalysis a little longer but the psychoanalysis is superficial under the circumstances, as they cannot be induced to apply candor, always keep secrets from the consultant, and cover under silence whatever comes into their mind bearing on their attitude towards their physician.

He carried his revolver whenever he called at my office, always ready to shoot down the alleged enemy. I tried to make him understand that he was tortured by his own homosexual and criminal thoughts. He listened incredulously but was not so averse as I have seen most paranoiacs.

This patient also stayed away after three weeks of analysis because the analysis produced in him a tremendous excitement. He thought I was in league with his father[20] to part him from his girl. The real object of his love was the father who seems to me to play an important rôle in the psychogenesis of male paranoia.

I saw him two years later during the war. He had joined the army as volunteer, had made an excellent record for himself and had been slightly wounded. Since the war he felt better. He had given up the engagement shortly after the treatment. His ideas of persecution had subsided to a great extent, he claimed.

The next case shows us a paranoiac jealousy with insane notions based on proofs ferreted out and scrutinized with remarkable ingenuity. Such cases form the borderline towards the class of querrulants who clamor always for their “rights,” precisely because an inner voice clamoring for “injustice” must be drowned.

78. Mr. S. D. is referred to me by his family physician from a distance. I am asked to determine whether his jealousy is justified or the result of a morbid state of mind.

He is a very energetic, active 30-year-old merchant, who conducts the local inn in connection with his larger business in a small village. In eight years he made a great success and attained affluence. He has acquired all the retail business of the place, carries on also a wholesale business with the neighboring retail dealers, and was on the way to become a very wealthy man when he began to quarrel with his wife on account of his jealousy. His wife was of a frigid temperament who always remained cool during his embrace and it always worried him. After the birth of a couple of children she grew somewhat more responsive. When she had her first strong orgasm during his embrace he became suspicious and concluded at once that she must have had some other instructor in the art of love. How was it possible for a cool woman, suddenly, over night, as it were, to turn into a passionate mate? He began watching his wife and came to the conclusion that she must have had intercourse with a certain man possessing a very long phallus. There lived in that village a farmer who was no longer young, but wealthy, and known for his long penis and his virility. That fellow was his regular guest at the inn. What more natural than that the innkeeper should conclude that he must be the guilty man. We note that his mind must have been preoccupied for a long time with the size of that man’s penis. That phantasy he projected to his wife. His curiosity and longing to see that phallus he ascribed to his wife. That is how thought processes originate. Such autism (Bleuler) renders us uncritical and permits us to see the whole world through the subjective coloring of our own emotions. How could his wife, a woman, fail to be interested in the size of the peasant’s phallus, which was openly the talk of the tavern, when he, a man, could not help being interested? Such, approximately, is the logic of this thinking. He began to watch that peasant and his wife. He pretended to go on a journey telling his wife he would not be back before the following day. But he returned that very evening. He tiptoed up the steps to the bedroom. He heard a dull thud. Naturally it was the peasant, escaping through the window. It was—as the woman explained—the cat who had been scared off. He insisted a man had been in the room. His wife felt so indignant that she wanted to leave him at once and refused to say another word. He became humble and begged her imploringly for forgiveness telling her the reason for his jealousy. The wife declared that she had always been passionate but was ashamed to show it. Finally it came to her all of a sudden that it was foolish on her part, also, she had learned to love him more than ever. She cannot help it if she is now more responsive. There followed an interval of peace but only for a few months. Soldiers were quartered in the place and a physically impressive captain secured a room. From the moment of his appearance at the place that captain roused the man’s suspicions. He found that his wife gave the fellow the best cup of coffee, that she was altogether too friendly with him, and that she showered upon him all sorts of pleasant little courtesies. His wife explained to him that this captain bought of them all the supplies for his company and was the means of bringing them important business, and that she was friendly only for business reasons, but that their relations had never trespassed the limits of propriety. But he kept collecting indications of her unfaithfulness. Among the proofs he found the butt of a cigarette in his wife’s room. He questioned her closely and asked the officer’s orderly to bring him a cigarette from his master’s case, claiming those cigarettes had such a pleasant aroma he wanted to try one. He thus secured a cigarette and found that it bore an identical mark. The fact was he smoked the same brand of cigarettes, but he thought he discovered a certain stripe which the other cigarettes did not have (I could not detect the stripe in question). His other proofs were of a like character. This time he had a terrible quarrel with his wife,—much more serious than the previous ordeal. Trouble upon trouble followed after that. He suspected his clerks and dismissed them one after another about every two weeks. Every one was his wife’s lover. Finally he rushed at his wife, in a fit of anger, to beat her, and began choking her. The following day the woman left him, went to live with her sister, and started proceedings for divorce. She claimed her husband was not normal and he voluntarily came to Vienna to place himself under my observation.

First I turned my attention to his jealousy and I tried carefully to correct that. He acknowledged some points, here and there, showed some insight into his condition, and was not shocked when I refused to give him a certificate of good health. Meanwhile he had removed his beard to give himself a younger appearance. That change was not necessary as he was young-looking enough, but it was part of the outbreak of his feminine tendencies. He also had a string of dreams in which he was a woman. Usually he rehearsed the old jealousy scenes and he repeatedly killed his wife in his dreams.

Thus he dreamed:

I am with my wife in an old room but dressed as a woman, so as not to be recognized. My wife steps out of the room, it was very dark. The captain comes into the room and wants to touch me under the dress. But some one calls him out of the room. I jump at my wife, enraged: that is the kind of a h—— you are. Now I know everything about you ... and I stick a knife in her throat.

In another dream he lies hidden under the bed and feels the swaying motion of coitus above. It was very characteristic that after quarrels and scenes of violence he craved intercourse with his wife and his libido was much stronger ... clearly on account of the sadistic excitation.

I saw this patient again five years after the psychoanalysis. He was divorced from his wife and was apparently very quiet. He claimed to be entirely well, said he was jealous no longer, and every now and then had intercourse with women. I do not dare decide whether this result may be ascribed to the analysis and the therapeutic-educational course of treatment.

The various confusion states, called periodic insanity, must be looked upon as an equivalent of permanent insanity. It is certainly striking to see how many alcoholics, morphinists, opium eaters, cocaine fiends and, in more recent years, victims addicted to adalin, veronal, medinal, luminal, etc., fear insanity. If such a case is analyzed one always finds the homosexual component and the repressed sadistic tendency. The psychic mechanisms of these disorders are the same as those described in the paranoid form of the jealousy delusion. We have in all these cases an endopsychic perception that inner forces compel greater stress on the delusions than on reality.

The next case is a pure example of this condition under a form which often ends in suicide.

79. Mr. O. L., a very talented violinist, suffers unbearable anxieties, among them the fear of insanity being the strongest. He also has hours of terrific, unexplainable depressions for which he is unable to give any cause. He only has the feeling that he is about to commit some terrible deed so as to rid himself of the anxiety and have peace once more. He thinks he might commit some crime and be jailed so as to be sure that there is nothing further for him to fear. During the first weeks he speaks only of his anxiety over his father. He has the idea fixed in his mind that his father will come to Vienna and have him interned in an insane asylum. Rather than put up with that he will shoot his father first and then kill himself. He reverts every little while to the suspicion that I am in league with his father. (That is the form which the identification of the physician with the father assumes with this class of patients. The physician is the symbol of the father.) He has been taking various narcotics for a number of years. Not, exactly, to sleep. For he sleeps well without the aid of veronal or pantopon. But he suffers so much of anxiety. And he feels that the narcotics make a better man of him. He uses unbelievable doses of these drugs. He has once taken with suicidal intent 10 g. veronal in one dose with the only result that he slept 24 hours “like a top” and woke up without any ill effects. He sleeps every day till 11 or noon, sometimes into the afternoon hours, and still wakes up somewhat drowsy.

He now abstains strictly from alcohol. He has done a number of foolish things under the influence of drink. Once he tackled an officer at a night resort, wanted to embrace him, kiss him, made various suggestive proposals and finally had to be thrown out. He has also had serious rows which put him in the hands of the police. He gave his word of honor to his father that he would not touch liquor any more because he was threatened with internment at a sanitarium for alcoholics. He broke his word only once but has turned to various narcotics. During a six-months sojourn at a sanitarium he got completely well and abandoned the drugs. One month after leaving the sanitarium he began again to use the drugs.

He is an impressive, handsome, very powerful man, very “lucky” with women. But he is true to none for any length of time excepting the last sweetheart. He did love her and does to this day. He would marry her if he could support her.

He is tremendously jealous and his jealousy is that typical form which is concerned with the past, an example of which we have seen in case 75. He has to be told over and over by his sweethearts how they have been seduced. He must hear with particular circumstantiality all the details of the defloration. That causes him tremendous sexual excitation. Only then is he able to achieve orgasm with women. Otherwise he may keep up the sexual congress for a half hour without accomplishing ejaculation.[21]

Finally ejaculation and orgasm are brought about through manual friction of the penis by the woman. This form of sexual gratification leads back to a particular incident in his youth when the choice was made. First, he confesses that at 17 he maintained relations with a boy who gratified him in that manner. Earlier reminiscences from childhood appear. The incidents always relate to boys. Now he does not want to recognize any homosexual tendencies. At 17 years he made a forceful attempt to tear himself away from his friend and began passionately to run after women and girls.

His homosexuality shows itself in the choice of his love objectives. Usually he seduces the sisters of those of his friends whom he likes in particular. I know no affair of his in which some man did not play a rôle. When a man did not figure at the beginning he was brought in later, so as to complete the constellation necessary for the rousing of his libidinous craving. Very characteristic is the following episode, among the others of the last few years:

He became acquainted at a sanitarium with a young woman who soon became his sweetheart. One of his most intimate friends was also at that sanitarium. He asked his friend to try his luck with the lady because he wanted to test her faithfulness. The friend hesitated. He was afraid of a misunderstanding and the woman was not worth that to him. Then our subject tried to bring him and his sweetheart together in another way. He wagered a large sum of money that he could not get at the girl. His friend accepted the wager, and three days later proved that he had won the bet. O. L. wanted to hear every detail about the seduction and became so enraged that he could have killed his friend. Then that friend seduced again another sweetheart of his, a few months later he attacked him on the street and would have beaten him up if a few colleagues had not restrained him.

Now here in Vienna he is convinced that “that d—— fellow” will seduce also his present sweetheart, a girl whom he truly loves. But if so, he will find the fellow and kill him as well as the girl. The woman has a brother who plays an important rôle in the psychogenesis of this love. Once the woman told him how devotedly she loved her brother. She could understand how a sister may give herself to a brother. Now he urged the woman to give herself to the brother, setting up but one condition: he should witness the act. This phantasy assumed compulsive strength. On every occasion he tortured her, insisting that she ought to grant him the wish, and he kept calling in the brother when she did not want him. Once they were alone. He broke his word and they drank merrily. He got very drunk and made a passionate love declaration to his sweetheart’s brother, begging him to accompany him to the house and take the sister’s place.

His mother died when he was 15 years of age. The father engaged a young woman to take care of the house and he fell in love with her. At the same time he also hated her, fearing that his father would disinherit him in favor of this woman. He even planned to put the woman out of the way with poison. Wholly unconscious and most deeply repressed is his love for the father, whom he worries and to whom he causes no end of trouble. He was at the threshold of a wonderful career, all teachers had prophesied that he would be some day one of the world’s greatest violinists. His first concert was an unprecedented success. Then his neurosis broke out and now he is through with his career. Done with it and with life.

Back of the neurosis the motive of which is to worry the old father, to irritate him and force him to pay attention to the unsuccessful son, stands hidden his passionate love of the father, though he writes him scolding letters, 20 sheets long, and threatens to shoot him, should he dare cut down his rightful inheritance. A certain memory trace leads to various childhood fancies resembling the affairs with boys already mentioned. Finally he brings forth a reminiscence placing his father in an unpleasant light. The father was also a drinker....

It seems as if he had tried to forget that fact. His fancies of murder are directed against the father. That becomes clearer all the time. He turns ill and addicted to veronal so as to commit no crime. He feels his father slights and neglects him. They quarrel all the time on account of his dissipations. The father threatens he will be no longer responsible for his debts. The son must give up his expensive habits of living. Then the war broke out. He was among the first volunteers to answer the call, distinguished himself several times with his conduct, and finally met his death in an engagement.

I have already pointed out elsewhere in this work the latent homosexuality of drinkers. In the light of these new considerations, the well-known jealousy of drinkers reveals an additional feature. The intoxication is to a certain extent a periodic artificial paranoia during which the ideas of persecution come to the foreground. This is very clearly to be seen in many cases. In that particular respect the alcohol addict is hardly different from the paranoiac. Both believe in the objectivity of their insane notions.

The following two case histories of drinkers’ jealousy will conclude this lengthy list of illustrative cases:

80. Mr. N. V., Captain, married at the age of 34 and has been married two years. His marriage was unhappy from the very first day. Previous to that he had had intercourse only with puellæ publicæ and with them was always potent. With his wife he is impotent. He is very unhappy over it and consoles himself with street women. He began to drink and beats his wife while intoxicated. He scolds her, calls her a whore and accuses her of intimacy with all the officers. Although he had been drinking formerly, he did so with moderation, but now he is a confirmed potator, spends his time in dram shops and while intoxicated becomes very friendly with the waiters and other underlings, kissing them and toasting their comradeship. He is firmly convinced that his wife is unfaithful to him and even suspects his boy whom he beats mercilessly when under the influence of drink.

The woman left her husband and fled to her parents.

That affected the man so depressingly that, after a three months’ stay at a sanitarium, he returned penitently, a changed man, and prevailed upon the wife to return and live with him again. But in a few weeks his old demoniac jealousy set in once more. This time he accused her of the most horrible crimes. He reproached her that she allowed herself to be licked by the dog and shot the animal. He watched her carefully and denied her the least social intercourse. Finally he accused her of intimacy with her 15-year-old brother. He found a small spot on the bed linen and he cut that out to preserve as proof of her infidelity. He pounced on her one night, choked her, and tried to force her to confess her doings with the brother. Again she fled to her parents but hesitated to turn her husband over to the lunacy board. She did not want to be the cause of his commitment to a sanitarium.

Meanwhile the patient’s insanity grew rapidly. He drank to great excess and raised a big row in front of her parents’ home. He complained to the police that his wife and her younger brother, with whom she maintains criminal relations, had set a number of desperate-looking characters on his trail. He served notice that he would give those fellows something to remember him by and that the first one who would dare come too close to him would be shot down. Commitment. Delirium tremens. Exitus in consequence of an intercurrent malady.

It is noteworthy that the suspected little brother-in-law had been a great favorite of his; he had been fond of taking the boy along on his hunting trips. When completely under the influence of drink he always wanted to embrace him and pet him.

A connection between paranoia and alcoholism is shown also by the last of this series of observations, which follows:

81. This is a woman no longer in her prime of life. She is the grandmother of several children, 54 years of age, and, up to a few years ago, she was not jealous. As soon as her husband ceased to have intercourse with her she was seized with the idea that he must have intercourse with a certain pretty girl who had been formerly in their employ and had left. She had seen that girl often in the neighborhood and wondered that the girl looked so well and was so well dressed. She had always liked the girl very much. In fact, she wept when the girl left the house. Now she tortured her husband with the accusation that he was intimate with that girl,—she was sure of it. The man denied it, but—grilled by her—he had to admit that he had met the girl on the street a few times and had spoken to her. That led to such terrible quarrels,—he had to leave the house and was gone for weeks on a journey. He wanted to have peace and was energetic enough to bring it about. In fact, he threatened to sue for separation.

The woman began to drink, specially liqueurs, but also ordinary whiskey. When intoxicated she behaved very vulgarly and cursed the girl; called her a whore, and shouted that she ought to have the clothes torn off her. She threatened her youngest daughter’s husband and entertained the notion of throwing acid at him. While intoxicated she also felt an impulse to seek out her youngest daughter (obviously to find her son-in-law) and ran to the railroad station, entered the wrong train, and committed all sorts of nuisances so that she had to be committed. At the asylum she had to give up drink but showed no ill effects from the enforced abstinence, only she figured daily what her husband was up to with the girl. Like most paranoiacs she claimed that she had telepathic powers and felt at a distance that her husband was with the girl. That was an absolute fact and no physician could convince her it was not so.

That contention embodied an inner truth: the man in her was with the girl, that is, the man in her was continually preoccupied with the girl. In fact, she had no other thought than the girl. It was as if she was saying to herself: If I were a man I would fall in love with this girl and would not leave her alone a minute. She would have to be mine only.

After the marriage of her youngest daughter she fell into a depression during which she first began the habit of indulging in alcoholic drinks.

Obviously the woman had two homosexual objectives which she fused: the servant girl and the youngest daughter. In fact, she began early to think that her husband was intimate with the daughter in question. She even lodged with the authorities a complaint to that effect and asked to be allowed to bring proofs of the assertion. Now her husband wanted to poison her. She had been given coffee which had an arsenical smell.

She transfers to the surroundings her subjective criminal ideas. We see that she had to drink in order to deafen in her the wild beast which endeavored to break forth in all its primordial crudity. Her commitment to an asylum did not change her leanings. She swore at her man who conspired with the hateful son-in-law to have her put out of the way so as to prevent her from exposing their evil doings before the whole world.

How close the forbidden tendencies are to one another in such cases! Almost uniformly the same picture throughout: criminality, homosexuality and incest. After years of the compulsory yoke of a formal monosexuality the repression gives way and the underlying pansexuality and criminal tendencies manifest themselves in pathologic form. For all these case histories center around the “other,” the second, self,—the repressed component of human nature.

We know many persons who prove themselves victims of our monosexual culture. The race is paying for the development of monosexuality with neurotic homosexuality, with all the various neuroses, with alcoholism and paranoia!

But it would be erroneous for that reason to decry the course of cultural development or to look for the improvement of conditions to changes in law or in the formal code of morals. All lovers of mankind surely must fight for the abandonment of the moral opprobrium and legal persecution of homosexuals and for a greater freedom from bias in the perception of the problem of all paraphilias. But we must not fail to recognize that we are dealing here with tremendous social forces and with developmental tendencies striving, beyond all human range, for the attainment of unknown higher ideals. The development of the race is from bisexualism to monosexualism. Even the “genuine” homosexuality as we know it today everywhere is a proof in favor of this contention.

For if homosexuality were an inborn trait, as Hirschfeld and his pupils maintain, it would be the pattern-type of health and homosexuals would show no repressed heterosexuality; there would be no morphinists, no drinkers, and no dipsomaniacs[22] among them. Their number may not be large, but that is because the uranists’ homosexuality is already a compromise, an attempt on the part of nature, and of the psyche, to escape the insolvable bisexual conflict. The very fact that all neurotics represent retrogressions shows that the race is advancing towards monosexuality. The neurotic, as a bisexual being, might stand for an earlier developmental phase, if the cultural standards of morality would not hinder. When he attempts it (like, for instance, Oscar Wilde) he draws upon himself the deadly scorn of his fellowmen; he is ostracized as a citizen. Homosexuality leads but seldom to paranoia when associated with heterosexuality, as happens in the reverse instance,—heterosexuals trying to repress their homosexuality. That in itself shows homosexuality to be a neurosis,—the premonitory phase of the paranoiac psychosis. When paranoia breaks out, the homosexual holds to the delusion that he belongs to the opposite sex and may go so far as to disregard his genitalia and to acquire the feeling that he is physically changed. The paranoia attempts to round out physically the delusion of sexual transformation it has initiated psychically. The wish of the male homosexual: “I want to be a woman!” is fulfilled in paranoia. In that state he finds a thousand proofs that he is a woman. Many such cases have been described especially by Krafft-Ebing, who has called them “metamorphosis sexualis paranoica.” The subjects imagine that they have the monthly flow because they have the nose-bleed every four weeks (this happens also with nonparanoia urnings),—they have a flow from the lower parts for five days at every full moon. A patient of Krafft-Ebing’s relates (Obs. 134, p. 245): “Every four weeks at the full moon I have for 5 days the molimina, like any woman, physically and mentally, only I do not flow,—but I have a sensation of discharging fluid, a feeling of fulness about the genitals and the lower part of the body (within); a very pleasant time it is, especially later (in a couple of days) when the physiologic craving for procreation looms forth with its all-pervading womanly force.” Another paranoiac claims that he has always been woman, but when he was a child a French magician had miraculously endowed him with male organs and, with a certain salve, hindered the development of his breasts. A girl under my observation felt her penis, pointed to the hairs on her face, and thought she was a bewitched male. But she could feel her penis growing within and almost coming through.

The following statement by the highest expert on homosexuality shows that the repression of heterosexuality may have serious effects upon the homosexual,—it may drive him to drink, or into a delusion of persecution:

“I have seen, in the homosexual, states of precordial anxiety with strong vasomotor excitation as serious as such conditions could be. Next to anxiety neurosis, an occasional consequence of abstinence seems to me to be the occurrence of a sort of persecution mania which is rather difficult to determine whether it belongs to the compulsive neuroses or is actually a part of the picture of paranoia. Such persons imagine everybody suspects their homosexuality; they look at their hands and laugh sheepishly because they wear no engagement or marriage ring; at restaurants persons sitting at neighboring tables whisper and knowingly nod among themselves as they talk about the ‘eingefleischten Junggesellen’; porters and waiters at hotels ‘catch on’ to ‘what is up’ and treat them either more or less attentively than other customers; passers-by on the street comment on their tripping gait; in short, they feel that they are watched everywhere and are uncomfortably self-conscious; some blush continually, others become morbidly suspicious and timid, others again—and that is the worst—take to drink. Convinced of the truthfulness of their notions and refractory in their attitude towards the physician, patients of this type make up their minds late and only after considerable struggle, to consult a physician and even then they often do it under an assumed name. If the ideas of persecution have already persisted for a long time, the condition is hardly one that can be influenced by treatment,—in any case it requires the greatest skill and patience on the part of the physician as well as his whole therapeutic armamentarium, of which psychotherapy and hydrotherapy are most important means, while drugs, rather excessively favored nowadays, should be used but sparingly.” (Hirschfeld, loc. cit., p. 455.)

This observation of Hirschfeld’s discloses the homosexual’s deep feeling of self-reproach which must be ascribed to hidden criminality rather than to the homosexuality. Perhaps that fusion of homosexuality with criminality, of pathologic self-love and repressed hatred, that incapacity for true love, is the reason why men struggle against monosexuality and why innumerable victims fall in that struggle, their refined souls crushed by the conflict. Just as we no longer have the gods of antiquity—men with female bosoms and women with a tremendous phallus—just as we have accepted the division of God into three components (man, woman, and child) which unitedly represent but one force, so we must choose, in our day, our ideal. That is the monotheism of sexuality,—more unyielding and strict than religious monotheism. “To love means to find one’s God,” I stated. But there must be no other gods besides that one. This struggle for the single god of love sums up the erotic tragedies of our cultural development: the struggle for the true ideal and for monogamy which for the present appears the utmost sexual ideal of our current cultural level. Between the primitive man’s pansexualism and the monosexuality of modern man may be found all the developmental phases and inhibitions which manifest themselves as neuroses, paraphilias, drunkenness, psychoses, etc.

The analysis of jealousy has shown us clearly that with the outbreak of the repressed homosexuality criminality, too, comes to the surface. The patients whose histories we have recorded, fight, carry revolvers and threaten murder. Many a jealousy murder is due to the instinctive asocial cravings. We must bear in mind that the repression keeps down the homosexuality as well as the other paraphiliac instincts, including the criminal tendencies. When the repressed homosexuality breaks through the protecting covers and out of the unconscious, it carries along and brings to surface all the repressed antagonistic cravings. This mental mechanism explains the gruesome crimes which the paranoiacs commit who believe themselves pursued or threatened. They project to their surroundings not only the pursuit with homosexual intent but their subjective criminal tendencies as well. Someone is after them to kill them ... it really means: “I want to kill and therefore I assume, that others want to kill me.”

Looking upon homosexuality as an archaic symptom, a regressive manifestation, we may understand also that the incest, in all its forms, must play a greater rôle among homosexuals than among the normals. The urning, in point of psychic progression, is nearer the ancient Œdipus and the urlind is nearer ancient Elektra than the normal man. Their will to power also manifests itself through stronger tendencies. The very repression of his heterosexual component shows that the homosexual tries to achieve mastery over self, and is a proof of the one-sided emphasis of his stubborn will to self-control. The will to power breaks out in violent, affectively stressed jealousy deeds, which shows the intimate inner relations between homosexuality and sadism,—a subject to which we shall give more careful consideration in our next chapter.

V

HOMOSEXUALITY AND SADISM—THE ANALYSIS OF A HOMOSEXUAL—EARLIEST MEMORIES—FIRST ACCOUNT OF HIS ATTITUDE—FEAR OF TUBERCULOSIS—HIS ATTITUDE TOWARDS HIS PARENTS—FIRST DREAM—DREAMS OF URINALS—ANAL EROTICISM—COPROPHAGIA—THE MOTHER AS A TYRANT—TRANSVESTITISM—AN IMPORTANT DREAM—VOYEUR AND EXHIBITIONIST—OTHER DREAMS—POEMS TO THE MOTHER—MATERNAL BODY DREAMS—SADISTIC PHANTASIES—A SPERMATOZOAN DREAM—THE DREAM ABOUT WILD BEARS—SUMMARIZATION OF THE ANALYTIC DATA IN THE CASE—THE FORMULA OF HOMOSEXUALITY.

Man missversteht das Raubtier und den Raubmenschen (z. b. Cesare Borgia) gründlich, man missversteht die “Natur,” so lange man noch nach einer “Krankhaftigkeit” in Grunde dieser gesundesten aller tropischen Untiere und Gewächse sucht, oder gar nach einer ihnen eingeborenen “Hölle” wie es bis her fast alle Moralisten gethan haben.

—Nietzsche.

V

The nature of the wild beast and of predatory man,—Cesare Borgia, for instance,—is misunderstood, “Nature” herself is misunderstood, so long as we look for “morbidity” back of these healthiest of all monstrosities and excrescences, or for some “inner depravity” peculiar to them,—as most moralists have done thus far.

—Nietzsche.

Our investigation of the problem of jealousy has led us repeatedly to the relationship between homosexuality and sadism, a subject we have already considered briefly in connection with the repression-symptoms of the homosexuals. We have succeeded in proving the sadistic trend of homosexuals in most of the cases which we have examined. This relationship is so typical that I am surprised previous investigators have not been impressed by the regularity of its occurrence. The frequency of abnormal sexual cravings among homosexuals has been pointed out by many physicians and has been interpreted by them as indicative of a degenerative trend. But since the physicians were satisfied with their patients’ account and they were unfamiliar with the technique of psychoanalysis, this constant relationship escaped their observation. The next chapter will be devoted to a complete history of such cases and in that connection we shall see more clearly how unsatisfactory the patients’ first account of their own trouble must be. I have already mentioned that many investigators suspect that the homosexuals decidedly lack veracity. Moreover all neurotics drive their sadistic tendencies back into the unconscious. Their repressed tendencies are among the persistently overlooked features,—the unconsidered inventory,—of the homosexual’s psyche.

The sadistic tendency breaks to the foreground of consciousness only occasionally and then it lends its characteristic coloring to the paraphilic disorder. In such cases the sadistic trend is not directed only against the opposite sex. Sexual lust and cruelty are inextricably interwoven; the antisocial cravings cannot be sublimated;[23] the ailing individual becomes a danger to the community, he gets into conflict with the law, and lands in jail or in the asylum. For such cases show us a morbidly enlarged and distorted picture of the average homosexual.

The following observation by Fleischmann[24] may serve as an illustration of this fact:

82. “Physically the patient shows the early signs of Basedow’s disease. His temperament is very uneven, he shifts from one extreme to another. He is suspicious, very mendacious and very irritable—for instance, he struck his father in his rage. He is not particularly religious. His whole conduct shows a very weak will and lack of energy. Since his 17th year the patient has been addicted to excessive drink. His sexual history reveals the following facts: As a boy, 10 years of age, he came across a book containing an illustration of a scene of violence (beating) which gave him great pleasure. Ever since he thinks of that picture placing himself in the position of the one being beaten. The mere word ‘Peitschen,’ cuffing, has something appealing, something exciting about it to his mind. From the very beginning the patient thought this was an unhealthy trait and was uncomfortably self-conscious over it. At that time he took a journey into the country with his mother. They passed over a river and he saw standing on the shore a naked man who was bathing. That scene stuck in his mind for months. At 11 years of age the patient asked his father to punish him because he had an impure conscience, but did not attain his aim. His fancies were growing. He liked to put himself in Captain Dreyfus’ place, wanted to experience the latter’s degradation and suffering. So constantly was his mind preoccupied with his fancies that the boy neglected his school studies; he became distraught, and suffered headaches. At 15 years of age the boy began to enact his phantasies; he undressed in a room, tied his hands with a rope and suspended himself. He also tied weights to his lower limbs. This produced orgasm and ejaculation. An illustration of tortures which he found in an illustrated work on world history suggested to him new methods. He was specially fond of staging scenes of crucifixion. In all these scenes the boy fancied that he was the victim of all the imaginary tortures. He never connected these fancies of torture with one sex or the other. He had sexual gratification without reflecting particularly about sex. The gratifications led to orgasm and ejaculation. Then the craving for self-torture quieted down somewhat, his imagination cooled off and the patient began to seek sexual gratification through masturbation. He drew his penis downwards and backwards between his limbs and rocked his pelvis sideways. During these acts there arose the first homosexual fancies. While masturbating, which he did at first regularly once every four weeks, later daily and afterwards, five to ten times in succession,[25] he pictured to himself the hips of a young boy. At first that fancy, without any further details, was enough. Later he fancied carrying out coitus intra femora. His contrary sexual feelings showed themselves also in other ways. For instance, he took such a strong fancy to a younger comrade that he resolved to stay voluntarily back one year so as to sit in the same classroom with that boy. On account of his lack of veracity his father put him in a training institution; there his comrades initiated him into sex matters and he learned mutual masturbation. He was not aware of being untruthful because he had lost the faculty of discerning between phantasy and fact. At 17 years of age the patient picked up a peasant girl and induced her to sleep with him; but she did not allow coitus; the patient thinks that at that time he would have found coitus pleasurable.[26] During that period he was in the habit of abusing daily one of his best friends,—in his phantasy. He had the latter stand naked before his eyes and played with his private parts. In his phantasy he felt all over the fellow’s body, finally advancing to a complete homosexual act, always fancying a one-sided active immissio penis in anum; at the same time he masturbated in the manner described above. After one year he was no longer able to control himself. He prevailed on his friend to undress before him and lie, face down, on the sofa. Then the patient crawled on top and attempted immissio; he did not succeed on account of a sudden feeling of nausea. He desisted, but ejaculated ante portas; afterwards he was ashamed of it. The patient parted from this friend later as the result of a quarrel. Then the sadistic tendencies again came to surface. He imagined all sorts of tortures, reserving to himself merely the rôle of devising the punishment to be applied. The actual carrying out of the deeds he left to other imaginary persons conjured up for the purpose. He chose his victims preferably from among his younger comrades. Patient had devised 36 different kinds of torture assigning to each a written symbol. He selected by lot (drawing numbers) the intended victim, as well as the torture to be applied and the instruments therefor. The patient played this game for hours.

“He kept this up a couple of years. Suddenly the whole thing lost its charm for him. His phantasy cooled down. Finally he gave up the game altogether. At 18, the patient attempted for the second time normal coitus. He had an erection but premature ejaculation ante portas. A third attempt failed on account of drunkenness. Again he reverted to his masturbation habit, his thoughts during the act once more centered on the hips of a young boy; this was a fetich to him. Masochistic fancies he entertained no longer; but he dwelt profusely on homosexual phantasies. Later the patient thought of coitus inter femora with boys. He became very friendly with a 14-year-old boy, kissed him, and allowed the boy to touch his own genitals. But when he found that the boy had hairy hips his passion for the boy cooled off at once. During that time the patient (20 years old) entertained thoughts of suicide because he felt that his life was a failure. An attempt at analysis only excited him worse instead of quieting him. Again the patient linked himself in intimate friendship with a 14-year-old boy; as that boy resented any physical display of affection, his attachment remained purely platonic. Every now and then patient masturbated fancying he was carrying out coitus inter femora with his friend. His sadistic fancies again broke to the surface. He became more and more restless, enticed a boy (under a slight pretext) to visit him and devised most refined ways of abusing him; for instance, hanging over the boy’s back with the hands clasped around his neck, or beating him over hips and buttocks with a reed cane; for every stroke the boy was to receive a sum of money. As a consequence of this action the patient was brought to the clinic.”[27]

Fleischmann, in his psychologic examination of this case, lays stress particularly on the significance of trauma and ascribes to the masturbation a predominant rôle in the psychogenesis of the paraphilia: “This case proves clearly that the various sexual anomalies differ only in their sexual objective and aim,—their developmental interrelationship—but that the mechanism of their development must be looked upon as identical.”

But of particular significance in this case is the constant association of sadism and masochism, a condition with which but few sexologists thus far have been impressed as a bipolar expression of the same underlying tendency; next, the tremendous sense of guilt which no masochist lacks; further, the defense reaction against the homosexual tendencies: disgust of the immissio penis in anum, and the unpleasant feelings roused by the sight of the boy’s hairy thighs.

This patient also illustrates the overwhelming rôle of the father in the psychogenesis of homosexuality and the recurrence of the “specific scene.” At 11 years of age he requested his father to beat him because he felt guilty. At 25 years he carried out that very act on a boy under a very refined form. One must be a victim of psychic blindness not to see that he there played the rôle of the father who punishes the child. The development of this attitude may be surmised to have taken place approximately as follows: His primary phantasy was undoubtedly generated by the wish that his father be tender with him. He wanted to replace the mother in his father’s affection (coitus inter femora). Probably jealousy thoughts against the mother, revenge fancies against the father on account of unrequited love; these mental sins gave rise to his feeling of guilt, as displayed in his masochism. For as I shall prove in another work[28] in this Series, sadism is always the primary attitude and is transposed into masochism in consequence of the feeling of guilt, or else the two appear side by side.

I must comment on Fleischmann’s remark that psychoanalysis only disturbed the patient and did not cure him. It is not proper to ascribe all failures of psychoanalysis to the method. Psychoanalysis is a difficult art and will always be conducted expertly only by a relatively small number of specialists. Not everything that goes under the name of psychoanalysis is genuine. Often the patient submits for a few days to psychoanalysis then drops it (when a successful psychoanalysis may require several months) and claims it did him no good.[29] A thorough psychoanalysis of the above case would have certainly led to a deeper understanding of the mental mechanism involved and would have revealed much new light.

Undoubtedly various sexual repressed tendencies may become manifest during psychoanalytic treatment. That is even necessary,—they must be met and overcome with the consultant’s aid. The next case below is an illustration that latent homosexuality may become manifest after a few seances in the course of psychoanalysis.

83. Mr. Delta, medical student, 24 years of age, hereditary history negative, physically healthy in every respect, suffers of depressions and inability to concentrate on his work. The most important facts bearing on his anamnesis and his later history he relates in the following letter:

“From my earliest childhood I have been extraordinarily sensuous. It was the custom (an evil one) in our family for the children to crawl into the parents’ bed in the morning. I naturally always went to mother’s bed, while my sisters preferred to go to father’s bed. We children also went to one another’s bed and on such occasions I was in the habit of trying to crawl with my head under the covers with the intention, frankly, of carrying out cunnilingus especially on my sister N., who was already married. Why I preferred N., at the time I do not understand clearly, possibly because she was receptive towards me and such practices are possible only if the female partner is at least unconsciously agreeable to it. I was 5 years of age at the time. I have also carried on cunnilingus on my sister B., at 15 years of age, while she was asleep. These fancies later played a tremendous rôle in my mental life, causing also a profuse sweating of the palms of my hands which disappeared in part when I became consciously aware of them. The killing of the chickens by our cook produced an extraordinarily exciting effect upon me. When the cook gripped the chicken between her limbs near her genital region to kill it she excited me to the point of a true orgasm. I tried to imitate her by catching flies and squeezing them to death between my limbs, near my genitals, or by drowning them in urine. My attitude towards friends, colleagues, etc., was also extremely peculiar. I cultivated preferably the friendship of children of the proletarian class, while children of my own set never attracted me in particular, although I was friendly with them. Children of that class also submitted more willingly to various homosexual acts, something which I did not quite dare carry on with children of my own set. I remember one boy in particular, with whom I attempted coitus in os. I recall also a dream of my childhood years: An awful butchery is going on in our court yard and my sister W., and a certain man are in it. I am pursued by both, they throw me on the ground, and I am killed with a single blow on the forehead. I may add that killing invoked in my mind the picture of the aggressor sitting astride over the victim’s face and mouth, rider-fashion. That at any rate was the manner in which we boys killed one another. Girls of my age were a torture to me but to older girls and adult women I extended my greatest admiration,—a sentiment which was purely platonic with me at the time. At the public school I fell in love with every strict teacher, once I was in love with two of them at the same time. I wanted the two to punish me and that, in a very strange way. I wanted to be taken to bed and to be squeezed to death by them,[30]—naturally between their genitalia. The immictio in os by a woman was also a favorite form of torture in my day dreaming.

“Now comes puberty. I consider the starting point of my later neurosis the fact that I cared for contact only with persons who could offer me some sexual satisfaction and that even as a child. During puberty this peculiarity showed even more markedly. For a time I preserved my platonic admiration of women older than myself. Young girls were still repulsive to me until I fell passionately in love with one. I followed that little one for years like a shadow, but in spite of the encouragement she gave me I could not bring myself to speak to her. When I finally did so, I saw in a flash the reason for my remarkable hesitation, I did not say what I started to say, the whole charm was gone in an instant,—she seemed to me common and inferior,—although my objective judgment at other times told me precisely the reverse. In short, my affection reawakened in its earlier intensity only some time after I recovered from the shock of my personal acquaintance with her. At that time I became very friendly with a certain colleague, Joseph Z. The tie that linked us was that very bewitching dark girl. He also was in love with her (one would have thought that this would have broken our friendship). We never tired admiring her charms between us and our friendship came to an end only when I discovered that he was not true to our idol. At the same time nothing disgusted me during that period so much as the sight of a pair of lovers. I had the feeling that a man loses something of his manliness and dignity through intimacy with a woman.

“My next friend was Herbert. I had few sexual points of contact with him, except that we visited together the red light resorts for the first time and jointly made love to the various inmates. Herbert was so witty a fellow that I almost loved him, especially as he was slavishly devoted to me. But my neurosis made tremendous leaps for the worse even at that time and I became more and more timid and awkward in my ways and when finally he turned on me with his wit our friendship came to an end.

“Next came Friedrich. He clung to me with fanatic love, this went on for about three years, until he married, and then I felt lonely in the world. My beloved mother to whom I was extremely devoted as a child could only try to console me, but I was hopelessly disconsolate. As a child I had been inseparable from her for years; Mendelssohn’s well-known Spring song brought tears to my eyes because the thought of a mother losing her child seemed atrocious to me. Although I felt a great measure of that affection for mother which is common in every one’s childhood experience, a certain craving remained ungratified. I became acquainted with psychoanalysis and it brought to my mind the youthful perversities of my youth. I decided to give expression to my conscious instincts and I have come to the following conclusion:

“My attitude towards the other sex will never be satisfactory, I must stand either above or below woman, must be either hammer or anvil, an unprejudiced relationship I find impossible, because as soon as I see a pretty woman I lose my senses, and would like preferably to be at her feet and obey her like a slave. But women do not wish that, they want to be submissive themselves, they want to feel the man above them. Intercourse on the level of equality I find tiresome, so there remains only sadism for me, through which, I may confess frankly, I have already enjoyed pleasant times. True friendship on the basis of mutual love and respect I am capable of maintaining only with men, as in my childhood.”

This sounds like the history of a typical bisexual strongly on the way to become a genuine homosexual. Let us turn to his psychoanalytic treatment before we examine his sexual attitude. He went to a psychoanalyst who had been recommended to him by Freud. He was wholly unable to work, impotent with women at the time, and had recourse to masturbation. During the first sitting he learned that he had been in love with his mother. The knowledge of this fact acted as a “relief,” according to his testimony. (He even told it to his mother.) Shortly afterwards he had his first successful coitus with a woman. But the neurosis did not change and in a short time he came to me for analysis. I found a tremendous resistance against the discovery of the true attitude. He employed all sorts of subterfuges to take up the time during the consultation hours and to disclose only what he wanted. He soon exhausted the account of his pronounced sadism and of his masochistic tendencies. But concerning his relations to his father he was very hazy. He became able to go to work, attended the lectures and turned once more diligently to his studies. I saw the hopelessness of my endeavors and broke the analysis under some pretext or other.... There are patients, whom I have described as the psychoanalytic Ahasverus-type[31] who are among the most thankless of subjects for our professional endeavors. They rush from one analyst to another, imploring the new consultant to remove the last of their troublous symptoms, and stay all the time very much as they have been from the beginning. They look upon the analysis, too, as a test of power, they want to triumph over their consultant, they want to come out stronger than he and—what is most important—they do not want to recognize the real background of their attitude. They stubbornly overlook the real foundation of their neurotic trouble and their ‘unwillingness to see’ is made worse by their superficial acquaintance with psychoanalysis and their fragmentary introspection. They thus run from one physician to another, criticize the first to the second, the second to a third, the third to a fourth. This conduct stands partly in relation to their attitude towards the father,—a subject to which we shall have occasion to revert more fully later.

It happened precisely as I had surmised. He went back to Freud, who recommended a third analyst, because he refused stubbornly to return to the first. After a few months he gave up the treatment and considered himself well. One half year later he came back to me and told me that since adopting exclusively homosexual relations he was entirely well, able to work, and as lively “as a fish in the brook.” But something still seemed to be lacking. At my request he wrote the account which I have given above, stating that he had no objection to its publication. He added orally a few statements which I shall use later.

The characteristic feature of his attitude towards woman is emphasized in his own written statement. Either he must torture or he must be tortured—he can either love or must hate, and only to excess. He is afraid of his terrific love passion. Therefore he feels impelled to humble himself before woman, to serve her as a slave, which is his symbolic expression for the longing after cunnilingus and for his willingness to submit to mictio in os. He wants to serve woman as a means for the attainment of gratification, as a vessel for her excreta, to be a submissive slave to all her whims. His submissiveness goes so far that he is willing to be killed by woman. This sadistic transposition of this attitude signifies: only through doing away with the sexual partner one achieves complete mastery and may claim complete possession.

In his feeling-attitude towards woman he vacillates between two extremes: hatred to the point of annihilation and a love so great as to include the willingness to be sacrificed. Clearly, he must protect himself so as not to give way to his hatred and become a murderer. A deeper insight into the parallelogram of the psychic forces involved in such situations leads plainly to the conviction that the instinct to live and the will to power prevent him from subjecting himself to woman actually to the point of self-annihilation. His feeling-attitude towards woman is too affective for him to be able to reduce it to a proper emotional level. How plain is the significance of his boyhood experience,—his great passion for the girl whom he followed like a shadow. But he did not dare to bring that love affair down to reality. He was afraid of himself, afraid of the subjection. The girl gave him to understand that he need not belittle himself at all. In his eyes that was enough for her to lose her charm after he became acquainted with her; she attracted him again only after all danger of his trying himself out with her was over. He considered himself plain-looking and thought he could not attract any one. He hated the women on account of their charm, because he himself would have liked to have been a pretty woman.

He also cleverly covered that wish by beginning to overstress the value of manliness. “I had a feeling,” he states, “that a man loses something of his manliness and dignity through his intimacy with a female person.” One must bear in mind that this man esteemed his mother very highly, holding her above all others as a person and as a woman. The normal person forms the image of his ideal woman after his mother. But he looks upon his mother as an exception and, like many other homosexuals, excepts his mother alone from the scorn with which he looks down upon the whole female sex. Now he tolerates woman but only with a sadistic feeling-attitude. For hatred vanquishes woman easier than love.

The question, what is he seeking in man and why does he prefer men to women?, he answers as follows: “I seek the penis in man. I think chiefly of his penis. With men I find no resistance at all. Woman I consider ugly while man is beautiful. I look chiefly for womanly men who to me stand for the girl with the penis. I was attracted only once to an elderly man with a very energetic face. And what particularly attracts me to man: there is no question of any submissiveness with him. Man does not humble himself,—only woman does that.”

But he does not seek the submissive woman. He needs a strong woman who shall domineer over him. He confesses that intercourse with a woman sadist would gratify him. But, as he states in his written account: women do not care to domineer, they want to be overpowered themselves.

We note that the polar sexual tension between male and female is most extreme in his case. He could kill the woman who humiliates him, belittles him, as Judith killed Holofernes, because he had conquered her sexually.[32]

His peculiar manner of masturbating (squeezing flies to death against the penis) discloses his specific onanistic fancy. He squeezes a woman to death, he strangles her, while cohabiting with her. A short time after the first analysis he had sexual intercourse with a servant girl. He described her to me: “a gigantic girl, and so powerful that she could have overpowered me with one hand!” With such a girl he felt safe. But he never dared to have sexual intercourse with weak persons, even though they exerted a stronger sexual attraction on him. He had every reason to flee from woman, because he feared the transposition of his excessive love passion into a deadly aggressive hatred. He claims he could have intercourse now only with a woman addicted to all sorts of perversities. Only such a woman could rouse his passion and could offer him something. He has never tried this out. It looks as if he feared the involvement of his heart, but that could use woman merely as a vehicle for his lust. A perverse woman would drown the urgings of his strongest paraphilia: the impulse to kill a woman.

Now we may understand through his family history how this attitude must have arisen.

He belonged to a family where both parents had very pronounced individualities of their own. The father was a self-made man, who rose through his own efforts and became a millionaire. He was strict, energetic, always preoccupied with his business, and never had any spare time for his family. With the children he was tender while they were small and pretty playthings. Later he changed completely his attitude and the patient was required and expected to show a good record of his conduct at school. He continued to be tender with the girls, so that the boy must have unconsciously envied his sisters. This change from tenderness to severity on the part of parents is very common and is responsible for many instances of stubborn contrariness on the part of children, especially towards the father. The child always longs for the early childhood when the father was so loving and tender. Perhaps this longing for early childhood is the reason why so many homosexuals are of a decidedly infantile type.[33] The kindly old gentleman sought by so many homosexuals is perhaps merely the affectionate father of their youth, who never punished severely....

Our patient’s mother was a remarkably intelligent and very beautiful woman, who all her life contended with her husband for rulership over the house. I had an opportunity to obtain a deep insight into that marriage situation. I know of no other marriage where the struggle for supremacy was so bitter between the two personalities. There were constantly quarrels in the house, often on the point of breaking out in violence. Each one avoided showing any affection for the other. To do so would have meant acknowledging the other’s superiority. They did everything they could to each other. They bore themselves with aloofness and appeared indifferent towards one another, though keeping up a continuous quarrel. If the husband noticed some other man courting his handsome wife, he smiled indulgently and accorded his rival a free field, as if to prove to his wife that he was not jealous in the least, and was willing to accord her every freedom. She also seemed to overlook the seamy side, in her husband’s conduct. Nevertheless they were ready to jump at each other on the slightest provocation. Once the situation reached a crisis and the woman pointed a revolver at her husband threatening to end everything in a terrible tragedy.

The children divided between the contesting parents, taking sides. The son was entirely with his mother. He was unhappy because she had to put up with so much and he goaded her on all the time, urging her to carry the fight to a successful issue and even advising her to seek separation from her husband. He had nothing good to say about his father, outside the latter’s business ability. He described the father as a cold-blooded fellow without a heart, a mere adding machine, etc.... On a superficial examination it looked as if he loved his mother and hated his father. But back of that hatred there stood the carefully preserved love of his earlier years. That love, however, he was unwilling to acknowledge. That was the critical point in the analysis. He always recoiled whenever the analysis led to his fondness of the father, or various signs pointed out his aboriginal attitude towards the father. Any analysis leads sooner or later to a similar experience. Nothing is more difficult than to dissolve the father hatred and reduce it back to its infantile components,—love.

But in his homosexual acts he played the rôle of the father who is tender with the child. We also perceive now why he felt himself suddenly attracted to that elderly gentleman with the energetic face. He was an image of his own strict father.

Having witnessed in his childhood a terrific struggle between man and woman, and having himself taken a part in that merciless struggle for supremacy, he was bound to conceive the problem of love as a struggle for supremacy, a competitive struggle in the will to power. His supreme question always was: “Who is the stronger one?” This case shows us with remarkable clearness the mechanisms on which Alfred Adler lays such great stress. But it also shows the incestuous love for the sister, a tendency of which he was aware. In the young men he sought the reproductions of his sister’s picture. He also showed a fixation upon the mother, with whom he was seldom on agreeable pleasant terms. Nevertheless he has not forgotten the early tendernesses of his father. In the wish to be squeezed to death, his masochistic fancies revolve around the masked image of his severe father standing like a shadow. To be master, to be slave—his whole system of thinking revolved around these two notions. He has social intercourse only with men towards whom he feels himself superior. Already as a child he chose his comrades among the children of the poor, because he could domineer them. He abandoned one friendship because his friend made jokes at his expense. He was not a handsome child. That drove him into the path of hatred and envy. He hated all women because they were his rivals with the father. He thought he would have been liked better if he had been a handsomer fellow.

He was a slave to his family and unable to wean himself away. He moved to another city in order to free himself of the family ties. That made him homesick. His mother had to visit him. He was proud when they went on walks together and were taken for a pair of lovers. But secretly he really yearned for his father, and never forgives himself that he did not interrupt that vacation journey to go to his father.

In reality he continued the struggle between his parents. Within him struggled man and wife. Possibly also the child, though acting more in the rôle of a bystander, and ready to give the stereotypic answer “both” to the question, “whom do you like better?” He thinks he has overcome the man in him. I consider his homosexuality a passing phase. He will achieve health only after complete emotional detachment from the family circle.

We often note that the neurotic gets well only after the death of one of the parents or of both. But in many cases, the parents even after they are dead continue to hold their sway over the infantile soul and their dominion ends only with the death of their child who, in that devotion to them, loved but himself and loved himself unto death....

VI

HISTORY AND ANALYSIS OF A HOMOSEXUAL—CHILDHOOD REMINISCENCES—ANAL EROTISM—ATTACHMENT TO THE MOTHER—INTERPRETATION OF DREAM SYMBOLISMS—LOVE OF THE FATHER—REGRESSION THEORY OF HOMOSEXUALITY.

Was ist das Siegel der erreichten Freiheit?—Sich nicht mehr von sich selber schämen.

—Nietzsche.

VI

What is the stamp of achieved freedom?—To be no longer ashamed of one’s self.

—Nietzsche.

The complete analysis of a homosexual would require a whole volume. Before concluding the present work I propose to give a portion of such an analysis. The treatment lasted six weeks, when it was interrupted by the war. This analysis, too, only led as far as the father complex. But even so it yields important data and enables us to draw together the observations made in connection with the various briefer illustrations already discussed.

84. Mr. Sigma, a student from Denmark, 28 years of age, consults me on account of various nervous difficulties. For a number of months past he has felt very depressed, is always fatigued, generally unable to sleep and unable to concentrate on his work. He is facing his final examinations but is unable to study. He complains of a lack of any sense of joy in living. He admits having entertained also ideas of suicide which he has rejected chiefly on account of his mother. He is very much afraid that he may yield some day to just such a temptation.

Sigma is consciously homosexual. He emphasizes: He has never felt any interest in the female sex and already as a child he fell in love only with boys. He is the only son of a very hard-working, brave, mother in comfortable circumstances who is wholly wrapped up in him. His father died a few years ago. He lives a wholly retired existence, he has no friends,—for his mother prevents that. Once—he was 17 years of age at the time—he had a close friend to whom he felt very attached, but his mother interfered and broke up their friendship. Now he is completely isolated. All his spare time he devotes to his mother, when he is not gone to the theater or to a concert. He also visits no families; his mother prevents it.

He begins—spontaneously—an account of his life with his first recollections:

I was 2 years of age and we—a number of children—played out of doors. A pretty lady walked up and threw a ball into the grass. She said: He who catches the ball may keep it. I was nearest to it but did not dare to trespass upon the finely kept lawn. Therefore another one caught the ball....

This recollection seems typical of Sigma. Like all first recollections it contains the determinants of his whole life.[34] It shows us a man who lacks self-confidence, whose activity is inhibited by considerations regarding others. He explains that for the sake of his mother he has renounced all pleasures in life. He is always hesitant (kleinmütig), overwhelmed by his feeling of inferiority and dares not assume any important enterprise.

His sexuality awoke very early. He played always with girls and felt more like a girl. He liked to put on his mother’s hat and clothing. His mother was the master in the house, the breadwinner and law giver. The father always played a subordinate rôle. We see again a reiteration of the fact that the child identifies itself with the stronger parent. Under the circumstances it was natural that Sigma should identify himself with the mother....

Already, in the public school, at seven years of age, he fell in love with his teacher. That is why he became one of the best scholars. He also loved some of his colleagues, but was too bashful to betray himself to them. At 12 years of age he began to masturbate and during the act his fancies were centered on the image of a naked man. He was very religious up till that time and during confession distinguished himself by the lengthy list of his sins and the depth of his dejection. At 12 years of age he became free and progressively developed into a full-fledged atheist. The struggle against masturbation began at 14 years of age, when he heard that the habit was very harmful. After that he indulged more rarely. Great feeling of fatigue on day after pollution. The subject regards his present condition a consequence of his masturbation habit.

Already during his gymnasium years (high school) his mind was distracted and he barely managed to squeeze through his finals (Matura). He was always bashful and avoided the colleagues who spoke cynically among themselves about girls so that he was called “Miss Sigma.” For a few years he lived away from home. They lived formerly in the country and he had to stay in Copenhagen. He lived with some older sisters with whom he did not get along very well. He played music with them, joined them on walks, experienced considerable excitation ... short of erotism. His whole erotic feeling was directed only to men and boys. In the course of his endless day dream fancies he never thought of a woman at any time in his life. He dreams only of men and thinks only of them. That concludes the first visit.

Sigma again emphasizes his one-sided inclination towards men. Nevertheless he must correct a small detail of his account as given on the previous day. This, I repeat, is a common typical occurrence in the anamnesis of homosexuals. When giving an account of their life they neglect entirely all the heterosexual episodes. But today Sigma adds that occasionally he did have erotic dreams concerning women; perhaps four or five times. But not more often than that. These dreams led to pollutions and were rather indefinite as to content. Sigma was also in love, transiently, with a girl cousin, at sixteen years of age. He at once attempts to weaken the force of this declaration: it was merely a pastime, a pose, because an uncle was in love with the same girl. He thought it was his duty also to make love to this girl cousin. But it was soon over. And he must emphasize again that he never indulged in any phantasies centering on women. He had such phantasies. But they were always about men.

He was brought up almost wholly in female society. If his mother was away, there was an aunt in the house who looked after him. He was taken to school and was called for when he was already a grown-up boy—the typical training for dependence. His mother wanted to procure friends for him. There were always some boys whom she wished he would accept as his friends. But usually he himself found nothing in those particular boys to interest him. If he himself chose some boy for a friend his mother was sure to interpose her veto as soon as their friendship became too warm. And he was always prone to fall in love with his friends. He composed poetry at a very early age, deifying his friends; to this day his poems are devoted almost wholly to Eros Uranos.

At this point he reflects for a while; and he continues: “I identified myself always with the female figures who were mostly strong, aggressive women. I could always enthuse over such strong, energetic women displaying male aggressiveness about them. If a woman or a girl ever interested me and played a rôle in my day dreams, she was of this type.” Next he recalls a heterosexual episode. He admired for a time the landlady’s daughter, kept company with her, they played music together, but he felt very unhappy when she married off afterwards.

The Eulenberg trial made him aware of his own homosexuality. That made him very unhappy for he discovered that he was unlike others. In the high school he was always looked upon as peculiar and he kept aloof from his schoolmates. The famous trial made it clear to him that his end would be either insanity or jail. He went through some dreadful days. He was in love with a friend and when the latter asked him why he was so depressed, he broke into bitter tears and poured out his heart circuitously describing his passion. He felt that he was not like others, he felt lonely and closed in, unrecognized and weak. His friend advised him to devote himself more to art. He looked upon the subject’s suffering as due to thwarted ambition.

His typical dreams are concerned with pursuit by men and breaking in. A particular dream made a strong impression on him: He was pursued in bed by a great mass of bedbugs and finally himself turned into a bedbug.[35] Like all homosexuals he had for a time the fear of infection and especially of tuberculosis. He was almost convinced that he would die prematurely of tuberculosis.

We are also familiar with tuberculosis (as well as syphilis) as the representative of what is evil, of incest and homosexuality. But for the present our patient sheds no light on this aspect of the subject. We do not care to influence Sigma and therefore do not disturb the course of his associations. Sigma shows but little interest in the analysis. He is mistrusting and hesitant. He does not have much time and seems relieved when the sitting is over.

The next sitting opens as follows: “I have come to ask you to make an appointment with me for tomorrow. I want to skip today. I must take a little rest and gather strength. Yesterday’s sitting has sort of taken me to pieces....”

During the first couple of sittings I had hardly spoken a word and had allowed Sigma to do all the talking. But the flight reflex, which dominates all homosexuals, because they are afraid of the truth, is here already coming to surface:

“What roused you so yesterday?”

“That you kept so quiet. It was an uncanny silence....”

“Would you have preferred to see me excited?”

“No.... I know, of course, that the physician must keep his balance. But that is precisely what I lack. What an awful impression I must have made on you!”

Hinc illae lacrimae! The subject is concerned over the impression he makes upon the physician. He wants to know whether the physician has sympathy for him, whether he is impressed or indifferent. He is afraid of making himself appear ridiculous. The physician becomes the chief person around whom his own life interests are being centered for the time.

“But that is irrelevant. You want to get well; and that has nothing to do with personal matters.”

“To be sure,—that is just what I was saying to myself. Doctor, you are my last hope. And yet, I am already losing patience and feel like running off. It is less than two weeks since I went to purchase a revolver intending to shoot myself. The plan fell through only on account of my lack of adroitness. I was unable to procure a revolver. The saleslady demanded to be shown a purchase permit and I did not have one. There must have also been a tremor in my voice. I was so excited.... If I had been able to procure that revolver I would not be now sitting in your office.”

“Why did you want to die?”

“A life full of trouble! No friends! No prospect of improvement! The everlasting depression!”

“And did you not think of the suffering you would have caused your mother? To your mother who sacrificed her life for you?”

“No, I was indifferent about that. It would have only served her right, because it is she who has ruined my life. It might have been the end of her too.... But I was truly sorry for my friend. He has so many cares and so much to think about. It would have shaken him up. He is a writer and is now at work on a new novel. It would have certainly thrown him out of the writing mood and it would have interfered with his creative activity.”

“What has your mother done you that you should want to punish her so severely?”

This brings out the last repressed grudge against the mother who came near separating him from his much beloved friend.

“Mother has ruined my whole life,” he continues, “she has separated me from my only and best friend. You have no idea what I suffered. He came daily to our house. He accompanied me on the piano so that we enjoyed unforgettable evenings together. Father was once a good singer. As there was no accompanist at hand he neglected the beautiful gift. Now we resurrected the old songs once more. Every evening was a festival. On account of a pulmonary apical catarrh I had to go to Egypt. During my absence a catastrophe occurred. Mother found that my friend was robbing her of a son’s love. She was jealous because he heard more often and received longer letters from me than the parents. She compelled my father to write Ernst a curt letter forbidding him to come to the house any longer or to correspond with me. From Ernst, to whom I wrote regularly three times weekly while he answered once, I received next an ironic letter, stating that I ought to enclose the parent’s permission next time I write him. Only then will he write me again. I did not understand what that meant until I read the enclosed father’s letter. I felt like one against whom the gates of heaven have been suddenly closed tight. I returned to Copenhagen at once, but did not dare to take openly a stand against mother. She had a bad heart spell the first time I reproached her bitterly and all the relatives called me her murderer. I made up secretly with Ernst and met him on the street. But mother found out. She followed me stealthily and when she discovered that I was meeting Ernst there followed terrible quarrels which I am unable to relate. I was thus very badly embittered and that innocent relationship was turned into a morbid whim. You will appreciate, therefore, that I cannot but hold a grudge against mother....”

“Have you not tried to rebel openly against the situation?”

“I was too weak for that. Father begged me not to disturb the happiness of our family circle. It was a terrible situation and I did not see my way out of it. That happened when I was 19 years of age. I have since told mother that I must meet Ernst once in a while. She is against the idea and wants to link me up to other friends. I am brought into contact with girls in the hope that I will take an interest in them. But the very fact that they are brought in my way under mother’s patronage, as it were, makes them repulsive to me from the outset. Moreover, I know that mother would be equally jealous if I should really love a girl. She will stand for no other love besides her. I am too broken up to ever break away and be self-reliant. So I remain everlastingly a mother’s boy. But I cannot endure this sort of thing any longer. I have had enough of this torture and want to see an end to it....”

“I feel much better. Last evening I worked fairly well, for the first time in a long period. I am beginning to like Vienna. I was out in the woods (Wienerwald) and I was pleased with the sight of the first violet. I am again beginning to feel pleasure in nature’s beauties. It was my first excursion.”

“Don’t you go out of doors otherwise?”

“Yes, every Sunday. Always in mother’s company. We start in the morning, have our lunch out of doors and spend the day together.”

“Do you not go on excursions with your friend?”

“Unfortunately, I do not. But hold on! I did, just once. I was going to tell you about it anyway, today. He invited me to join him with a number of his colleagues on an excursion to a distant island. I was enthusiastic over the plan at once for I hoped that it would prove an opportunity for greater intimacy between us. But I was disillusioned. We were happy the whole day. I was thinking all the time of the night. I hoped we would have a room with double bed.... Unfortunately all the rooms in the hotel were taken and we had to be content with occupying quarters in common. Here, too, luck failed to serve me. My friend slept next to another member of the party. Next day, under the pretext of fatigue, I started back. I felt unhappy and was all day long on the point of tears. I reached the next village alone. It was on a holiday. I did not know what to do. So I went into the church....”

“To pray?”

“Not at all. I was no longer religious at the time. I went to be among people. It did no good. The many dressed up folks, the holiday atmosphere, the music, the songs, the organ. I calmed down a little. Next I went to a restaurant because I felt a great craving for something sweet. Thus the majestic and the trivial stand close in my case.[36] Then I returned home, after first driving around through the streets and was happy when it was so late that I had to go back to the house....”

There follow various accounts of his passion for his friend Ernst. He always dreams of physical union with the friend and has no other thought. Only once he attempted aggression on his friend. In a urinal he suddenly reached for his friend’s penis. The latter good-naturedly avoided him and never afterwards referred to the incident. But he saw clearly that he would never achieve his aim. Meanwhile his friend fell in love with an actress. He was jealous only so long as his friend did not confide in him. Thereafter he was happy because the actress preferred another man and paid no attention to Ernst. He was in a position to console his friend like a mother. He emphasizes that his feelings are distinctly maternal towards men who are ill or unhappy and that he makes an excellent nurse,—thus bringing out his pronounced identification with the mother. But he was unable to nurse his father when the latter was taken with gastric cancer; the disease was terribly repulsive to him....

He has dreamed the following dream:

I am called up in school. I had to solve a mathematical problem but could not arrive at the right result. Next it was an English translation from Shakespeare. I did not know the vowels. It seemed that the various persons of the play were represented by some of the colleagues in theatrical costumes.

The analysis of this dream would lead us into endless bypaths. The most important feature is the affective character of the dream which in simplest terms may be formulated as follows: “I am facing problems in life for which I do not feel prepared. I am an actor and I am wearing a theatrical costume. I am playing the homosexual, I have transposed one aboriginal trend into another. The English play, The Merchant of Venice, comes to his mind. The teacher who examined him in mathematics was also Kaufmann (merchant) by name. This Kaufmann is the center of a rather tragic episode in his life. He was studying “exact” branches (Realschule) but was interested in the classical (Gymnasium) course; he was always weak in mathematics; he failed in his last examination for engineering. His attitude towards money matters has always been morbid. His mother continually reproaches him for not appreciating the value of money and for being unable to handle money wisely. He is different from his parents, both of whom are merchants.”

The Merchant of Venice portrays the tragedy of the relations of a Jew to his only daughter. She runs off with her beloved and abandons the greedy father, who, however, never begrudged her anything. He wants to do likewise. He would like to flee with his friend and abandon the mother. His basic problem is: how to get around his mother, how to free himself of her.

He places great weight on the jewel box scene, which has always impressed him. He, too, is confronted by the difficult problem of a choosing among the boxes. There are three paths open before him: man, woman and child. He is a child, would like to be a woman and is afraid to be a man. His inner conflicts are locked up like the valuables in the box. We shall see whether analysis is capable of disclosing them....

There are some vague relations to Shylock’s coldbloodedness. He emphasizes the pound of flesh. The associations lead to certain sadistic trends which are wholly unconscious. At any rate, the first dream in the analysis is of greatest significance. Its complete solution and interpretation becomes possible much later....

He dwells for a long time on his attitude towards money. One familiar with dream analysis at once suspects that this money complex has its bearing on anal eroticism. He keeps to his theme. Requests to leave early.

Again comes very late and asks whether he may leave early. He is hungry. (One notices his extremely resistant attitude. He is afraid he might disclose something.) He has dreamed wild and profuse dreams, he can no longer remember what. He must have spoiled his stomach for he vomited in the morning.

This vomiting in the morning, a symptom which appears in many neurotics and also in the case of many neurotic children is a reaction of the ethical, moral self against the dreams of the previous night. Plainly, one is disgusted with one’s self. Hence the vomiting which is subsequently ascribed to something inoffensive that may have been eaten on the previous evening. But the subject believes that the beer he drank did not agree with the dessert....

He is asked whether he can recall at all the dream.

“No, not a trace.”

“Better try and see.”

“I only remember scraps; nothing worth mentioning.”

“Please tell me these scraps.”

“I have dreamed only about various water closets and urinals. There was a urinal here and one in the office ... the rest is gone. I cannot recall.”

“The vomiting in the morning seems to me to point at something going on in the urinal which strikes you as disgusting.”

“May I not have simply spoiled my stomach?”

“Indeed. That is a possibility not to be excluded. But the other is also a possibility to be thought of. Do you often vomit in the morning?”

“Yes, but only as I did today. Only fluid. It is more a nausea than real vomiting. May I leave now?”

“You know that I never compel you to stay. Only I want to draw your attention that I am fully aware you want to hide something from me. How do you imagine you can get well if you do not have the courage to confide in your consultant? Or perhaps you are afraid that you will lose something of my respect if you should disclose the peculiarities of your sexual life? You are anxious to run off and keep your secret. Very well. You are free to do as you wish. But do not expect, under the circumstances, that a consultant should spend his time on your case. One who wants really to get well must first be willing to face his problems clearly.”

“You are right, doctor. I have kept from you the most important thing: I do indulge in a form of sexual excitation which is perhaps the most unpleasant possible. You will appreciate at once why I have kept the knowledge of this from you so long. I thought I have told you already too much and I wanted to keep to myself this particular morbid turn. But you will surely despise me.”

“I despise no sufferer.”

“Already as a small boy I had felt the greatest interest in the water closet. My wish was always: to see another man in the act of defecating. In my school fancies I always thought of the teacher being compelled to defecate in my presence. I was always trying to watch other men in the act. If I succeeded in witnessing the act I became very excited and masturbated. My whole mind and thought to this day revolves around the water closet and the feces. Think of it! I, a person with certain æsthetic tastes, an artist, poet, enthusiastic musician, a man aspiring to all that is beautiful and noble,—to be fettered down to so horrible a perversion! Think of this abyss between my body and my soul! If I become acquainted with a new man and I like him, my first thought is: I should like to see him empty his bowels.”[37]

“Have you perhaps, as a child, witnessed such a scene which may have made a deep impression on you?”

“I do not remember. I only know that already in the primary grades I was interested in watching my schoolmates. In Denmark there is a greater freedom about these matters than elsewhere. Sexual freedom, too, seems to me to be greater in our country. In later years I found sufficient opportunity to satisfy my craving. Finally I had recourse to a tiny augur which I keep always with me as an aid to secure the opportunities for observation which have now become indispensable to me. But usually I find boring holes unnecessary. Little appropriate convenient holes may be found when one looks for them. I must have many colleagues for I have found that most closets show these observation spots. Here in Vienna, too, I have seldom come across a water closet, where it was not possible to watch the act. I fight with all my powers against this unfortunate trend. But I give in each time again. I think of it all forenoon. By noontime I am wholly out of patience. I am impelled to seek a public lavatory. There I wait till a man comes along. When I see him defecate, I masturbate....”

“Have you watched women, too?”

“No, I find women disgusting when I think of them in this situation.”

We are here confronted with a form of anal erotism of a pronounced infantile character. All children without exception show a great interest in the lavatory and in the processes of micturition and defecation. These processes form the theme of a whole group of infantile sexual theories. The children come through the anus, they are generated through the urine, etc. It is quite likely that we have here an instance of the fixation of certain infantile impressions. The fact that the first phantasies which he is able to recall revolve around his teacher, proves that someone who was an authority played a rôle as the intermediary for these early infantile impressions. Who can that authority be? We can only surmise. We must await patiently the further development of the analysis.

He complain that he has an ugly appearance, because everything about him is so unprepossessing; his whole physiognomy seems to him womanly, soft, and the obverse of striking. He often turns to the looking-glass and examines himself. As in the picture of Dorian Grey he finds the traces of his paraphilia expressed in his features. He symbolizes his mental processes and localizes them in his face. He fights, a relentless fight against his scatologic phantasies and trends, he seems to himself weak, womanly, repulsive. Vice, low thoughts, animal cravings, low passion—all that he sees expressed in his face.

His first recollection of his paraphilia is noteworthy. He is playing with a little friend, an uncle, who wants to defecate near the street. He points out that people may pass and prevents the deed.... This recollection already indicates the two tendencies: the coprophiliac trend and the struggle against it.

Moreover, his coprophilia reaches farther than he has confessed thus far. We discover today that there is present a predisposition to coprophagia, that the condition is really a mixture of homosexuality and stark infantilism. He would like to allow the partner to defecate on him. Identifications with lavatory come to surface. The place chosen for the deposition of the feces is the abdomen, occasionally the mouth. There are also frequent phantasies of fellatio, active and passive. The reading of various medical and popular books excites his phantasy and feeds his paraphilia.

He relates two dreams. In the first he was running after an electric car which he could not reach. He tried to jump on but in vain, the car just passed before his nose. In the second dream he led his dog for a walk, the dog met another and copulated while he himself ran off. The first dream represents an unattainable ideal. The second illustrates the endeavor to get rid of the animal-like trends (within himself). He avoids similarly coitus with a woman.

He relates that for a long time he has been in the habit of writing up phantastic homosexual orgies and that he carries around these erotic stories for months. The last story he wrote some 14 days ago. He is much interested in these doings, because the writing and the reading excite him tremendously. He tells me the content of the last phantasy which he has written up: A round table of sixteen soldiers. One of them holds a naked woman on his knees. She must urinate in a glass. The soldier pours beer in that glass. Then all those present partake of the beer.[38]

He confesses next that he has already carried out a number of times various urolagnic acts and felt great pleasure doing so. In fact these cravings did not bother him only so long as the friend visited him daily and he was keeping up his spiritual love for the fellow. That is why he was so broken up when his mother deprived him of that friend.

He relates a number of episodes illustrating his activity as voyeur. At first it was chiefly men of advanced age who roused him. They had to have very clean and attractive linen. Ejaculation ensued when he had an opportunity to see the man naked and the phallus interested him more than the podex.

He also admits having entertained phantasies about his father. But he found these phantasies unbearable and they proved at last so discomforting that he had to abandon them. On the other hand he was able to state emphatically that his mother never figured as an erotic object in his fancies.

As a genuine homosexual he was very much surprised that a “naked woman” should figure in his last phantasy or story and he could not explain the intrusion. But he is telling me everything without reserve....

He fears that perhaps his mother is having some understanding with me. She is in the habit of tracing all his secrets.... I point out to him the fact that the mothers of homosexuals always show the strongest opposition against the analysis when they find out that their sons free themselves and turn their affection (temporarily, of course) to the analyst. Sigma’s mother, who has accompanied him to Vienna, also tolerates no intimate friendship on her son’s part, as we know. Thus he tells me that she had reproached him yesterday for leaving her alone on Sunday. She wants to be everything to him. She also tries to be tender with him, to coddle him, a habit which he strongly resents. He believes that this resentment is due to his aversion against all womanhood. This sort of protection against all tendernesses on mother’s part is typical of all sons who are incestuously fixed on their mother.

He relates how his mother once confessed to him that she found no support in his father and actually felt lonely. On that occasion he wept over his mother’s plight and passed a sleepless night.... His further associations lead him to his father’s fatal illness: it was a slow breaking down due to cancer. He could not take care of his father, and was but of little service to the latter. It was shortly after his father had dismissed his friend. He was still too absorbed in his own troubles. He witnessed with detachment the terrible phases of the dying man’s last struggle. A few days before the end he dreamed that he saw his father’s body lying peacefully on the bier. It was plainly a dream of impatience. He could hardly await his father’s passing away. He declares that he hated his father heartily at the time, because the latter had allowed himself to be induced by the mother to write that letter to his friend. Strangely, he was never so angry with his determined mother as he was with his weak-willed father. During the father’s funeral and upon returning home he was unable to weep. This occurrence is typical of those men for whom a death is the fulfillment of an old wish. In point of fact the father was a burden and drag in the house. The mother sacrificed herself and his death was a release for everybody. Moreover his attitude towards his father had always been rather peculiar. They had never had much in common....

He reports a number of small details illustrating how tirelessly his mother endeavors to bind him to herself. Yesterday afternoon he was at the theater and later went to the Prater. In the evening he found his mother morose and pouting. She looked at him reproachfully saying: “Did it not occur to you during your rounds of pleasure that you are leaving your poor mother alone?”

He must think only of his mother and always feel that he is bound to her forever. Aunts and neighbors always come to him to tell him how much suffering he causes his poor mother by neglecting her. While he was still suffering acutely the distress caused by his mother’s breaking up his friendship with Ernst, he met the latter once secretly and they went to a theater together. The mother knew it in some way and when he returned home he found her in bed, her head wrapped in towels. Her disappointment made her ill and she had to keep to her bed for a week. Finally an aunt accused him of behaving like a murderer towards his mother. She cannot understand that passion of his for that friend! Was he perhaps in love with the young man’s sister? Happy to have a way out of his difficulty suggested to him he answered the question in the affirmative. That roused his mother’s jealousy to the highest pitch. But she soon convinced herself that she had been fooled by him and that he had no interest whatever in the girl.

He found the household ties so unbearable that at one time he entertained the notion of shooting his parents and running off. There were frequent quarrels during which he displayed unexpectedly a terrible venom against his mother and an unexplainable tendency to violence. But these episodes soon blew over, and he again felt himself helpless under the tyrannic sway of her love. Perhaps not as unwillingly as he makes out ... for there were opportunities available for freeing himself and he did not take advantage of them. He remained inactively at home, to be taken care of and to allow his mother to worry over him....

He dreamed of visiting numerous urinals running from one to the other. This dream portrays him as searching for something. It appears that he is trying to trace down a particular infantile scene. He relates how obsessed he becomes with the desire to go from lavatory to lavatory until he finally sees the longed-for scene. He is seldom satisfied. Often there follows a feeling of disappointment and disgust. Occasionally an uncommon sense of peace during which he is able to gather his thoughts.

“I did not tell you the truth when I denied transvestitism (Verkleidungstrieb). I often entertain such fancies. I am particularly fond of Salome and I often portrayed myself in that rôle with keenest interest. My teachers were the prophets whose cold, severed head I kissed.”

This trend distinctly sadistic is fortified by numerous small details. He is jealous. He saw once his friend entertaining himself in friendly and lengthy conversation with a lady and the thought occurred to him that perhaps his friend was in love with her. He figured that he would be justified to take his friend’s life for he loved him more than any one else in the world. He pictured to himself that deed and what he would do to his friend. The chief motive he confessed reluctantly: “I should abuse sexually his body.” With that fancy there is linked also the portrayal of immense sadness.

The two features he mentions today are represented in the Merchant of Venice. A scene which always excited him, representing transvestitism. Portia as judge and the Jew bent on carving out a pound of flesh. Shylock and Salome. The bloody head of John is obvious enough.

Today, too, he is in a hurry and must get through quickly. He is always relieved when the hour is over. This raises the suspicion that he is trying to cover up further revelations....

He relates particulars regarding his homicidal fancies against his friends. His favored phantasy is the thought of pushing his favored friend into an abyss. They often take walks on the seashore. At a certain spot the coast is very steep and rocky and a fall there would mean certain death. He is also obsessed with the reflection: what would he do afterwards? Run away? No ... he would jump after his friend to be united with the latter in death....

The next dream carries us deeply into the structure of his homosexuality. First he relates the dream as he had written it down and then he adds reluctantly the portion indicated as “additional.” The addition usually contains the most important features.

The dream just before falling asleep:

Place: the grotto across the Schönbrunn Castle. I was descending the rocky incline and reached the lowermost declivity. I was very much afraid of falling into the water basin. I was wondering what to do, and I had the feeling that back of me, instead of rocks there were high stairs which I could never climb up. Suddenly I found myself on level ground, beyond the water. An automobile passed me by noiselessly and with lightning rapidity disappearing specter-like in the bushes. I saw no driver and nobody else in the machine. It seemed very uncanny but presently I knew that I was at home and in my bed. I should have liked to keep on dreaming but the wish to hold on to what I had dreamed thus far prevailed over all other desires. I was afraid I should forget my phantasy so far as it had unfolded and that I should have nothing to report to my consultant.

Shortly afterwards I fell actually asleep and i dreamed a great deal. I have tried to recall some of the things in the morning. It seems noteworthy that the dreams were but lightly intimated rather than carried out; there was always still something more about to take place but the next dream picture intruded before the previous one was all done.

Additional: Once I found myself in a theater in the first row of a balcony. Tristan was being given for the occasion. Instead of the orchestra leader, André Rose was leading. A fine one-year volunteer, Einjahrig-Freiwilliger, back of me, in the second row, was singing Tristan in the style of the modern recital song. Next to me sat my aunt who is linked with memories of my kindergarten age. I had the unpleasant feeling that I was involuntarily sliding down towards the ground floor, and therefore I leaned heavily back in my seat stretching out my legs and trying to support myself by pressing my toes against the foot support (bed foot-board?). I had the uncanny feeling that the foot rest might give way and fall off like a piece of paste board. I begged my aunt to lift me carefully. I felt like a very sick person. Sitting again upright I felt well and refreshed and I was just in time to see the curtain drop over the stage and a number of persons appearing in front of it, among them several gentlemen in evening dress. Obviously the performance is being cancelled. The public broke into ironic applause, whistled and howled.

Another dream: Late at night in a big garden. Many people about to take their leave after an afternoon spent in irrelevant gossip. My parents were also among those present. My father was in a hurry to get to town. He leaves. It is very dark. Presently a station bell, the whistle of a locomotive. I shout into the night’s darkness not knowing whether any one hears me or not: he is lucky! He is just in time to catch the train. And I think of following in an hour. I am very tired. I am happy in my bed at home.

Sunny afternoon in a poor quarter of a suburb. Under a window of an apartment window there are a number of tin vessels which I know, belong to the woman above. An elderly woman is preoccupied with the vessels, holding each vessel up to the light, as if testing them, but I know that she is merely awaiting the opportunity to run off with them. A window is raised in the neighboring house, a woman calls out to the woman living in the apartment under whose window the vessels are lying, to watch out for the stranger. By that time I myself am standing in the owner’s room. She is just putting on her best toilette. The warning neighbor appears and scolds the vain woman who on account of her vanity neglects to watch out for her things.

Addition: I was in the next room. The woman had a little girl with her. I held my penis in hand pursued the two and wanted them to take it in their hand; and thus the ejaculation....

The woman’s hands disgusted me because they were dirty.

This is hardly the place for a complete analysis of the whole dream. The first part, the falling into a deep basin is a hypnagogic vision and represents the process of falling asleep, the descent into the depths of primordial man. The rapidly passing automobile, the danger. The representation of Tristan refers to a great passion for a queen. Schœnbrunn, the former Kaiser’s summer residence, refers to the parental home. Isolde is also a queen, who is lost forever for Tristan. Is it not rather remarkable that he should dream of Tristan and Isolde, the quintessential epic of heterosexual love? And does not the cancellation correspond precisely to his cryptic wish? The thought of a fall into the depths is continually recurring as well as the inhibitions about things not holding out (hence the steadying with the feet for support). The man in evening dress represents the love of a modern cultural man in contrast with a Tristan. He himself is Tristan, the onlooker and the singing Einjährig-Freiwillige. Finally another picture: parting, i.e., his father’s death: “He was lucky.” What is the meaning of that? He has caught the train on time! Recalling that in one of his previous dreams the subject was unable to catch the electric car, we understand that his father found time to attain his aim,—a tempo—while he himself is late. We shall be informed presently about the meaning of this aim. And back of all inhibitions another picture breaks forth: he runs after an old woman with his erect membrum (the child is a symbol for the genitalia. Cp., in this connection, The Language of Dreams, Dreams and Sex, Chapter, “Children in Dreams,” translation by James S. Van Teslaar, Badger, Gorham Press, Boston, 1922).

He is not a little surprised that his dreams portray heterosexual feelings. Heretofore he had paid no attention to his dreams.

I have not yet stated whom the old woman represents. He is asked to mention any woman that occurs to him and after some hesitation he states: my mother.

Here we come across one of the roots of his homosexuality, one that perhaps we anticipated. But thus far I avoided any inquiries about his attitude towards the mother.

What is the meaning of that portion of the dream which portrays a number of tin dishes? I perceive this as follows: He does not possess many treasures, it is all mere tin, but such as it is it all belongs to the woman above ... the mother. The neighbor warns the mother that another woman might rob her of her son’s affection. The mother is very vain and spends considerable time preparing her toilette.

The key to the dream rests in the pollution with which it ends and the deepest effect: the disgust on account of the dirty, unclean hands of the woman above.

We see that the pollution is slowly prepared. First there is a representation of the heterosexual love (Tristan). But his inner voices—the public—express themselves against that love, the latter is deprecated: there is whistling and shouting and ironic applause. Next the father is upon the scene of action. He is represented in the act of leaving. Other women appear,—the old woman, the neighbor. But the orgasm is achieved only through the “woman above” (“upstairs,”—Frau da oben, literally, woman above),—the mother. This form of pollution, which at bottom represents merely an unconscious onanism (unclean hands!) brings on a feeling of disgust in him.

The next dream portrays a scene in which a man talks about his son. The scene takes place in a lavatory. Probably this reproduces an infantile scene wherein he may have observed his father at the lavatory. The dream following that is much clearer. I reproduce here both:

I found myself in a lavatory compartment and I watched my “victim.” The man turned his back to me and spoke to himself about his son. I noticed that the woman guardian was keeping watch on me from the outside and I started to leave, grabbing my hat just as she was opening the door to catch me at my observation post. I acted as if I were unconcerned, quietly picked up my handkerchief on which I had knelt down, picked off the floor the various things of mine that were still strewn about, gloves, muffler, etc., and went off with the feeling that through my cool behavior I disarmed the woman of her suspicions and had avoided a public scandal....

I went upstairs to a wide open store. Half way across I saw the saleswoman standing in a corner. At the sight of her I am seized with tremendous bowel cramps. I turned around and defecate publicly in the room. The woman over there will not see me?

This dream reminds him of the childhood incident already mentioned: When he was two years of age he was playing out of doors with another boy who prepared himself to move his bowels close to the street, in the open. Now he admits also that his own libido is greatly increased if he imagines he is watched during defecation. This is a typical instance of sexual infantilism. He is not only voyeur; he is also exhibitionist.

The first dream discloses the fear that the mother, the guardian, might find out his scatological tendencies. In the second, the woman upstairs was the onlooker during an infantile scene. It reproduces undoubtedly a frequent scene of childhood.

He has carried out a number of homosexual acts at public baths. In Denmark the men bathe together in steam rooms. Thus he had opportunity to permit himself bodily contact with others to the extent of inducing ejaculatio. He must also add something to yesterday’s dream about defecation. Once at the seashore he heard a man groan in the lavatory. He climbed upon the side wall and saw the man masturbate. This so excited him that he climbed down at once and also masturbated. The stranger revenged himself by looking on in his turn and that increased tremendously the subject’s libido.

His dreams today are very characteristic.

I am in a carriage and I am playing with an infant in swaddling clothes. I would gladly be rid of it. A man advises me to pack the child in a tin box,[39] and I actually do to.

Interpretation: he wants to be rid of his infantilism; he preserves it in a tin box. Compromise between the two trends. The next dream relates about a minister of the gospel who stands before a big hole in the ground and who interprets that hole to mean that asceticism is not a possible ideal. It is necessary to masturbate, at least occasionally. There were roots in that hole, which looked like hair. Next he is with his mother in a carriage. The mother turns into the holy Madonna or the holy Zara(?)

The earth, too, stands for the mother: mother earth. The hole refers to both, birth and death. One comes from the mother and returns to the mother. The mother appears again as the holy one, and as the Czarina, hence the mystifying Zara. The father is the Czar, just as in the Tristan dream he is represented by the king. Further meaning is obvious.

Hairs recall his peculiar attitude. Women’s hairs are abhorrent to him. His mother has long blond hair. The father was very hairy. Formerly all hairy men were abhorrent to him. Downy, young, feminine men are his ideal. He is continually seeking woman in man....

He reverts once more to the dream about the hole in the ground. He now recalls that dream very clearly.

I am again a pupil at school and I am being conducted to confession along with the other school mates. We stand in a wide, round amphitheater scooped out of the ground. The natural wall rises to a height of about 2 meters, all around. Above it there stands a wonderful temple-like edifice. A monk points to the wet spots upon the earthen walls and compares them to the erotic thoughts, which are also not to be rooted out of the believer’s conscience. I notice a bunch of roots on the wall and involuntarily I think of pudendal hair. The monk condemns asceticism.

A dream full of religious meaning. Already in some of the previous dreams the woman “upstairs,” or “above,” was perceived through religious over-determination as mother Mary to whom alone his love belongs and which he therefore must not squander on any earthly woman. He sees his grave which like a memento mori admonishes him to regard this life as a preparation for the next.

Woman seems to be here the quintessence of sinfulness. Now we understand why the woman upstairs had a little child by her. It was little Jesus. He has soiled his pure faith. The brain which holds his belief (the earthen wall!) is likewise stained with his sinful erotic thoughts.

The great wall surrounding the place to a height of a couple of meters symbolizes all the inhibitions. He himself is the monk, he had a passing desire to become an ecclesiastic, he is a heterosexual ascete....

Last night many dreams of going through urinals. In one urinal he found a man who instead of a phallus had a vagina.

Dissolute dreams. Among others a dream that he podicem lambit a friend. He also entertains consciously fancies of like character.... Further dreams of mutual masturbation with a strange man. Finally the scraps of dreams culminate in a lengthier one in which he finds himself in the company of the girl he was very fond of as a boy. The struggle against the heterosexual tendencies goes on throughout the night and finally he is conquered.

Obvious resistance against the uncovering of the heterosexual tendencies.

One dream out of a large number deserves to be reproduced:

I go on a walk with mother. We are tender with one another and she tells me sweet words. I pluck wonderful anemones from a river and want to make a garland to crown my mother with it. But the petals fall off and only the empty green stems remain in my hand.

Any one familiar with the symbolism of plucking flowers (vid. my Dreams and Sex: The Language of Dreams, translated by Dr. James S. Van Teslaar, Badger, Gorham Press, Boston, 1922, Publisher) will readily recognize that this is a reference to an indulgence of an erotic nature. These love pats lead to empty stems. The love cannot come to blossoms or fruition.

He dwells on his relations with his mother. It is virtually a marriage without any erotic elements. He does not tolerate his mother’s tendernesses and he has asked her to refrain. There is now between them genuine shyness. Erotic matters are never so much as touched upon. Against his incestuous leanings he secures himself by the wall of an apparent aloofness. But they live together, they go out together, they share every enjoyment. His mother is a woman who has a grip on his whole life. And at bottom he is not angry because she has interfered with his other friendship. He understands her, that is, he sympathizes with her. That friendship was an attempt to free himself of the mother. But the mother instinctively did the right thing when she stepped in between her son and his friend. He does not at bottom care to be liberated from the slavery of his affection. He allows himself to be led about and to be treated as a child. He talks as if the love and the chain were disagreeable to him. Both trends—towards the mother and away from her—are active in his soul: bipolarity.

The treatment should improve his neurotic condition only but should not interfere with his attitude towards his mother. He dreams that he is well and that he tells his mother, now he is all well and they are going to be happier together than ever.

In connection with a dream another love affair comes to surface, dating some 16 years back. He courted a certain girl and sent her some poems. He thinks it was mere play, an attempt to “imagine” that he was also capable of loving girls. That is how he endeavors to dismiss lightly his heterosexual tendencies. But he thinks that the love poems were irrelevant. He also composed poems to his mother, when he was away from home for a short time:

“Du meines keuschen Herzens Allgebieterin,

Der ich mich neige in tiefer Demut ...”

“You, mistress of my chaste heart,

To whom I bow in deep humility ...”

The verses are full of yearning and passion. His blood calls for her, his heart is filled only with yearning for her. These are the utterances of a man who has lost his head by falling in love.

This case illustrates plainly the manner in which monosexuality leads to homosexuality. But the subject himself did not want to recognize any of these relations. All the powers of sublimation at his disposal he had turned into his love for the mother. Therefore he had to cling to a portion of his mysophilia (dirt compulsion). What he overdid on one side in the way of cleanliness was compensated for on the other by a sinking into filth. It is noteworthy that he does not care to be cleared of his homosexuality. He looks upon it as a protection and as something that sets him apart from other men. This again shows the hopelessness of any therapeutic endeavors in most cases of this type.

Since taking account of his dreams he is astonished how often heterosexual excitations come to the surface. Last night he dreamed, first, that he was with a naked woman, of wonderful build and that he in vaginam et in anum immisit his finger.

Further, another remarkable dream, which played an important rôle in the solution of his neurosis:

I am with mother at the Opera. A long hallway at the end of which one obtains a view of Vienna. One sees the wonderful St. Stephen’s Church, a fine cloud like a smoke or like a fine powdery water spray over its tower. The Opera is changed. Instead of Don Juan, the Donna carissima.

Already the first dream indicated a definite trend towards woman and now the change of program discloses the source of his neurosis. I ask him for a description of the woman in the first dream. He did not see her face at all. He merely saw the wonderful bewitching white body.

Such dreams—figures without faces—are very frequent and serve to hide the beloved person and to prevent recognition. I know dreamers who have pollutions with such half figures. The face is never visible. Often only a portion of the body. Through the second dream we may assume that the figure represents the mother. Otherwise it is hardily possible to explain why the face should have been subjected to the dream’s censorship.

The second dream belongs to the category of maternal body fancies. He is within the mother’s womb. The long passage he associates with: life’s pathway. It is in fact the pathway through which he came into life. Stephen’s tower is a phallic symbol. The smoking room, ejaculatio or mictio. It is a representation of the illusion that he is within the maternal body and is able to observe from that point of vantage the process of generation. The dream becomes even more transparent when we learn that his father’s name is Stephen.[40]

Now his sexual infantilism becomes intelligible. He is under the spell of Mutterleibsphantasie, maternal body phantasy. Every lavatory becomes for him the symbol of the maternal body. There he watches the man urinating as he might have watched the father in the maternal body if he had had enough intelligence to do so as an embryo. It seems unbelievable that intelligent persons should become victims of so puerile a phantasy. Various facts always uphold the sense of such a phantasy. In this particular instance there was dislike for, and unpleasant sensations in, closed rooms, also a series of paraphiliac trend which found their explanation only through that phantasy. He revelled in the thought of permitting himself to be besprinkled with the spermatic fluid by his beloved male friend; he had a craving membrum erectum amati viri fellare; his urolagnic and coprolagnic proclivities, too, were dominated by the same phantasy. He behaved as if he were still in the maternal body.

But the dream declares clearly that a change of program is taking place in the play of his life. Don Juan becomes a Donna—Carissima,—she who is most dear to him. He has changed programs; and the love for the father he has transferred to his mother. He is within the maternal body,—he himself is the mother. He seeks himself, he is his dearest woman, he loves the womanly in himself. We have here the never absent love of the homosexual for himself—narcissism.

Various recollections come to surface, all showing alike that his earliest predisposition was distinctly heterosexual. Thus, for instance, at five years of age he fell in love with a girl, wanted to marry her, and called her his bride. We hear only of three heterosexual episodes belonging to his later life. It is not yet clear how this complete turning away from woman came about. Further inquiries reveal dreams of which I can only give a part. Thus he dreams:

I study for an hour. My textbook is on various physical experiments, further on it turns into history. There is something in it about Bavarian history. The year 4005 plays an important rôle. The whole thing ends with a fairy tale about three pines which stand on a winter’s night before the house and signify three dead women.

Later I act successfully as an imitator of women.

The figure 4005 brings the following associations: 00 is the sign for lavatory; 45 is the opus number of one of his favorite opera scores, the Salome of Richard Strauss; 4 and 5 are the bad marks at school.

The Salome of Strauss and a previous dream lead us to his sadistic trends. It becomes progressively clearer that his aboriginal sadism was extraordinarily great. To this day he revels in phantasies about sexual crimes, violent murders, etc. He toyed with the plan of killing himself as well as his whole family. Any opposition at home immediately suggests to him thoughts of murder. His original attitude towards woman, too, was sadistic. The chief motive of Salome is the severed head of the prophet. Also the pound of flesh in Shylock, in the first dream, refers to this trend; finally the dream about the bedbug. His religious trend set in early, thus protecting him against the wild beast within him. At six years of age he played that he was a preacher and he had his own altar. He fled from woman because he was not sure of himself....

He has a large number of idiosyncrasies which may be explained through a repressed sadism. He cannot eat peaches because their skins resemble human skin; he cannot tolerate the skin on parboiled milk, it brings on disgust and nausea; he often turns against meat and for a long time he confined himself to vegetarianism. Meat he calls animal carcass. The thought of a menstruating woman is particularly repulsive to him. All associations with blood are strongly affective, partly in a positive and partly in a negative way.

What is the meaning of the three pines which symbolize dead women in the dream? Has he lost three female ideals? He associates with “Ein Fichtenbaum stand einsam im Norden auf kahler Höhe,” etc., “a pine tree stood lonely on the bleak heights of the north,” the famous poem by Heine. That pine tree dreams of palms in the glowing climate of the Southern Country. There are no further associations. The theme “dead women” is met with considerable resistance.

I pass over a number of days which amounted merely to a preparation for the coming solution; and I shall report merely the most significant of the dream material.

Very important appears the following dream:

Standing with father at a wide stream. A little white steamboat departs from us, turning and twisting like a reptile. I would have liked very much to be on it (though I do not know where I could have found place, it was like a microcosm). The ship is delayed and now we have to return by train. That the ship would have made better time is an opinion I dare not share with father.

Next day I enter a grotto through which a number of others are wandering ahead of me. The pathway is tortuous and leads upwards. Who among my acquaintances is joining me I do not know. My whole attention is centered on snakes which I carry on a cord. They have very friendly heads, yet somehow I have the impression they can bite. I say to some one close by that their poison glands have already been removed. Eventually I reach a house in full daylight and at the top they turn into dogs who escape my control and quickly clatter down the deep stairway. Presently they are back and allow meekly to be held in leash.

At home I find a package of handkerchiefs neatly wrapped in tissue paper.

This is a combination of a spermatozoon dream and a maternal body phantasy. The stream in which the tiny boat is moving about, the life stream, the stream of spermatic fluid carries a particular spermatozoon, himself. He, now grown up, wants to revert back to the tiny thing, wiggling like a reptile. He wants to be tiny again, not a child merely, a spermatozoon (Samenfaden). He is dissatisfied with life and would like to begin his life all over. The path leads from the stream into a grotto cave,—the maternal body. At the same time the dream symbolizes his whole life, which leads him upwards through pitfalls and dangers to the sunshiny heights. His thoughts are represented here as snakes. They have friendly heads, to be sure, i. e., sin beckons, but he holds them captive. All sins are overcome, all snakes are captive and wear muzzles. The shiny house is the church. Thus this dream shows the life’s beginning and end.

The next dream about handkerchiefs, becomes intelligible when we find out that he masturbates into his handkerchiefs. The packing in tissue paper shows that the specific masturbatory phantasy is covered up.

The dream is concerned with the father. During the last few days he has been thinking a great deal about his father. He tells me about that:

“I have had some hard days and I only see now how strongly I was fixed on father and what a tremendous rôle he has played in my life. Yesterday I felt in me all the strong hatred that I bore for years against father.”

“Why did you hate your father?”

“In the first place because he made me and passed on to me his weakly characteristics. Such men should have no children. I have taken over all his morbid predispositions. Then I hated him because he parted me from my friend through that letter which he wrote at mother’s behest.”

“Then you ought to hate your mother. Is it not strange that you should condone the same conduct in the mother but not in the father? You seem to appreciate your mother’s side but not your father’s.”

“Naturally, when you put it that way I see clearly that I was unfair to father. The letter was but an excuse for the great hatred. I recall with shuddering his last day. I had the feeling that father was afraid of me. He gazed at me continually with his great glassy eyes while holding on to mother’s hand. I felt something like jealousy over mother,—now I know that I was always jealous. My maternal body phantasy means, of course, that I want to be present at the parental love act. I want to replace the father in mother’s life. As a small child I loved him very devotedly and I suffered on account of his coolness. He was immeasurably loving and devoted; nevertheless I felt that there was something lacking.”

He looked for tendernesses from his father. To this day he indulges in two phantasies during his sexual acts. He is the boy watching his father during coitus. That is the particular lavatory phantasy when he watches elderly men. He permits himself to be used as a receptaculum seminis by a favored person. (Strong desire to carry on fellatio on his teachers or to subject himself to pederasty.) He is within the maternal body und wird vom Vater päderastiert oder felliert. Or else, he himself is the father, he identifies himself with the latter, and seeks young boys who in that case stand for himself.

But we see that these phantasies differ as widely as possible from reality. He is unable to secure his contact with reality, because he is continually under the sway of the maternal body phantasy, as shows by his peeping into lavatories.

His love for the father proves to be the strongest root of his homosexuality. He wanted to assume the mother’s place in the father’s life. In his phantasies he is either the father or the mother; he has not attained his own individuality. He loves himself either with maternal or with paternal feelings.

I record the following dream among many others. It shows us his typical attitude towards the mother:

Am going with mother to the country where we expect to spend a few days to recuperate ourselves. Locality: forest neighborhood. The journey, stopping station, roadway familiar partly from actuality partly through precious dreams. Wonderful woods with fragrant blooming flowers. But the blooms show numerous brown spots of decay, as after excessive rains. Elder bushes badly torn up by the weather and by plunderers. The path leads to an incline which offers a view of the numerous villas in the valley. I find that we have wandered off, in order to reach the place where we proposed to stay for a while; we should have taken the path to the right half way up the road.

This dream represents a love whose bloom is decaying. They have wandered off (note the double meaning of the expression, vergehen), and they are off the right path.

His past is illumined not only by his dreams. Among his youthful compositions he finds a poem which portrays clearly a paternal body phantasy and speaks longingly of the time when he was yet “unformed and rested quietly in his father’s loins.”...

The revelations in the course of the following days bring to light new associations. His reveries continually slight the immediate past and carry him back over a number of generations. He is a person of wonderful ancestry, he is not at all the son of his father, he is a child whom gypsies have changed in the cradle, he has fallen into the midst of his family by accident.

It turns out that two lives were much talked of at home and that has had a great deal to do with determining his life course and specifically his fear of woman. In the first place, there was his father’s life. The man had been previously married to a woman whom he caught in a breach of marital faithfulness and it led him to fight a duel. He carried a scar on his forehead as a memento. Then, an uncle took his life when he found out that his wife whom he considered loyal, proved unfaithful.

These lessons stood before his eyes already when he was a mere boy. They served as terrible warnings: beware of woman!

During the next days his fear of woman is the chief theme of his associations. His father’s and his uncle’s fate stand before him as a perpetual warning. Already as a small child he had absorbed very clearly the thought: one must beware of women! His mother did everything to fix permanently this fear in his mind.

But every fear is the fear of self. This fear of women must have a deeper determinant. The deeper relations are indicated by the following dream:

I am on the street and it is towards evening. The roadbed in front of me is badly torn up. A wagon drives by; it rolls past at dusk and the farther end of the street is already plunged in darkness. Horse and driver will not be able to see that the road is torn. A powerful bear jumps up to warn the horse, the driver draws tight his reins, the animal turns around at the same time holding his head anxiously away from the torn pavement until he finally reaches again the straight road. Before the wagon disappears into the night the powerful bear jumps once more at it.

I am tremendously roused to think that such wild animals are sent out as warning. There might be small children in the wagon who would be frightened to death.

Every statement in this dream is a psychic disclosure. The dream records his life’s journey. A portion of the street is torn and impassable. He can only go through the homosexual pathway. The heterosexual is so broken up as to be unusable. It is dark and he might easily meet with disaster in his life’s journey over this point. The darkness symbolizes the forgetting of the aboriginal determinants; the driver is consciousness, the horses are the instincts.

A bear warns him of the dangers of the torn-up road. He is angered at this form of warning. The reference to small children shows that the warnings date back to childhood, when he was actually threatened with a bear.

“There may be small children in the wagon who would be frightened to death,” records the dream. As a child he has heard repeatedly about his uncle’s suicide, because of the wife’s faithlessness. In the depths of his soul this story could not but act as a perpetual warning against woman. The story of his father’s duel, too, and the latter’s scar on the forehead influenced his childhood and filled him with fear of woman.[41] It made him resolve to submit to no woman. And is not hatred the surest self-defence against the dangers of love?

Who or what is the mysterious bear in the dreams? Naturally,—like every figure in the dream, it is the dreamer himself. There is the power of a wild beast in his breast. We recall that one of his dreams was staged at Schönbrunn, the Zoölogical Garden of Vienna, where the wild beasts may be seen. We recall Shylock, the pound of flesh, and the various sadistic determinants of his neurosis.

We now approach the kernel of his homosexual neurosis which turns out to consist of a powerful protective wall against his criminal self. His attitude towards woman is characterized by a tremendous hatred. He is a Lustmörder, the wild bear who attacks women, who strangles them and would drink their blood. The bear represents his own image and a terrible warning.

Beware of the women! It will turn you into a murderer. Better remain a child, enjoy whatever brings gratification to a child. Woe to you if your life’s journey should lead you through the open road where all wild passions lurk which have already filled you as a child! Oh, better if you had never been born, or if you could begin life all over....

Blood is his true requirement. Spermatic fluid, urine, fæces,—all these are substitutions representing blood.[42]

Now we begin to understand why he must not be a man and why he wants to be a woman. His great aggressive trend is linked with the notion of maleness. The passive attitude, suffering, patience, is identified with femaleness.

After these revelations, which were supported by a large mass of memories, the patient stayed away for a few days. Then he reappeared and told me that he had successful intercourse with a puella publica. He thought he might be able to overcome his homosexuality. But he received a telegram recalling him to Denmark.

I have not heard anything about his subsequent history. Did he become bisexual? Did he overcome his infantilism? Did the torn portion of the road become passable at last?

I am unable to state anything definite. But we have obtained here a clear insight into the psychogenesis of homosexuality and we have seen that many determinants are at work shaping the original predisposition.

Let us briefly mention the most important data in this clinical history. It must be looked upon really as but a fragment of an analysis. But it leads us to the core of the neurosis and shows us the subject’s inner predisposition, so sharply contrasting with his conscious attitude.

