Part 11

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: