Part 16

_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.