This man carries within himself the aboriginal instincts of mankind. His dreams carry him back to the paternal body and back to the prehistoric phase of his existence not without reason. He carries within himself the engrams of thousands of years, the remnants of the wildest instinct of primordial man. The phylogenesis of his being corresponds with his ontogenesis. What does he lack for a typical primordial being? In his dreams and phantasies he shows the terrible blood lust, the imperativeness of wishes, the brutal egoism of the periods of long past. Even man’s primordial toleration of filth is not absent; this subject’s history discloses urolagnistic and coprophagic tendencies.

Consider the contrast between his instinctive and his cultural self. He is a man of refinement and a marked personality, a genuine artist, a man who appreciates the beautiful, a man who is transfixed before a representation of Tristan, or before a statue and whom the beauties of nature plunge into ecstasy; a man who seems capable of adding some day to the world’s art possessions a worthy contribution.

This case proves most decidedly that my view that homosexuality represents a regression is correct. Other physicians will prefer to speak of degeneration. Indeed,—but this subject has no sign of physical degeneration, there is no pathologic family history such as might be regarded as predisposing to degeneration. One might as well consider all artists degenerates inasmuch as all artists show the primordial cravings which we find in our patients. The very fact that all human progress is brought about through individuals who represent regressions should teach us more carefully the term degeneration and to apply it only to the cases in which the conjunction of physical signs of degeneration with moral inferiority leaves no doubt.

We trace here the operation of that primordial hatred which threatens to smother the mind’s safety valve as it presses for expression. A portion of this hatred may turn into love and lead the subject into the pathway which makes prophets, religious reformers, philanthropists or champions of the people. Another part of it persists and strengthens infantile trends.

What is Sigma’s conscious attitude? Love for men, indifference towards women, hatred of the father, a bipolar vacillation towards his mother,—love and hate![43] But unconsciously he loves his father and hates all women,—perhaps because he must love them. His ordinary attitude requires the projection of his love feeling in its bipolar form upon all the objectives of his affection. One loves and hates at the same time. But he hates only the women. How has this primordial hatred been attained by the subject? Why is he incapable of assuming the usual bipolar attitude towards women?

If we go far back into his childhood we find that he was in love with his father and jealous of his mother. At that time all women were possible rivals in love for the father. He himself wanted to be a woman, the woman to love his father. This father Imago he seeks to this day in all his teachers, older friends, in his superiors. He must necessarily stand in a homosexual relationship towards them so long as he is unable to overcome his infantile constellations. Everything peculiar about his attachment to the mother is traceable back to his identification with the father. From the latter he has derived his quiet, timid, patient temperament,—that attitude of passivity which really masks a tremendous aggressivity. That infantile attitude determines the survival of all infantile excitations in his vita sexualis.

How may the cure be effected? The subject must be made to understand that he will never really carry out the crimes which contact with women suggest to his unconscious. He must learn to apply love in its bipolar form alike to men and women. His plethora of cravings should enable him to awaken within himself the hitherto badly neglected love for woman. Before the analysis all his erotic trends were directed towards male friends. The cure leads through approach of woman as friend. First she is a friend, and subsequently—after much struggle and searching—the beloved. He must learn to play the rôle of father to some strange woman.

Is analysis the proper means? Who, in the present state of our knowledge, knows another? What can we accomplish through commands, punishment, formal training, or hypnosis? Primordial love achieves supremacy only through the exacting process of self-knowledge and through the recognition of the primordial instincts, including the primordial hatred. The subject has concentrated his primordial love feeling wholly upon his own person.

Like all homosexuals he loves only himself. This peculiarity, too, he shares with all primordial beings. Does primordial man know any other love than love of self?[44]

I have already pointed out that urnings always seek themselves first and assume subsequently the rôle of another person; or else they seek in the male different variants of their own childhood. The same is true pari passu also of the urlinds. To be in love always means to find one’s self in another. But why do urnings not find themselves in the female Imago? This question cannot be covered with a generalization that will hold good for all cases. In the two last cases the fact that the subjects regarded themselves as the reverse of handsome played an important rôle. They had a sense of inferiority with regard to woman and a feeling of envy. Self-love induced fear of defeat by woman on account of lack of attractiveness. How could they feel confident of conquering woman in view of their ugliness? How could they play the rôle of a Don Juan to which their latent homosexuality might otherwise have driven them? Among men physical beauty does not matter. What is important is the size of the genitalia.

If love capacity be measured by the size of one’s genitalia, the patient Delta (Case 83) could measure himself against any one. He took ridiculous pride in his great penis,—a pride shown by many men. His whole sexuality was centered upon the symbol of masculinity. With Sigma, with whom the penis played but a secondary rôle, the case was different. Sadger who sees in narcissism the love of one’s genitalia would find his view corroborated by the history of the first case but not by the second, the subject in the latter instance showing not the least interest in his penis.

The first of these cases portrays the mechanisms described by Adler, the second barely a trace. This shows how easy it is to build certain assumptions through a one-sided selection of cases. It is obvious that every earnest investigator must come upon certain aspects of the truth. What we obtain always are mere sectional views of homosexuality. A cross section yields merely a corresponding view of the picture. Only the apposition of the various sectional views can furnish us the proper perspective for reconstructing the whole picture of homosexuality.

Infantile reminiscences in both cases were partial determinants which lead to a lasting fear of women and to withdrawal from heterosexual love. Delta had witnessed an unhappy marriage as a child, Sigma heard a great deal about faithlessness and about woman’s lack of loyalty. Both shared also a strong sadism, a feature which we have observed in all cases of homosexuality thus far analyzed.

We are thus led to a synthetic formulation of male homosexuality which, in reversed terms, holds true also of women:

The homosexual neurosis is a flight back to one’s own sex induced by a sadistic predisposition towards the opposite sex.

VII

THE NEUROTIC’S INABILITY TO LOVE—THE NARCISSISM OF THE HOMOSEXUAL—PROGRESSIVE SEXUAL DIFFERENTIATION WITH THE GROWTH OF CULTURE—THE POSITION OF THE HOMOSEXUAL IN THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN SEXES—THE SOCIAL CAUSES OF HOMOSEXUALITY—HOMOSEXUALITY AMONG GREEKS—INCREASE OF POLAR SEXUAL TENSION—VARIOUS THERAPEUTIC MEASURES—HYPNOSIS—MOLL’S ASSOCIATION THERAPY—PSYCHOANALYSIS—THE PATH TOWARDS CURE AND THE CONDITIONS FOR RECOVERY.

Im Hass ist Furcht, ein grosser, guter Teil Furcht. Wir Furchtlosen aber, wir geistigeren Menschen dieses Zeitalters, wir kennen unseren Vorteil gut genug, um gerade als die Geistigeren in Hinsicht auf dieser Zeit ohne Furcht zu Leben. Man wird uns schwerlich köpfen, einsperren, verbrennen; man wird nicht einmal unsere Bücher verbieten und verbrennen. Man ist seines Faches um den Preis, auch das Opfer seines Faches zu sein.

—Nietzsche.

VII

Hatred means fear, it contains a great, big part of fear. But we the Fearless ones, we the more intellectual men of our age, precisely as the more emancipated ones, with reference to our age, are well aware of our advantage of living without fear. We shall be bitterly pursued, jailed, burned at the stake; our books will more than once fall under the ban and be burned. One is a man after one’s own kind only at the risk of paying the price demanded of one’s kind.

—Nietzsche.

We have seen with what powerful hatred the homosexual encounters his environment. Whether he turns his hatred towards the other sex, his own, or, under certain circumstances, against himself, he remains the inveterate hater vainly trying to reconcile the feeling of man’s aboriginal nature with the ethical requirements of later culture. The question rises whether he is at all capable of loving. One may point out that in a certain sense he does love his mother, father, some friend or that perhaps he even has a “sweetheart.” But it only seems that he loves them! The truth is that he is unable to love. That peculiarity he shares with all artists who, in fact, are also incapable of loving. I repeat myself and reproduce below my statements on this point as incorporated in my work “Die Träume der Dichter.”[45]

All my inquiries into the psychogenesis of these disorders have led me back to the manifestations of hatred. Already in my work, Die Sprache Des Traumes (the Language of Dreams), I have pointed out that antagonism (or hatred) is man’s primary feeling responsible for the development of neuroses in those ethical-minded persons who still preserve strongly their aboriginal instinctive cravings. “The neurosis is the endopsychic perception of hatred in terms of a guilty conscience” (The Language of Dreams, page 563 of the 1st German edition; English version of the latter edition is now in preparation by the translator of the present volume.)

I believe I have proven successfully that the homosexual is a neurotic, that he represents a type of regression to man’s primordial instincts; and that homosexuality is a sort of compromise healing process in the mental conflict between the abnormal, raw cravings, and the cultural need for their suppression.

But we must not think that, like the average neurotic, the homosexual is incapable of love. Only, all his love is a love centered exclusively on self. Yet all cultural progress consists of the sublimation of self-love into social love. That is the meaning of the majestic injunction: love thy neighbor as thyself!

Since the homosexual loves only himself he seeks only himself in others. That, however, is a feature of all love. What appears to be the most extreme manifestation of altruistic feeling is at bottom but the outcome of egoistic cravings. Love is but egoism potentialized. Every neurotic suffers of narcissism. He is a slave to self and cannot escape that bondage. The homosexual loves, or appears to love, his own sex, but even superficial examination shows this to be but part of his narcissism. In truth he loves neither man nor woman. He has to overcome a hatred stronger than the corresponding feeling in the normal. That hatred is the theme of his childhood. As perpetual infant, he fails to sublimate sufficiently that hatred, or to fix it upon objectives considered proper in our current cultural development.

All who investigate homosexuality find an early awakening of the sexual instinct. It is perhaps the greatest social function of sexual instinct, next to reproduction, to provide for the conquest of hatred. Though the selfish child becomes a loving person, the child’s love is still entirely self-centered. The child loves the persons who serve it. In vain one tries to point out that it ought to love also the teachers who are severe but mean well, that parents must punish in order to teach! This view belongs to the adult mind and is what enables the adult to forget the childish notions of revenge which he entertained as a child whenever he suffered punishment which he looked upon as unjust before his higher sense of responsibility had asserted itself. But in the neurotics, including homosexuals, sexual precocity brings early to surface cravings which involve the love of others; they are therefore inclined to renounce or modify their hatred. The proportionate share of hatred against some beloved person is withdrawn and turned against the others. These infantile feeling-attitudes may undergo a second transformation in later years. A boy may love the father and hate the mother, because she is his rival in the father’s affection. At the same time the sisters may be hated because they draw to themselves a certain quantum of the father’s love, which the self-centered jealous boy wishes to secure exclusively for himself. Later the mother and sisters are loved, and the father recedes to the background.

Jealousy is an infantile feeling. Its appearance in later years always signifies a regression to infantile attitudes. The homosexual spreads his hatred from one persons to the whole sex under the form of jealousy. Let us assume that he loves the father insofar as he is at all capable of loving. The mother is looked upon as a rival. With the formulation of that attitude, all other women become likewise potential rivals, capable of robbing him of his father’s affection. Therefore he hates all women,—the subject is on the road to homosexual neurosis. At the onset of homosexuality stands jealousy and the latter, therefore, preserves its infantile value throughout life.

I have already mentioned that it is the function of sexuality to conquer hatred. But that task is never completely carried out. An eternal rivalry persists between the two sexes giving rise to the so-called “struggle between the sexes.” I have no doubt that man’s capacity for loving has increased in the course of our racial evolution. What subtle refinements our erotism has undergone! How complicated the psychic processes displayed by the man and the woman in love! But the antagonism or hatred which divides the two sexes has grown apace. Modern love owes its profuse affectivity to this conquest of hatred, this periodic regression back to the feeling-attitude of hatred and its renewed subdual.

The question arises: Have we in fact any proof that the polar tension between man and woman has diminished? He who fails to see a proof of this in the improvement of woman’s social position and her acquisition of equal rights may turn to biologic facts. These biologic data prove that the sexual differentiation between man and woman has increased with growth of culture. In primitive times woman was not so womanly, the man less manly, than the man and woman of civilization. Fehlinger[46] compares the primitive peoples with the Europeans and shows that the secondary sexual characters are much more pronounced among the civilized peoples than among the savages. Subtler stimuli are required to excite the domesticated sexual instinct.

That sexual differentiation is more pronounced among Europeans is shown also by the fact that the period from the onset of sexual adolescence to the attainment of complete physical growth is more prolonged among civilized peoples than among the colored races. The primitive races show a great similarity between male and female types and that is most pronounced among the various pygmean races. The latter are characterized by an infantile physique, which, as is well known, is sexually but little differentiated.

Since the homosexual represents retrogressively a stage of racial development during which the bisexual character of the organism was more pronounced, he carries ab ovo the inclination to project himself unto both sexes. He passes into the world of sexual differentiation as into some strange, inimical, and, to his mind, incomprehensible realm of existence. He belongs to the primordial period in which a man, if necessary, could have replaced the woman. His engrams perceive the homosexual feeling as something as natural as if he had come a few hundreds of thousands of years sooner into the world. But into the cultural age in which love plays such a tremendous rôle he brings with him also the antagonism of bygone ages. That feeling of hatred becomes a powerful lever in the struggle between the sexes. Physically he stands between man and woman but he is not suited for the rôle of mediator because he has not learned to subdue the eternal struggle between male and female within his breast. The love-attitude which is a mixture of love and hatred, he splits into its two components directing one separately towards each of the two sexes. Towards woman he turns his primordial hatred, while man he loves as a representative of culture. When he is grown up that deadly hatred is repressed and stands a hidden stumblingblock between himself and woman. Unable to be a complete man, unable to extricate himself from that infantile feeling-attitude, he also hates the woman in him. He overvalues manliness and in his excessive appraisal of it turns to it with his whole love. The hatred of all women corresponds to his scorn of the woman in himself,—a reaction due to his personal inability to overcome the woman in his own make up and to become a complete man. Finally in the course of the continuous struggle between the man and the woman within his breast he reaches the curious compromise of accepting the feeling that he is a woman. That is: he excepts a single woman from his hatred ... himself. In that manner he becomes a transvestite. He may be active heterosexually, he may, apparently, have overcome his homosexuality, yet, as penance for his hatred, he puts on the clothes which had seemed once so hateful to him. The latent homosexual becomes a transvestite only on account of his guilty conscience.

Our investigations have proven that homosexuality has no uniform psychogenesis. But all cases showed an archaic emphasis on bisexuality. Although I speak of regressive manifestations I should not care to see that conception confused with the notion of “hereditary taint” or of “degeneration.” For my investigations of artists have convinced me that they present the same tendencies as the homosexuals. They, too, are neurotics. In fact, the number of homosexual artists, even of homosexual persons of rare genius, as given by Hirschfeld, is impressive. I hold the view that every great creative work has been and is being achieved through these regressions. It is as if nature attempted to rejuvenate herself and once more to absorb creative energy by dipping down into the primordial source of all energy. It might be more proper, perhaps, to speak of them as dégénérés supérieurs, in the sense of Magnan. It seems to me that true degeneration, as seen in the stigmata of physical decay, and which manifests itself in an insufficient adjustment to the ethical requirements of society, represents rather the terminal point of an exhausted stem, gravitating downwards, while the neurotic represents a progression. Degeneration and regressions certainly have a great deal in common. But similar causes often bring on varying results. I need refer only to the well-known laws of inbreeding, for instance. The summation of good qualities through the intermarriage of relatives may lead to the birth of a true genius, but the same step causes more or less degeneration by reinforcing morbid tendencies.

I see in such an atavistic tendency the predisposition to homosexuality, common to all neurotics. Perhaps organic changes, such as I have found in more or less pronounced form in most homosexuals also play a certain rôle. Persons of pronounced bisexual type do not necessarily become homosexual, but this does not disprove that the organic condition may be a factor. Here is where I agree with Hirschfeld’s “intermediate sex” theory. But beyond this point our standpoints diverge. The organic factors remain yet to be investigated. We are but at the beginning of our studies of organic bisexuality. The ascertainment of unilateral hermaphroditism, it seems to me, will play a particularly important rôle in future investigations. Already the data obtained through the examination of large groups of persons, for which the World War furnished me an opportunity, impressed me with the fact, that contrary sexual Anlage is to be found particularly often on the left side of the body. (In men this shows itself in the form of unilateral gynecomasty, scant hair growth, asymmetry of the face, the left side being more pronouncedly of feminine type.) The finding of infantile features must also be considered of significance in the diagnosis of an organic predisposition to homosexuality.

These interesting facts do not relieve us of the need of establishing the psychogenesis of homosexuality on a sound basis. But the multitude of conditions which may lead to homosexuality admit no hard-and-fast line. Every case is a problem of its own; these are the very cases where we must carefully individualize and guard ourselves against hindering future research by laying down any hard-and-fast rules.

A question which no investigator of sexual problems has thus far satisfactorily answered, now suggests itself: Why is it that homosexuality and particularly male homosexuality has become the object of such terrific social abhorrence? Why is our penal code so backward in that respect?

We can understand the reasons for that only in the light of the historic aspect of the problem. It is a striking fact that although female homosexuality always appears along with the male, it is not nearly so abhorred but is rather tolerated under the cover of silence. Austria is the only European country in which sexual intimacy between women is a penal offence. Probably the difference in this attitude bears some relation to the problem of reproduction, since man, as the fertilizing agent, plays a more active rôle than the woman.[47] The seed, that most precious possession with which a man may fructify several women, must not be squandered.

The decided struggle against homosexuality began energetically with Judaism. Monosexualism developed with monotheism. The Bible hardly refers to homosexuality. The blessings of children, of reproduction, the advantage of numbers were the needs to which the sexual cravings had to be subordinated. There is, therefore, justification for the contention that Judaism has fought against homosexuality,—impelled by social motives. On the other hand it was also an account of another set of social motives that, in Greece, homosexuality was not only tolerated but permitted and even expressly introduced. Aristotle is of the opinion that in accordance with their customs and beliefs the Dorians expressly intended to limit the increase in population through the encouragement of boy love and the separation of women from society.[48] But that in itself would not explain the high regard in which homosexuality was held in ancient Greece.

I refer those interested in the subject to the interesting work of a philologist, Prof. E. Bethe.[49]

Like many other philosophers and investigators of history, Bethe falls into the error of pointing to the Christian church as the agent responsible for the newer orientation in sexual matters. In the first place these writers overlook the fact that the new attitude had set in already with Judaism. Secondly, they fail to see that religions are, themselves, but the result of social conditions. Religious teachings always adjust themselves to the social needs of their day and even fulfill them. Religious formulæ prove meaningless only to the progressive, emancipated, free and forward-striving persons, the imperatives of religion are superfluous only for those above the average. The crowds must cling to religious formulæ and will always need sexual inhibitions of a religious character.

Sexuality is changing all the time, it undergoes progressive refinement. No careful observer can deny that fact. More and more of our instinctive cravings are gradually throttled. But when the process of repression becomes too severe there are regressions such as we have witnessed in the agitation for free love of the last decades and in the current more frank discussion of sexual matters. But if all signs do not fail the high tide of the agitation for sexual freedom has passed and the wave of that agitation is receding. Pioneers in the movement for sexual freedom are beginning to uphold monogamy; and the problem of population made pressing by the World War does not favor the abandonment of the current social and legal proscriptions against homosexuality. On the contrary. There is likely to be in the near future a stronger revulsion against homosexuality inasmuch as society finds itself compelled to revert at all costs back to the Old Testament attitude of fostering reproduction.

I have already pointed out that the secondary sexual characters are becoming more strongly accentuated through culture. The prehistoric stage was probably characterized by an undifferentiated sexual feeling, such as Max Dessoir ascribes to the pre-adolescent stage. The polar tension between male and female has increased! That explains the difference between the old Greek and the modern attitude towards homosexuality. The Greek was a bisexual being. He was capable of loving his friend and wife and woman slave alongside the boy. The modern homosexual, carrying within him the bisexual instincts of the most archaic developmental stage, finds himself confronted with another sex-attitude. He is confronted, so to speak, with the need of making a new choice, and therefore he seeks always the type to which he himself belongs, the man who is a woman, or the woman who is a man. Exceptions do not disprove this rule. But in proportion as the polar tension between the sexes increases, the basic antagonism between man and woman also grows. As we have seen—the last case was particularly instructive in that regard—the homosexual, who apparently stands above that struggle, is inspired from within by a feeling-attitude of extreme hatred. He hates woman with such deadly antagonism that the fear of his own passion makes him avoid woman. His hatred is a will of annihilation. But that feeling involves its polar alternative: love to the point of self-annihilation, a willingness to be utterly humbled. Subject No. 83 gives us a history clearly illustrating this interplay of forces.

But it is plain that the number of homosexuals will not decrease. On the contrary. I am of the opinion that under certain conditions the extreme polar tension between man and woman will always drive to homosexuality certain individuals possessing the requisite bisexual predisposition and that the number of homosexuals will increase. Since I look upon homosexuality as a neurosis, a morbid condition, if one insists on the term, I am decidedly opposed to the policy of penalizing the homosexual, and against those legal proscriptions which have been and are the cause of much misery. It is a striking fact that in France and Italy homosexuality plays a lesser rôle than in Germany, for instance, although in those countries the offence is not so severely penalized. Dangers and prohibitory laws often excite the strongest attraction and the neurotic is the very person who likes to become a martyr. Homosexual relations or acts, carried on under mutual understanding and with the consent of the parties thereto, should not come under the province of penal law, as provided in the Codex Napoleonis. The latter penalizes only public nuisances (outrage à la pudeur) that is, acts committed in public or carried on in the presence of witnesses; the Code Napoléon penalizes coercion and protects the minors and the feeble-minded.

With these provisions the requirements of our current ethical standards are fully met. I cannot conceive the State compelling the homosexuals to reproduce. Although I do not accept Tarnowsky’s viewpoint that their offspring is degenerate,—because personal observation has often convinced me of the contrary—I look upon the rise of the homosexual neurosis as a sort of social instinct. The homosexual possesses an endopsychic perception of his asocial tendencies. He feels himself beyond the pale of society and does not care to adjust himself into the social order with regard to his sexuality. His struggle against reproduction is perhaps best for society. Considering the strength of his sadistic inclinations we can appreciate that through his voluntary sterilization in certain cases he renders society a genuine service.

The question rises whether it is advisable to clear the homosexual’s path towards woman through psychoanalysis. That brings up the chief question whether homosexuality is at all amenable to therapy.

My personal experience has convinced me that here and there psychoanalysis is successful in effecting a cure. But only under certain conditions. The homosexual must be genuinely willing to be cured. He must actively desire a change in his leaning.

But experience shows also that this will to health is found only in the lighter forms of homosexuality in which latent sadism does not dominate the condition.[50] That in a certain sense the homosexual of this type is curable I am in a position to affirm on the basis of my personal experience. The cure proceeds spontaneously but it may be hastened through psychotherapeutic endeavor.

The proper psychotherapeutic method can never be hypnosis. What may we expect hypnosis to accomplish so long as the homosexual himself remains in the dark regarding his false attitude, so long as he has not learned to acknowledge openly the repressions against which he has fought so long? Contrary to Krafft-Ebing, Schrenk-Notzing, and Alfred Fuchs, I have never met with a lasting cure through hypnotic treatment. We must accept with greatest caution the statements of homosexuals claiming to have been cured by us.[51] Case 62 recorded in this work, illustrates that there are some homosexuals who in order to please the physician and conclude the treatment with flying colors, claim they are well without having changed in the least their deeply rooted feeling-attitude. Moll’s association therapy I am also unable to accept. That method of treatment consists of the systematic development of normal and the equally deliberate destruction of the perverse, associations. Moll, who has proposed this therapy and given it that designation, has the homosexual cultivate deliberately feminine company so as to come strongly under the specific female influences, he regulates the subject’s reading and helps him overcome the homosexual phantasies. The subject must think of “normal pictures” only, before going to sleep and thus influence his dreams in the proper direction.[52] But one must not think, as Moll concludes, that the heterosexual dream pictures which follow are due to the association therapy. The pictures thereby are merely rendered bewusstseinsfähig, tolerable to consciousness. They were always present. But the patient lacked the courage to acknowledge them.

I do not mean to deny a certain relative value to the association method. It is certainly not an advantage for the homosexual who earnestly strives to get cured to continue to frequent homosexual circles and to have constantly dinned into his ears the assertion that his condition is inborn and hopeless. I have quoted some cases showing that latent homosexuality may become manifest through contact with and the example of homosexuals while the heterosexual leaning may be disturbed thereby. But I did not intend to suggest the advisability of any compulsory measures for restricting the homosexual’s freedom of action or social intercourse. I have already expressed myself clearly against compulsions and punishments. It is advisable to urge the homosexual anxious to get cured to give up contact with homosexual circles.

But that the association therapy alone is capable of effecting a complete cure I cannot but doubt. The subject must first learn to see himself clearly and to recognize the source of the evil against which he is fighting. We must bear in mind the many subjects with whom repressed sadism is the true cause of the fear of woman. Such subjects must first consciously overcome their sadism, they must recognize that the fear is a ridiculous attempt at protecting themselves against leanings which under normal conditions never break through.

The first condition for the successful cure of homosexuality is adequate self-knowledge. That can be accomplished only through persistent psychoanalysis. The physician must devote himself to the subject for some months until the side-tracked leanings which the patient has stubbornly overlooked are brought into the field of consciousness and clearly acknowledged. The subject is like a person with torticollis looking constantly in one direction and avoiding a turn of his head on account of the pain. This mental torticollis must be overcome. The homosexual—if he is to get well—must be able to turn his gaze unrestrictedly over his whole mental horizon.

That is by no means a simple task. It is an achievement challenging the whole medical art, requiring insight, diplomacy, sympathy, friendliness, and patience. But few physicians are fitted for the task. Perhaps the opposition to psychoanalysis would not be so sharp if it were practiced only by competent psychotherapeutists and experienced professional men possessing the requisite tact. The physician is like the sculptor engaged in the task of bringing forth a certain form out of raw material.

Unfortunately I must point out in this connection that the psychoanalytic method inaugurated by Freud is in danger of falling into discredit through careless application. On the one hand the exaggerations of the master and his pupils have repelled many practitioners; on the other many of the patients have themselves become psychoanalysts, without being completely cured of their own trouble. What would one think of a hydrotherapeutist, expert though he be in his own specialty, who undertook a laparotomy? Analysis is comparable to a serious operation requiring a steady, experienced and skilful hand. Psychoanalysis does not permit dilettantism like hypnosis. Only from an experienced master may one learn the difficult art of psychoanalysis and in turn become a master of the art.

It is quite likely that the analysis of today will be ridiculed in the future as a raw beginning. Various subtleties and gradations remain to be uncovered by the future generations.

The psychoanalytic realm is not yet completely laid out.

How firmly I held to all the Freudian mechanisms so long as the deceptive proximity of the great founder confused my own understanding! How much I had to unlearn, correct, tone down, or underscore, overcome or forget, or see with a different eye, before I realized that we are as yet but at the beginnings of our knowledge and that we must use our present findings as but so many spring boards to enable us to reach a little farther out! Finally, each psychotherapeutist formulates in the end his own technique. The most important prerequisite for psychoanalysis—as for every scientific investigator—is to approach the subject without any preconceptions, to look upon every patient as a new problem and not to be surprised if one’s case does not fit in with one’s ready-made systems or if it disproves one’s favorite notion. For even the physician with years of experience is startled to meet so many new forms under which neurosis manifests itself.

But in spite of the variegated pictures, this bewildering variety of causes leading to the trouble, one thing remains true and unalterable: the neurotic’s unwillingness to see, that peculiarity which Freud has called repression, and the consequent psychic conflict. We must first appreciate that the patient’s mind is shattered over the hopeless character of his conflict, that for him the neurosis is a necessity,—something that enables him in one way or another to put up with his hardships,—something with which softly to hide his wounds on the one hand and on the other, show his suffering to the world; when we appreciate all that, we may gradually acquire the subtle skill of dissolving the ties and bringing the wound to light. We see the wound but the patient will not, cannot, see it. He may go so far as to claim that he has no wound and is well; that he was born with the ties that bind him; or else, that he came with that wound into the world.

These difficulties are in no psychoneurosis so great as in homosexuality. As I have already stated: the homosexual neurosis is a flight to one’s own sex induced by the sadistic feeling-attitude towards the opposite sex. It is the task of analysis to uncover the mental conflict which finds expression in this onesidedness and to enable the patient to see the cruelty trend which he has derived from the childhood of the race and has carried through his own childhood into his adult life. When the homosexual becomes aware of his bisexuality and sees the causes of his monosexual leaning we have accomplished the requisite educational task. Beyond that point the patient must help himself. If he is truly earnest about his desire to get well he will accomplish it without being pushed to it. If he lacks the inner will the situation is hopeless in spite of the analysis.

For that reason I am not in favor of the practical management of homosexuality as carried out by many physicians and particularly by some psychoanalysts. They urge the homosexual to adopt heterosexual ways, and consider the subject cured when he is able to have normal coitus a few times. Unfortunately unpleasant reactions often follow alleged cures such as are often claimed for persuasion-therapy and hypnosis. The homosexual abandons all further attempts and prefers his original monosexual attitude.

We may claim a cure only after the subject under treatment falls in love with a suitable person of the other sex. Potentia cœundi is not enough. He must be able to give up dividing the feeling-complex hatred—love between the two sexes—and to achieve the bipolar attitude “hatred and love” towards the opposite sex. Such a miracle only love can perform. Experience proves that the homosexual flees from the heterosexual love to save himself. The latter looms up in his mind as a test of power, in which he is anxious to come out the winner, even at the cost of doing away with his heterosexual partner. He must accept the subjection to woman implied in love and recognize that in true love both lovers rule and both obey. He must also learn to recognize the essential unity of erotism and sexuality. Only when the homosexual finds it possible to fix his erotism and sexuality upon the same goal, in a person of the opposite sex,—in other words, when he learns to love in adult manner,—have we the right to claim a cure. It is only then, at any rate, that the greatest healer of all ages, love, achieves its easy victory and the former patient, like all neurotics, thinks that mere chance has brought him face to face with his ideal. With that end in view the fixation on the family—through which the homosexual loses his erotic freedom, occasionally also the sexual—must be severed. I have brought strong proofs to show that we must transform the homosexual into a bisexual being, in order to cure him. Practical experience does not favor bisexuality. We must reckon with the fact that we live in a monosexual age. The homosexual must transpose his whole sexuality and must try to overcome or sublimate his one-sided leanings.

The necessary educational discipline takes a long time. The treatment of homosexuality therefore is a formidable task, both for the analyst and for the patient. The end-result of the treatment may not be known definitely for some years.

I have tried to describe the technique of the analysis in the individual cases. From those various indications the reader may form a picture of the difficulties. A systematic account of the technique of the analysis would require a volume in itself. Perhaps after finishing my Disorders of the Instincts and Emotions Series I may write such a work in order to acquaint with my experience the practitioners who want to grapple with the same problems.

A new generation of physicians, not brought up in the midst of the prejudices of the older, will further the psychologic investigation of the neuroses.

Naturally the high school must change its attitude towards the problem of sex. Departments of Sexology and Psychotherapy are necessary to instruct the young physicians in the essentials of sexual life and its morbid changes, in order to prepare the future practitioner to deal effectively with these troubles, heretofore erroneously looked upon as hopeless. The next volumes in this Series will prove how little the paraphilias are inborn and how much they are the result of training and environment. But what is formulated through faulty training may be corrected by proper reëducation, even though the hold of infantilism appears unconquerable.

I have called the paraphilias the struggle between spinal cord and brain. They are, even more truly, the Struggle of Child against Adult. For at bottom these neuroses are but infantilisms struggling for survival. The adult fights against the child; the adult race, ripe for monosexuality, fights against its childhood manifesting itself in bisexuality and sadism. The physician can see to it that the warfare is carried on in humane fashion and with means worthy of civilization. He can turn the hidden into an open warfare. It means overcoming the evil—or that which the moralists call evil—by meeting it face to face.

He who looks for more than a few words on the subject of the prophylaxis of homosexuality and onanism will be disappointed. I believe it is best that we turn our attention to these themes only when we are called upon to do so in our professional capacity. I advise all parents and educators not to watch whether a child masturbates or not. The child quits the habit when it finds other ways for releasing the tension. And our analyses have abundantly shown us that it is almost impossible to prevent masturbation. The evil effects produced upon the child witnessing marital bickerings, the household inspiration it receives with regard to judgment-feelings about women and men, the decisive manner in which parents affect it when they transfer their conflicts on the child,—these capital facts the life histories of homosexuals given above illustrate very clearly for any one willing to look squarely at the truth. We do not as yet appreciate how careful we must be in our relations with the children. Our educators are still guilty of a serious blunder when they conceive their duty to be to instill goodness in the child through the instrumentality of fear. There are only two educational levers: one’s own example and—love. The healthiest children come from happy marriages. It is love that determines whether a marriage shall be a happy one and whether the offspring will be healthy or weak. The unconscious sexual instinct, manifesting itself in love is the guide for the regeneration of the human race.[53] Social conditions favoring early love marriages are the only social reform to which I look for results....

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Abstinence, 81, 191
Adult Love, 314
Age, 50
Aggressivity, 283
Ahasuerus-Type, 214
Alcoholism, 27, 69, 178, 183
Ambisexuality, 12
Anal Eroticism, 245
Anamnesis (of H.), 231
Anger, 69, 120, 152
Antagonism, 94, 304

Anxiety, 15, 164, 178

- neurosis, 28, 76, 191

Asocial (Cravings), 194
Associations, 250
Association Therapy, 307
Atavism, 169, 297
Attachment (to Father), 182
Autism, 173
Aversion, 29, 31, 57, 97
Bipolarity, 157, 206, 218, 265, 283
Bisexuality, 12, 296
Censorship, 267
Christianity, 301
Compromise, 189, 290
Compulsion Neurosis, 192

Conflict, Psychic, 311

- Psychology of, 93

Confusion States, 176
Conscience, 144
Coprophilia, 247
Cravings, 180
Creative Energy, 296
Crime Passionelle, 23, 158

Criminality, 13, 18 passim, 20, 70, 133, 138, 144, 151, 157, 187

Culture, 159
Cunnilingus, 209, 216
Day Dreaming, 138
Defence of Jealousy, 123
Degeneration Theory, 282, 296 passim

Delusion of Jealousy, 161

- vs. Reality, 177

Depression, 96, 104, 187
Differentiation, Sexual, 294
Disgust, 15, 21, 29, 62, 63, 207
Dorian Love, 300

Dreams, 82, 131 passim, 176, 240, 247, 254 passim, 267, 269, 271, 277

Drinkers’ Jealousy, 183
Drug Addiction, 176, 178
Dyspareunia, 18, 95
Dyspnea, 72
Egoism, 291
Elektra, 195
Engrams, 295
Epilepsy, 22 passim
Ethics, Sexual, 317
Family, Love of, 91
Fancies, Homosexual, 247, 253
Father Complex, 227

Father Imago, 35, 36, 39, 49, 61 passim, 77, 283

Fear, 57, 62, 67

- of Sexual Partner, 15 passim, 17, 20, 38

- of Women, 286

Feeling-Attitude, 216
Fellatio, 73, 247
Fetichism, 44

Fixation, 47, 70, 79, 81

- Emotional, 223

Flight Reflex, 234
Greek Love, 82 passim
Guilty Conscience, 296
Guilt, Feeling of, 207
Hair Symbolism, 262

Hatred, 19, 38, 79, 80, 103, 132, 134, 145, 273, 289, 304

Hermaphroditism, Unilateral, 297
Heterosexuality, 269
Horror Feminae, 14
Hypnosis, 306
Hysteria, 22
Identification, 49, 103, 110
Impotentia, 40, 69
Inability to Love, 289
Inbreeding, 297

Incest Phantasy, 33, 105, 146, 155, 181, 187, 194, 222, 265

Infantile Attitude, 283, 292, 295

- Reminiscences, 286

- Sexual Theory, 211, 246

Infantilism, 44, 133, 220

Inferiority, Feeling of, 229

Insanity, 156, 158

- Fear of, 176, 177

- Periodic, 176

Intermediate Sex Theory, 217

Inversion, 41, 43, 49

Jealousy, 76, 102, 109, 127 passim, 131, 135, 156, 292

Judaism, 299

Late Homosexuality, 50

Latent Criminality, 137

- Homosexuality, 296, 308

Law of Substitution, 89, 90

Libido, 29, 44, 260

Love, 157

- Attitude, 295

Masochism, 207
Masturbation, 16, 55, 64, 66, 155, 230, 245
Maternal Body Phantasy, 268, 272
Melancholia, 118
Monogamy, 303
Monosexuality, 187 passim, 299
Monotheism, Sexual, 193
Mother Imago, 34, 41, 49, 89, 144, 146
Mother-in-Law, 118
Motherhood, 95
Motivations, 159
Narcissism, 47, 48, 91, 269, 291
Neurasthenia, 72
Neurosis, Epileptic, 27
Non-Conscious H., 117
Œdipus, 195
Ontogenesis, 156, 281
Orgasm, 63
Overcleanliness, 266
Over-valuation (of Manliness), 217, 295
Pansexualism, 193
Paranoia, 156, 163, 166, 190
Paraphilia, 200, 219
Pederasty, Epileptic, 26
“Penetrating Eye” Symbolism, 61
Permanence of H., 46
Persecution, Delusion of, 159, 171, 192
Phylogenesis, 156, 281
Philosophy, 39
Polar tension, 293, 303
Pollution Symbolism, 259
Precocity, Sexual, 291
Primordial Hatred, 282
Progression, 297
Projection, Psychic, 159
Prophylaxis, 316
Protection, 80
Pseudo-Heterosexuality, 14

Psychoanalysis, 139, 146, 170, 176, 200, 208, 284, 310

Psychogenesis of H., 105, 181, 280, 298

- Paranoia, 171

Psychosexual Infantilism, 148
Psychosis, 156
Puellæ Publica, 194
Purity, 105
Querrulants, 172
Rage, 19, 158
Regression, 90, 132, 163, 194, 195, 282, 292
Religion, 301
Reminiscences, 179
Repressed Sadism, 270
Repression, 34, 43, 49, 190, 194
Revenge Fancies, 169, 292
Revolt, 92
Rivalry, between Sexes, 293
Sadism, 38, 49, 69, 159, 161 passim, 200
Sadistic Trend, 177
Scatologie Fancies, 244, 246, 260
Scent, 46
Scorn, 15, 32
Self-Knowledge, 309

Self-Love, 284, 291

- Pathologic, 193
- Punishment, 135
- Torture, 202

Servant Girl, 119
Severity, Parental, 220
Sexual Infantilism, 260
Sister Imago, 88
Social Abhorrence of H., 298
Specific Phantasy, 78
Spermatozoan Dream, 272
Spiritual Marriage, 166, 264
Sublimation, 88, 90
Submissiveness, 135
Suicide, 76
Supremacy, Struggle for, 220, 222
Symbolism, 44
Sympathetic Act, 111
Telepathy, 186

Tenderness, Craving for, 274

- Parental, 220

Third Sex Theory, 15
Transposition, Emotional, 162
Transvestitism, 252, 296
Trauma, Psychic, 98
Tuberculosis, Symbolism of, 233
Uncertainty, 168
Unconscious, 160, 194
Uranism, 34, 189
Urlind, 95, 133, 195, 284
Urning, 14, 31, 33, 47, 48 passim, 194, 284
Urolagnia, 248
Voyeurism, 117
Vomiting, Symptomatic, 242
Warning, 105
Water Closet Symbolism, 244 passim

Wish, 207

- Fulfillment, 111

- Incestuous, 131, 133

Zoöphily, 155

INDEX OF NAMES

Adler, 15, 222, 285
Aristotle, 299
Beaussart, 155
Berg, 91, 92 passim
Bjerre, 170
Bloch, 14
Bethe, 300 passim
Burchard, 27
Dessoir, 308
Eulenburg, 21, 317
Fehlinger, 294
Fleischmann, 200, 206, 208
Freimark, 93
Freud, 156, 161, 213, 215, 310, 311
Fuchs, 306
Havelock Ellis, 220
Heine, 271

Hirschfeld, 11, 12 passim, 14, 21, 26, 27, 29, 30 passim, 48, 90, 95, 188 passim, 193, 296 passim, 297, 299

Ibsen, 89
Juliusburger, 159, 160
Kafka, 233
Krafft-Ebing, 190 passim
Magnan, 296
Moll, 307
Nietzsche, 10, 11, 198, 199, 288, 289
Oppenheim, 161
Paul (Jean), 138
Platen, 43
Praetorius (Numa), 29
Raffalovich, 284
Rank, 90
Rochefoucauld, 108, 109, 154, 155

Sadger, 36 passim, 38, 39, 43, 46, 48, 71, 285

Schnitzler, 125
Schopenhauer, 52, 53
Schrenk-Notzing, 306
Schrecker, 229
Stekel, 200, 258, 264, 268, 290
Strindberg, 80
Tannenbaum, 125
Tarnowsky, 305

Van Teslaar, 18, 23, 90, 207, 258, 264, 268, 290

Weininger, 80

Ziemcke, 205

1. “Homosexuals who display their inclination clearly only after puberty show an interest in the other sex before and during the period of puberty. For instance, I have been told by a 23-year-old typical homosexual, today a victim of horror feminae, that at 16 and 17 years of age he entertained strong fancies about girls and ran after them, although without any particular sexual feeling desire. This transitory and undefined preoccupation of homosexuals with the opposite sex is a sort of ‘pseudoheterosexuality.’” (Bloch, loc. cit., p. 597.)

2. In vol. III of Disorders of Instincts and Emotions: The Sexual Frigidity of Woman; Psychopathology of Woman’s Love Life. English translation by Dr. James S. Van Teslaar.

3. Nervöse Angstzustände, 2nd ed., p. 336.

4. Vol. V. in: Disorders of Instincts and Emotions. English version by Dr. Van Teslaar.

5. B. Tarnowsky, Die krankhaften Erscheinungen des Geschlechtssinnes (The Morbid Manifestations of the Sexual Instinct). Eine forensisch-psychiatrische Studie. Berlin, 1886, p. 51 ff.

6. Jahrbuch f. sexuelle Zwischenstufen, vol. IX, 1908, p. 504.

7. Fragment der Psychoanalyse eines Homosexuellen (Jahrb. f. sexuelle Zwischenstufen, vol. IX, 1908). [A typical illustration of the wrong way of carrying on a psychoanalysis, the kind of painful ordeal during which the subject calls out in distress: “But, pardon me, what must I tell you? You just torture me, nothing less!” The most important relations are overlooked, the patient is tortured to admit that he is in love with Sadger, so that after fourteen hours of this sort of torment he runs off.]

8. J. Sadger: Ist die konträre Sexualempfindung heilbar? Zeitschr. f. Sexualwissenschaft, 1908, p. 712.

9. Jahrb. f. psychoanalytische u. psychopathol. Forschungen, vol. II, 1910.

10. Ibsen, the great psychologist, has described in masterly fashion the transposition of sister love into boy love. In “Little Eyolf,” Almers, the writer, suddenly loses the love for his wife and turns his affection exclusively to his child. That child is called ‘little Eyolf,’ like his sister, who had once put on boy’s clothes and called herself ‘little Eyolf.’ The parents had expected a boy. Almers turns his affection for the sister, which pervades the whole drama, into the love for the boy. He has discovered for himself the law of substitution which corresponds to the changes spoken of in these pages. Little Eyolf in fact is the dramatisation of the latent homosexual fixation on the sister. Almers cannot split his personality, he cannot be both homo- and heterosexual. This inability to split his self, the root of all homosexuality, forms the background of the whole drama. Rita cannot divide her personality any more than Almers can do it; he must give his whole personality self. Almers cannot divide wife and sister. He embraces his wife and thinks of the sister (That sister, whom he calls his little and his big Eyolf. The sister in trousers, who embodied his ideal, a woman in male clothes, a bisexual being which need not be split up at all). “Love of brothers and sisters is the only relationship not subject to the law of transformation.” Rank (Das Inzestmotiv in Dichtung und Sage, 1919, p. 654) and Pfister (Anwendung der Psychoanalyse in der Pädagogik und Seelsorge, p. 72) find the incest motive easily but overlook the fact that the situation involves the outbreak of homosexuality and its psychogenesis. It represents a flight from the sister to man, a wavering homosexuality sublimated into love for the boy. The drama contains numerous other familiar points well worth careful analysis. For Almers, his wife, and his child, are the representatives of the male, female, and infantile components which we endeavor to synthetize in our character (trinity). Regression to the infantile level sets in with flight from the world (flight to the solitude of the mountain top). The solitary Ibsen, as road builder, undertakes to construct a new highway which shall lead up to solitary heights and does not observe that the road leads really straight back to the realm of his youth. Somewhere in the vast expanse of his soul the ‘dead child’ is floating around and staring with wide open eyes into infinity. A child is killed in this drama. It stands for the miscarried regression back to infantilism. Childhood is finally subdued and forgetfulness once more drowns in the soul’s vast expanse all gnawing and biting reproaches. The memories are all dead ... and the next drama has for its theme: When the dead awaken. But in little Eyolf they are already awake.... The dead, whom Ibsen carried in his breast, the corpse to which Rita refers so often.... The child in him is dead and now the man in him also threatens to die. It recalls the admission of impotence, described with such tremendous realism in the great Rita-Almers scene. The man in him dies and the woman in him persists with yearnings. A more detailed treatment of these endopsychic processes will be found in my book on Masochism (Translation by Van Teslaar, in preparation).

11. The following passage, from an observation by Hirschfeld, shows how early such fixation on the brother may take place, only to disappear, apparently, and to be mistaken for inborn homosexuality: “I hated boys and boyish games; my sister was my alter ego, while my brother, who was 13 years older and a very beautiful man, had powerfully charmed my childish, pure and innocent heart. I worshipped him for his physical beauty even more than on account of his sterling qualities. At the same time I grew continuously more sensitive in my overt attitude towards him. I remember clearly that during the 6th or 7th year my brother’s physical beauty caused me to shake before him with every fiber of my body in admiration as before some mystery revealed. At 10 years of age I wept through a whole night intoxicated with joy because it fell to my lot to lie down near his intoxicatingly sweet presence for rest. I had a feeling of shame such as I did not experience in the presence of my mother or sister. Clearly and deliberately, although unbeknown, of course, to him, I deified my brother from the 10th to the 15th year, and this worshipful attitude reached its highest from my 10th to the 12th year, when he married. I was disconsolately unhappy over it because that event removed him from our midst and I felt it was dreadful that he should lose his virgin beauty, as I thought.” (Hirschfeld, loc. cit., p. 46.)

12. Zuchtbarkeit der Homosexualität. Sexualprobleme, 6 Jahrg., 1910, No. 12.

13. This thought is very wonderfully expressed in Gerhart Hauptmann’s Griseldis. The father is jealous of the son because he, in turn, had been his father’s enemy and rival....

14. Cf. chapter on Jealousy in my collection of essays, “Was am Grunde der Seele ruht...,” Wien, 1909, Hofbuchhandlung Paul Knepler. English Version, The Depths of the Soul, translated by Dr. S. A. Tannenbaum, Moffat, Yard & Co., N. Y.

15. With his wonderful psychologic mastery Arthur Schnitzler has described such a pair in his best piece entitled, “Das weite Land.” Hofrichter, the manufacturer, who flutters from one love affair to another, and his wife, who consoles herself in the arms of a young Cadet, are the kind of a pair who love each other but go down in ruin rather than openly acknowledge their love.

16. Cf. chapter entitled, “Der Kampf der Geschlechter,” in my work, The Beloved Ego, translated by Dr. S. A. Tannenbaum, Moffat, Yard & Co., N. Y.

17. The flaring up of jealousy in old age during exhaustive conditions, an extraordinarily common occurrence, seems to be determined partly by endocrinic disorders and partly by the awakening of infantile predispositions. We also find frequent mention of the fact that morbid jealousy manifests itself after a prolonged convalescence in bed. Some physicians are inclined to trace the condition back to an intoxication. It seems to me more likely that the unusual opportunity of mulling things over in the mind is more likely the cause. We must also take into consideration that facing closely the possibility of death all ungratified wishes, including the homosexual, once more flare up, urgently pressing for gratification. This alone may lead to the flaring up also of paraphilias and homosexual tendencies during old age, when it must also be considered that on account of organic changes in the brain cortex the inhibitions are also weakened. I have repeatedly noticed that nursing care by a person of the same sex as the patient also plays a certain rôle. I have even seen directly as a consequence of prolonged invalidism the development of a homosexual feeling-attitude towards the nursing person, for instance, the flaring up of a passion for mother or sister. Regressions back into childhood frequently occur after infectious diseases. All the various infantile attitudes manifest themselves. Psychosexual infantilism, a subject which will be fully treated in a forthcoming volume of our “Disorders of the Emotions and the Instincts,” is most likely to break out particularly after a period of illness when one feels one’s self again a child.

18. Cf. Willy Schmidt, Inzestuöser Eifersuchtswahn, Gross’ Archiv, vol. LVII, 1914, p. 257.

19. Zur Radikalbehandlung der chronischen Paranoia. Jahrbuch f. psychoanalytische Forsch., Vol. III, 1912.

20. A symbolic representation of the identification of myself with the father.

21. A form of sexual disorder not infrequent among neurotics, suggesting a different sexual objective.

22. Hirschfeld naturally traces this morbid tendency back to the social ostracism of the homosexual. In my opinion that is a forced explanation. The very proneness of the homosexuals to affective disorders, their heightened sensibility, their morbid irritability, their endogenous depression prove that all homosexuals are severe neurotics. Hirschfeld may be able to trace the homosexual’s acute outbreaks of affective psychoses back to the actual conflicts. But it is impossible to link this heightened affectivity to the feminine attitude of the urnings. For if it were so, how could we explain the equally distressing analogous disorders among the urlinds? Hirschfeld refers to the anxiety states of the homosexuals (p. 916) and expressly states:

“This very condition is found frequently also among homosexuals who are psychically normal so far as their home relations are concerned.”

No—they are not normal with regard to home relations, they are severe neurotics on account of the repression of their heterosexuality. Superficial appearances are deceptive and many a person who appears outwardly to be the picture of health, a well balanced temperament, is inwardly the victim of a serious neurosis.... Hirschfeld refers further to the homosexual’s proneness to persecution manias and to delusions of reference. Concerning homosexual women he states:

“Compelled against their inclination to fulfill their marital duties the homosexual women become very nervous and, in addition to anxiety attacks, they suffer severe depressions.”...

How does Hirschfeld know that the depressions are due to the enforced fulfillment of marital duties? I know homosexual women who are divorced and suffer even more; I know homosexual unmarried women, who are as neurotic as the married women, and, like the latter, suffer of serious depressions. All these facts prove that the homosexual pays for his monosexuality just as dearly as the neurotic monosexual who is heterosexual.

23. Cf. Stekel, Berufswahl und Neurose, Gross’ Archiv, vol. XIX.

24. Beiträge zur Lehre von der konträrer Sexualempfindung Zeitschr. f. Psychol. u. Neurol., vol. VII, 1911.

25. I have at the present time under observation a soldier who for about three weeks masturbated 15 times (!) daily. Advanced hypochondriac. The motive seems to have been the development of a neurosis so he would be freed of military service.

26. The history of the same patient, as given by Ziemcke, refers to the same episode as follows: “At 17 years of age the first coitus with a peasant girl, pleasurable, no disorder.” A proof that the heterosexual episodes are always corrected in memory and modified in favor of a homosexual predisposition.

27. Regarding this occurrence Ziemcke relates: “Towards the last of his studies at Kiel he brought to his room a 12-year-old boy from the street under the pretext of carrying some books for him. When the boy returned he suggested making some experiments on him, tapped him first on the knee cap, then had him take off his stockings and kneel on the edge of the lowermost cabinet drawer; next he forced the boy to stand up stripped to the waist while he pricked him with a pen in the armpit and under the fingernails. After that he hung him by a rope tied around his hands, but the rope broke. Then he had the boy lie down on the sofa, lowered his trousers so as to expose the hips and gluteal region and proposed to pay the boy 5 pfennig for every one of 50 cane strokes. After the 43rd stroke the boy could not endure the pain any longer, so he increased the pay to 10 pfennig and gave him 5 additional strokes. It has been ascertained that the man had been drinking hard the night before carousing until daylight and according to his own testimony he was very nervous next day and had palpitation of the heart. He also stated that he had acted impulsively; he remembered well all the details of the occurrence but everything took place as in a haze. After the deed he had a feeling of relief, his usual excitement and unrest promptly subsided. Examination showed nothing physically abnormal and absence of any serious intellectual defect as well.”

28. The volume on Sadism and Masochism, in my Series on the Disorders of the Instincts and of the Emotions. English version by Van Teslaar.

29. At a meeting of the medical society in Odessa, a colleague was presented as one who had been treated unsuccessfully by me. He suffered compulsions of a most serious character and was one week under my care. I had proposed three months. Nevertheless he was brought forth as proof of the inefficacy of psychoanalysis. It happened that colleague Dr. W. was present, and he knew that the alleged analysis was of one week’s duration. He was able to apprise the meeting of the fact. In a few weeks that honorable sick physician placed himself under the professional care of Dr. W....

30. An “infantile sexual theory,” in which coitus is conceived sadistically as a squeezing.

31. Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, Vol. IV.

32. Cf. also my essay, Der Kampf der Geschlechter, the Struggle between the Sexes, in my work, The Beloved Ego, Moffat, Yard & Co., N. Y. I have now under treatment a very sick woman who has gone to pieces over a similar problem. She was anesthetic with all men. The one man who had just once roused her during sexual intercourse she hated and could kill.

33. Havelock Ellis and Moll (Handbuch der Sexualwissenschaften, Leipzig, F. C. W. Vogel, 1912) draw attention to this fact: “Both sexes often show a remarkable youthfulness in appearance which is preserved late into the adult state. The love of green, which is chiefly, normally, a favorite color with children, and especially with girls, is often observed. A certain degree of histrionic talent is not uncommon as well as an inclination towards tenderness, occasionally also a feminine love of adornments and jewels. It may be said of many of these physical and psychic characteristics that they denote a certain degree of infantilism, and this fits in with the view that homosexuality is traceable to aboriginal bisexuality; for the deeper we penetrate into the life history of the individual, the nearer we approach the bisexual stage.”

34. Dr. Paul Schrecker, Die Individualpsychologische Bedeutung der Kindheitserrinnerungen, Zentralbl. f. Psychoanalyse, Vol. IV.

35. Cp. the novel by Kafka, Die Verwandlung (Verlag von Kurt Wolff). It portrays the transformation of a man into a bedbug. It is obviously a sadistic fancy (the bedbug sucks blood). This meaning is not imparted to the patient so as not to influence the course of his associations.

36. The mouth as an erogenous zone. He expected kisses and meanwhile was satisfied with other sweets as a substitute. He is a confirmed lover of dainties and still relies on sweets which he is in the habit of carrying in his pockets.

37. This is a thought which troubles many neurotics. It is their way of belittling the persons who impress them and who thus make them realize their own inferiority.

38. Later will be shown the sadistic meaning of this phantasy. Urine is often a substitute for blood in the dream....

39. Cp. the boxes in the first dream (Merchant of Venice).

40. Cp. Sex and Dreams: The Language of Dreams, vol. I. Translation by James S. Van Teslaar.

41. Cp. Chapter on Maternal Body Dreams, in work mentioned above, Vol. II.

42. In the Tristan phantasy these reminiscences return. The father is the betrayed King. The episode of the father’s departure in that dream becomes clear only now. He died in time to avoid the experience of a second deception in love.

43. Cp. my laws of symbolic equivalents in Language of Dreams: All secretions and excreta are equal to one another as symbols.

44. Raffalovich, author of a small monograph on Die Entwickelung der Homosexualität (The Development of H.), Berlin, 1895, states in a few pages more truths than many authors disclose in heavy volumes of writing. He states, for instance, that “there are no distinct barriers between heterosexuals and homosexuals.” He also emphasizes the strong self-love of homosexuals: “They have die Leidenschaft der Æhnlichkeit.”

45. Page 248, of the German edition. “The neurotic’s attachment to the family is an overcorrection of former lack of love and is induced by a feeling of remorse.” “Poets formulate a longing for love because of their inability to love and that drives them to their continuous chase after love adventure. Love becomes the overstressed idea and the unattainable ideal of poets.” “The poet differs from the criminal because he is aware of his incapacity to love as a handicap, and from hatred and scorn of humanity he turns to love his fellow men.”

46. Domestikation und die secundären Geschlechtsmerkmale. Zeitschrift f. Sexualwissenschaft, Vol. III, No. 6–7, 1916.

47. An excellent account of the history of homosexuality may be found in the work of Hirschfeld (loc. cit.).

48. Politics, II. Quoted after Havelock Ellis and I. A. Symonds, Das konträre Geschlechtsgefühl, Leipzig, George H. Wiegands Verlag, 1896.

49. Die dorische Knabenliebe (Ihre Ethik and ihre Idee), Rheinisches Museum f. Philologie (Neue Folge), vol. 69, 1907.

The authors prove that boy love in Hellas was introduced by the Dorians. Although traces of the custom are found also among the Ionians, boy love, like knighthood, became fashionable in Greece through the Dorians. “It was permitted only to the free citizen, the knight, while slaves were forbidden to indulge in the practice often under penalty of death. The practice was regulated by strict rules and became a state institution. In Sparta, Crete, Thebes the training for (arety) ἀρεθή, among the dominant class was based on pederasty. The lovers in Sparta were held to a strict accountability for their ‘companions’ who became attached to them from their 12th year; so that they and not their youthful companions were punished for any shameful act on the part of the latter.” “The battlefield at Chaironeia was covered with the lovers ... lying in pairs.” In Crete the choice of boy lovers assumed the form of bridal theft. The lover advised the boy’s family of his intention of stealing the boy. If the family did not like the “match” it tried to avoid the capture of the boy. The higher the lover’s social position the greater was the honor felt by the boy and his family. The chosen one was afterwards sent home carrying gifts....

In fact, at Thebes, Thera and in Crete such unions even enjoyed religious sanction. “The engagement of the lovers or rather their physical union certainty occurred under the protection of some god or hero at Thera and at Thebes. At Thebes we find the language unmistakably clear in the high archaic field inscriptions of the Seventh Century, chiselled in large letters upon the holy promontory near the City, at a distance of 50–70 meters from the temple of Apollo Karneios and on the holy site dedicated to Zeus. They read as follows: “On this holy place, under protection of Zeus, Kerion has consummated his union with the son of Bathykles and proclaiming it proudly to the world dedicates to it this imperishable memorial. And many Thereans with him, and after him, have united themselves with their boys on this same holy spot.””

At Crete it was considered a shame for a boy to possess no knightly lover. On the other hand it was a great honor for a boy to be wanted by many lovers.

For the lovers and for the boys these relations had an excellent effect. Each was inspired to do his best in order to prove his mettle and be ἀγαθός ανήρ (agathoi anyr). The heroic tales even took note of this love. The wondrous deeds of a Herakles were carried out in honor of the male lover Eurystheus. Repelling a wooing knight was considered ignominious,—a blot on one’s honor. Plutarch relates the story how Aristodamus struck down with his sword an obstinate boy: “Man gerät unwilkürlich in die Sprache unseres ritterlichen Ehrenkomments,”—states Bethe.

With that act the knight transferred his ἀρετή (arety), knighthood, upon the boy. It had a symbolic meaning. Among the Spartans the pæderast was called εἰοπνήλας (eiopnylas), from εἰοπνειν (eiopnein), meaning, the one who blows something in (the inblower). But what was it that the pederast blew into the boy? Clearly the πνευμα (pneuma), the soul, a belief which has come down from the oldest period (Bible) surviving to this day in Christianity. According to primitive conceptions the soul of man resided in his various secreta and excreta. Urine, fæces, blood and semen were magical substances inasmuch as they contained the life principle. With his male seed the Dorian endowed his boy with knightly prowess. (Similarly the savages in New Guinea drink the urine of the chieftain in order to acquire his skill and strength. Bethe mentions numerous similar instances.) The semen was regarded as the seat of the soul.

Bethe points out also that the liver, the heart and more particularly the phallus were similarly identified with the soul. The reader is referred to the original study for further details.

The remarkable notion of blowing one’s soul into another a posteriori, is traced by the author to primitive beliefs. Animals showed no objection to these love-offerings; and men who ascribed magical properties to urine and fæces undoubtedly lacked any feeling of revulsion against these excreta.... Since the anus was looked upon as the portal for angry demons, why should not the benevolent magical power of heroes be introduced the same way?

“The notion which led to the development of pæderasty as a State Institution among the Dorians, could not long endure. It had to give way finally.... But boy love persisted as a widespread custom and stood throughout antiquity and throughout the whole extent of Greek culture as a necessary feature of decent superior Greek citizenship. The Christian church fought the heathen custom from the beginning and was the first to drive pæderasty from Christian society; unable to root it out by spiritual means, it adopted criminal punishment in the year 342.”

That is, briefly, the philologist’s account, who also states that during the pre-Doric period (Homer, for instance) the custom of boy love had as yet no roots as an Institution.

50. Zur Psychologie der Vita Sexualis, Allg. Zeitschr. f. Psychol., 1894.

51. I am unable to corroborate the contention of Ferenczi in his Zur Nosologie der männlichen Homosexualität (Homoerotik), published in Zeitschrift f. ärztl. Psychoanalyse, Vol. II, 189, 1914. He assumes two forms of homosexuality: 1. the passive subject-homoerotic, who represents an inborn state and stands for an intermediary type in Hirschfeld’s sense and is incurable and 2. the active object-homoerotic, a type he describes as a special form of compulsion neurosis. The passive type never consults the physician for his trouble,—he is a genuine homosexual; the active type is unhappy over his condition, he shows the typical symptoms. Both share in common the peculiarity that their own sex is an essential condition for the attainment of their love-object and remains so throughout life.

I have seen many homosexuals who are interchangeably active or passive. On the other hand I have seen active homosexuals who were very much troubled over their condition and passive homosexuals who have been cured. Incidentally I may mention that Ferenczi borrows thoughts from my essay on Masken der Homosexualität, without indicating the source. Since Freud has decreed against me his anathema, the narrower Freudian school looks upon my work as common property to be appropriated at will by any one.

52. Handbuch der Sexualwissenschaften, p. 664.

53. A new orientation in matters of sexual morality is on the way in spite of tremendous opposition. I refer those interested to Eulenburg’s excellent work, Moral und Sexualität (Verlag, Marcus & Webster, Bonn, 1916).

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in spelling.

2. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.

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Table of Contents

- THE HOMOSEXUAL NEUROSIS
- TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
- CONTENTS
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- INDEX OF SUBJECTS
- INDEX OF NAMES
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE