And the River said, “But was Narcissus beautiful?”
And the Trees and Flowers answered, “Who should know that better than thou? Us did he ever pass by, but thee he sought for, and would lie in thy banks and look down at thee, and in the mirror of thy waters he would mirror his own beauty.”
And the River answered, “But I loved Narcissus because, as he lay on my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored. Then loved I Narcissus, and therefore must I weep and have my fill of sorrow, nor can I lend thee a tear.”
—Oscar Wilde, “The Disciple”
It is a well-known fact that ancient art and history both portrayed self-existent beings, as the perfect man.
—Francis H. Buzzacott and Mary Isabel Wymore, Bi-Sexual Man or Evolution of the Sexes
§1. In 1903, Lucien von Römer, a Dutch physician, theologian, historian, and humanitarian, published an astonishing monograph in Magnus Hirschfeld’s journal, the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen: Über die androgynische Idee des Lebens documented the representation of androgynous, hermaphroditic, and bi- or pansexual beings in ancient and Eastern arts and religious traditions. Von Römer presented Egyptian, Indian, and Japanese images and recalled that Greco-Roman culture had created popular icons of human sexual variations. From the point of view of modern observers, they were often strikingly obscene (I have considered aspects of this tradition in chapter 2); they were quite different from the images of homoerotically idealized youths (what I called queer beauty in chapter 1) that had been approved by modern arbiters of neoclassical taste.1 In 1904 von Römer published a short book in Dutch on the physiological basis of homosexuality, prepared an edition of the Earl of Rochester’s Sodom of 1634, and coauthored a short book on representations of sexuality in the Bible. He also responded to reviews of his monograph on the androgynous idea of life. In the succeeding years he published several books on Uranism, including a history of uranian homosexuality (the homoeroticism of “absolute inverts”) in the Netherlands and an elaborate statistical tract published in 1906, Die uranische Familie, on the incidence and heritability of homosexuality, or what he called the “rise of the Uranians,” a theme to which I will return at the end of this chapter. In the first decade of the century he was also intimately involved with the activities of Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in Berlin—that is, with Hirschfeld’s homosexualist organization.
Freud probably read von Römer’s monograph on the idea of androgyny shortly after it appeared. He was a close reader of Hirschfeld’s periodical and cognate publications such as Friedrich Krauss’s journal of sexual anthropology, Anthropophyteia, and Kryptadia, a journal of folkore published irregularly between 1883 and 1911; as he wrote in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in 1905, the regular critical bibliographies and abstracts published by Hirschfeld (many of them prepared by Eugen Wilhelm, the erudite jurist writing as Numa Praetorius) provided essential facts and references to “facilitate our understanding of normal sexual development.” In von Römer’s monograph Freud found material to help solve the sexological puzzle of the “psychical genesis of homosexuality,” namely, pictorial images that implied a correlation between an erotic and dangerous maternal femininity on the one hand and hermaphroditism, androgyny, and same-sex eroticism on the other hand. Some of these depictions were familiar to Freud: the well-known “Adonis” from Pompeii, for example, was a fresco that depicted a canonically idealized creature, supposedly supremely beautiful, who possessed both male genitals and female breasts. In some cases Freud had probably seen the originals; he had visited Pompeii in 1902, though we do not know if he visited the Secret Cabinet at Naples, where many relevant artifacts were kept (see chapter 2). Other items were new to him, such as certain images of the vulture-headed, phallic Egyptian mother-goddess Mut that von Römer had reproduced from an obscure Egyptological source and to which Freud returned (repeating von Römer’s citation) in his essay on Leonardo (figure 36).
To resume the trajectory considered in chapter 7, Freud knew that his hypothesis of originary bisexuality, supposedly imaged throughout history in the pictorial fantasies of “androgyny” collected by von Römer, did not in itself explicate homosexuality. Plainly, and going this far with homosexualist thinkers, homosexuality traced back to early childhood. In the fall of 1908 Freud’s essay on “Little Hans,” the five-year-old son of a family friend, was written.2 Here (and in closely related studies) the results of von Römer’s historical and cross-cultural researches had a central significance, though Freud did not directly cite his source. In Freud’s view of the situation, which relied heavily on Hans’s father’s reports, the little boy believed that every living creature has a penis. When the child first saw his little sister’s genitals, for example, he thought she had a penis, for he was, Freud inferred, “incapable of surrendering” his belief in a universal penis “on the strength of this single observation.”
FIGURE 36. The goddess Mut. Drawing by L. S. A.M. von Römer, “Über die androgynische Idee des Lebens,” Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen 5, no. 2 (1903), 159, fig. 12, after Ridolfo Lanzone, Dizionario di mitologia egizia (Turin: Litografia fratelli Doyen, 1881–84), plate 97.
One day Hans’s father drew him a picture of a giraffe that they had seen in the zoo; in the drawing, the giraffe lacked a penis. As Hans’s father told Freud, “Hans said to me, ‘Draw its widdler too.’ ‘Draw it yourself,’ I answered, whereupon he added this line to my picture. He began by drawing a short stroke, then added a bit on to it, remarking, ‘Its widdler’s longer.’”
According to Freud, Hans’s response not only documented his belief in a universal widdler. It also showed that he held it in what Freud called “high esteem” because he insisted on drawing it not with one but with two strokes. (Of course, we might simply want to say instead that Hans’s marks—his remarking—showed only that he had made the giraffe’s penis too short when he first tried to draw it, as he seemed to have told his father.) And, for Freud, it was the little boy’s “high esteem” for the universal widdler that overwhelmed his actual perception that not all creatures have one (though we might simply want to say instead, of course, that if Hans had seen a male giraffe at the zoo he might simply have been thinking that his father’s draft of a picture of that giraffe was simply incorrect—it entirely lacked a penis—rather than insufficient). Freud then went on to narrate how a “boy cousin came to visit Hans, who had now reached the age of four and who was constantly putting his arms around him, and once, as he was giving him one of these tender embraces, said: ‘I am so fond of you.’” “This is the first trace of homosexuality that we have come across in him,” Freud declared, “but it will not be the last.” Needless to say, there would seem to be no unequivocal relation between Hans’s concern for a proper-sized giraffe widdler and his affection for his male cousin. But Freud arrayed them in a continuous narrative of Hans’s sex life—of his emerging sexuality. He clearly intended his reader to infer that Hans’s high esteem for widdlers, his affection for his male cousin, and his overall homosexuality (such as it can be said to exist in a five-year-old child) belonged together in causal sequence.
Freud’s theory became clear at the end of his study of Little Hans. A boy’s high esteem for the penis, Freud said, will “decide his fate.” If he is especially interested in it, he will, Freud urged, “choose a woman when he believes she has a penis,” as any little boy supposedly does at first. As the boy grows older, he will discover that this woman does not have a penis; after this, she will cease to interest him. Now the youth will give his love to “the ‘woman with a penis,’ a youth of feminine appearance.” Therefore homosexuals, Freud concluded, “are persons who, owing to the erotogenic importance of their own genitals, cannot do without a similar feature in their sexual object; in the course of development from autoerotism to object love, they remain at a point of fixation between the two.” If we use the language of Interesse in the normative Kantian teleology of aesthetic judgment, they have failed to become fully disinterested in the highly desirable object that is the penis—their own and others’s. Or to return to the Freudian model of sexuality discussed in chapter 7, the penis of homosexuals (their own and others’s) has remained erotogenic—an imago caused by and causing erotic response in a continuing cycle of reflexes and replications of the objects, pleasures, and fantasies revolving around it. In other words, it has not been converted into a merely amphigenic object—into a sexually functional object to be found in the environment and in some situations to be used homosexually there. If it had so converted, of course, a sexually mature boy should take little or no interest in it, even if he might sometimes actually have (nonhomosexual) sexual experiences with other men.
Nonetheless, mere interest in an object is not the same thing as a fixation. Freud introduced the “erotogenic importance” of the boy’s genitals because a “special interest” in widdlers, even a “high esteem” for them, would seem to be too weak a force to generate homosexuality. All boys could believe that everyone has a penis, and all could be interested in the penis, even give high esteem to it—especially their own. But not all boys make homosexual object choices. Freud did not actually spell out the difference between a “special interest” in widdlers, one’s own and others’s, and an “erotogenic” interest. The former kind of interest simply leads to childhood “polygamy,” the various crushes of Little Hans, which were not limited to his affection for his cousin; it smoothly continues originary bisexuality. But the latter kind of interest continually causes interest in widdlers. In other words, it is erotogenic: it explains the transition, Freud asserted, from the originary (and universal) bisexuality to a manifest, adult homosexuality, a different (and specialized) sexual formation altogether. On this basis, and working directly against the homosexualist sexology that he engaged, Freud declared that “there is absolutely no justification for distinguishing a special homosexual instinct.” But whence the “erotogenic importance of a boy’s own genitals” if not in a “special homosexual instinct”? To say that the invert’s interest in widdlers is caused by his interest in widdlers sounds suspiciously close to saying that a homosexual is intrinsically disposed to homosexuality.
In December 1908 Freud generalized from Little Hans and other unspecified observations in a far-reaching paper on “The Sexual Theories of Children.”3 It revealed his difficulty in filling the gap in the argument of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality about the origins of male homosexuality (see chapter 7) while keeping homosexualist sexology at arm’s length. Freud now recognized that childhood and adult homosexuality cannot simply be a question of the erotogenic importance of the penis. All boys take pleasure in its importance. Homosexuality, he implied, must be a further question of the boy’s “estimate of its value.” That is to say, it is a question of the importance of the importance of the penis. A boy for whom its importance is unimportant—he takes a disinterested interest in it—must tend toward heterosexuality. A boy for whom its importance is important must tend toward homosexuality.
The Freudian problem of homosexuality, then, is the source and scale of the estimate of value a boy places on the universal, erotogenic phallus, a concept in sexual anthropology, as we have seen in chapter 2, that did not itself originate with Freud. The problem would admit an obvious homosexualist solution. Arising in a congenital homosexual disposition, however it should be explained genetically or physiologically, a boy’s tendency to give a high estimate of value to the penis of other males leads to the gradual consolidation of an adult homosexuality, despite continuous and massively enforced social pressures to the contrary. But Freud took a different tack. He said nothing about how the boy estimates the worth of the penis except in the case of “the ‘woman with a penis,’ the youth of feminine appearance,” an object that is formally most similar to the one other penis that Freud did explicitly introduce as an object for the boy’s aesthetic perception and erotic valuation—namely, the supposed maternal phallus. All children must be weaned from the mother’s breast, but the boy who fails to be weaned from his mother’s penis becomes homosexual. The composition of Freud’s pool of clients probably skewed his metaphysics here. Some homosexual patients (as he identified them) did indeed have neurotic histories with female family, friends, and wives: they were the unhappy “impotent” men who sought psychoanalysis because they had been persuaded that their sexual problem was a mix-up in their supposed bisexuality (or would be so persuaded when psychoanalysis attempted to alleviate their heterosexual impotence). A homosexual who thought himself happy and healthy, who saw his sexual feelings as original and unalterable, who highly valued the erogenousness and ideality of other men’s bodies as well as his own, who had little or no heterosexual activity (or recollection of such activity) but whose relations with women in his social world were comparatively non-neurotic—such a man rarely crossed Freud’s doorstep, even though he was the ideal subject imagined in the modern homosexualist culture to which Freud responded. More exactly, such men probably crossed paths with Freud all the time. But they were not his patients. They were his colleagues and friends.
§2. Whence, then, the little boy’s belief in the supposed maternal phallus? Hans’s drawing of the giraffe proved little. It could show, for example, that Hans knew the anatomical and maybe the sexual difference between a male and a female giraffe, that he knew the penis is not universal at all. Freud needed to offer a different kind of evidence for his idea that a little boy believes in mother’s penis, a high esteem for the high esteem of which will make him homosexual, that is, will not enable him to tolerate his discovery that a women does not have a penis, which, if it is relatively unimportant to him, will enable him to come to esteem her (and other women) as a sexual object without it or to enter normal genital heterosexuality. In this regard Freud noted that some men dream about women who have male genitals. But these dreams, reported to the Freudians by the supposedly bisexual, sexually impotent patients of Karl Abraham and Isidor Sadger (see chapter 7), hardly revealed an original interest in a maternal phallus. Instead they probably expressed a wish to be released from a frustrating heterosexuality into a desirable homosexuality, if they should even be given any kind of Freudian interpretation whatsoever. (Perhaps the dreams were the perfectly intelligible manifest sex dreams of men, supposedly impotent, who were aroused by male tranvestites—dreams requiring no explanation in terms of a latent imago.) In other words, the dreams exemplified the patient’s homosexuality but did not therefore explain it.
Freud’s best evidence had another basis altogether. “The numerous hermaphrodites of classical antiquity,” he wrote, “faithfully reproduce this idea of the female phallus, universally held in childhood; one may observe that to most normal people they cause no offence, while the real hermaphroditic formations of the genitals which are permitted to occur by Nature always excite the greatest abhorrence.” Evidently Freud was thinking of von Römer’s material, though he echoed a perspective (probably unwittingly) that can be found in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century iconographic treatments of hermaphroditic figures in ancient art.4 The sculptures supposedly “reproduce an idea” (von Römer had called it the idea of androgyny) that is “universally held in childhood.” But Freud could offer no direct testimony, of course, about the childhood beliefs and fantasies of the ancient sculptors—about the ancient artists fantasizing about sexual objects and functions when they were little boys. It was simply the apparent visual or formal congruity between the sculptures and the alleged content of the hypothetical childhood idea that justified his theory, as if we can actually see in the sculptures what the child, whether ancient or modern, is supposed to have once believed. Yet at the same time Freud could not overdo the parallel. He needed to make a morphological and aesthetic distinction between the sculptures and actual human hermaphrodites as part of his very evidence that the sculptures depict the childhood idea or fantasy of the mother’s penis, the fantasmatic icon of an infantile hallucination that was independent of accurate sexual knowledge rather than the anatomical reality. As he declared, “to most normal people the sculptures cause no offence.” Indeed, they can be seen as relaying a supreme (if queer) ideal of beauty. But real hermaphroditism of the human organs of generation is supposedly horrifying.
This line of reasoning was tendentious. Freud knew perfectly well that many hermaphroditic men and women lived unobtrusively. In fact, Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch publicized the supposed anthropological discovery that hermaphrodites and long-term or lifelong transvestites (sometimes the two conceptually distinct phenomena overlapped in the life of one person) had lived in Europe for hundreds of years undetected by the general population. In the very same issue of the journal in which von Römer’s monograph appeared in 1903, for example, Hirschfeld published the stories of an eighty-two-year-old Austrian man who had lived for seventy years in female dress; an old transvestite, “Wasserseppli,” who roamed the Black Forest; and Josefine Schmeer, a successful “male” folksinger.5 And Freud would have been well aware of such famous cases as “Countess Sarolta V.,” recounted at length by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in Psychopathia Sexualis and John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis in Sexual Inversion. Always dressed as a male, a practice that her father had instituted in her childhood, the countess had married a young woman who did not know her supposed husband’s sex; though eventually discovered and prosecuted, she was acquitted and permitted by the authorities to go on living in the way to which she and her friends and lovers had been accustomed.
In part because of overlaps with transvestism, most “normal people,” then, rarely saw “real” hermaphrodites (it is not clear whether Wasserseppli and the others were hermaphroditic in any way), and they never saw them unclothed. It was their naked image that was unsettling. In nineteenth-century physiology and medicine, people with hermaphroditic body formations were often drawn or photographed in order to display their genitals in poses that would have been regarded as obscene and degrading in nonclinical contexts (figure 37). (They probably would not have been encountered in nonclinical situations anyway: the medical representations were secured in gynaeocological examinations, anatomy theaters, and autopsies.)6 Freud’s principal medical and anthropological authority for hermaphroditism was Cesare Taruffi’s compendium on Hermaphroditismus und Zeugungsunfähigkeit, published in 1903. Taruffi’s frontispiece, a typical visualization, showed a heavily bearded hermaphroditic patient wearing a woman’s high boots and corset and spreading his legs in order to display the vaginal conformation of his genital region. The pictured pose was specifically selected to show what could not be seen otherwise.
But along with such clinical drawings and photographs, Hirschfeld’s journal published numerous pictures of hermaphrodites, clothed or naked, in ordinary relaxed poses, much like the sculptures of antiquity that von Römer illustrated in 1903. (Moreover, the medical and scientific presentations of hermaphroditic formations noted in the previous paragraph had often imitated the aspect of well-known works of ancient art, not limited to sculptures of Hermaphrodite; in the late eighteenth century, for example, some editions of Nicholas Venette’s famous treatise on sexual intercourse, La génération de l ’homme, were illustrated with pictures of hermaphroditic bodies in the form or the type of the Belvedere Torso.)
Indeed, Hirschfeld and other homosexualist publishers sometimes reproduced the pictures of nude or near-naked “gynecomastic” or female-bodied young men (as well as complementary pictures of female “gynandry” or “andromasty”) that had been produced within contemporary homoerotic circles, where the pictures were meant to be aesthetically attractive and sexually arousing. At the end of the nineteenth century the photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden, for example, sometimes focused on the full-breastedness of certain pubescent boys in Sicily, where he produced many photographs, some of them pornographic, of local boys and men (and a few young women); Siegmund Labisch replicated the same type in a Gloedenesque photograph of a boy’s gynecomastic torso used as the frontispiece to introduce Edwin Bab’s Die gleichgeschlechtliche Liebe of 1903, an influential homosexualist treatise. Of course, so-called male gynecomasty and female andromasty were also illustrated by sexologists as forms or correlates of anatomical hermaphroditism. For example, Émile Laurent’s Les bisexués: gynécomastes et hermaphrodites, published in 1894, was illustrated with eleven plates, including two that depicted fully naked people. The curvaceous body fat of some of the pubescent boys photographed by von Gloeden must be distinguished from this. But the point here is that the formations could be visually similar or even indiscernible, soliciting representations that relied on—that traded in—the same traditional iconography. In one of the most telling of these representations, Ralph Werther (also known as Earl Lind and as Jennie June), a young male “female-impersonator” who roamed the eastern seaboard of the United States in the second decade of the twentieth century, had himself photographed in the pose of the Borghese Hermaphrodite in order to illustrate his remarkable autobiography, published in 1919.7 So viewed, there was little visible difference between the ancient images of phallic goddesses or breasted gods and “real” hermaphroditism, androgyny, gynocomasty and andromasty, and so on, in certain modern situations; modern men and women like Jennie June aesthetically reenacted ancient types and images in their own projects of self-projection and self-representation. In fact, in 1917 Hirschfeld seemed to take a dig at Freud when he suggested in his textbook that the Greco-Roman sculptures of hermaphrodites were themselves “no fantasy product of the artist,” as Freud had needed to say in order to distinguish them from “real” hermaphroditism and to affiliate them with childhood theories of sexual function, but instead had been modeled with considerable fidelity on natural phenomena.8 Certainly the visible idealization of the body in the ancient sculptures and other works of art (such as the “Adonis” of Pompeii) posed no problem; modern hermaphroditic men and women were perfectly capable of such physical cultivation, even if it constituted a queer beauty. In Freud’s Vienna, for example, and in the same years that Freud was working on childhood theories of sexual function, Arnold Heymann published the striking case of a seventeen-year-old gymnast (with a deliberately cultivated aesthetically admirable body) who had been identified in 1906 as a hermaphroditic female though she had competed as a male athlete.9 And Leibisch’s photograph for Bab’s book on same-sex love or Jennie June’s self-portrait for his autobiography were, of course, intended specifically to show the beauty and desirability—not the horror—of body types that were not canonically gendered.
FIGURE 37. “Hermaphroditism in an apparent male (child of four years) [left] and hermaphroditism in an apparent female (girl of thirteen years) [right].” From L. Guinard, Précis de tératologie: anomalies et monstruosités chez l ’homme et ches les animaux (Paris: J.-B. Ballière, 1893), pp. 292–93.
In sum, the distinction between “real” hermaphroditism and its image (the idea of androgyny within which the universal phallus could be imagined) was considerably more vague than Freud presumed. Moreover, Freud was disingenuous in suggesting that “normal people” took no offense at the ancient sculptural images, his purported proof that they reproduced a universal childhood idea that people unconsciously accepted with some degree of aesthetic and erotic satisfaction. As a reader of archaeology and as a medical man, perhaps Freud himself took no offense. But throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the sculptures often caused an unfavorable sensation when they were exhibited. Many examples (especially the “Florence” type, which depicted a female divinity lifting her robes to reveal her erect phallus) had been vandalized, or mutilated by official order; the offending elements of the figuration, the unwanted breasts or penises, were hammered off (figure 38). Many of the objects were not well published; indeed, the most obscene examples were sequestered from public view in such collections as the Secret Cabinet in Naples (see chapter 2). In fact, like the mythological character of Hermaphrodite, the sculptures had been identified specifically with the visibility of homoerotic sodomy, for example, in Winckelmann’s art history (which von Römer cited in its illustrated edition of 1847) and Anne-Louis Girodet’s painting of the Sleep of Endymion (1793), mentioned in chapter 1, or in Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s citation of the statues in Formatrix (published in 1865) as a warrant for his concept of psychical hermaphroditism—a precursor for Freud’s parallel citation. These were not new or isolated tropes: uses of Hermaphrodite to denote sexual deviation, often specifically homosexual sodomy, were common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as in the Sieur d’Embry’s well-known satire on the mignons of the court of Henri III of France, L’isle des hermaphrodites, first printed about 1605, or in Voltaire’s character Hermaphrodix (bastard of Inkubus and a Benedictine nun, male by day and female by night) in La Pucelle d ’Orléans, written in 1755. To take an extreme but telling case, in the mid-nineteenth century Ambrose Tardieu, a French medical criminologist who virtually specialized in signs of what he called pederasty, or homosexual sodomies, had advised police investigators to pay careful attention to the position of the corpse in cases of murder. If the slaying had occurred in a sexual encounter between men and had been motivated by the homosexuality involved, the body of the pederast, he claimed, would almost always be found naked or near-naked and lying on its side “in the pose of the ancient Hermaphrodite [i.e., the Borghese Hermaphrodite quoted by Girodet and replicated by Jennie June], the situation in which he had offered himself to the squalid advances of the assassin who had cut his throat.” Tardieu’s seeming point was that the murderer had killed the pederast when he discovered that she was really a male.10
FIGURE 38. “Androgynous Priapus” (androgynischer Priapus) or “Hermaphrodite with an erection” (priapische Hermaphrodite), that is, an example of Hermaphrodite of the “Florence type” (with mutilated genitals). Drawing by L. S. A.M. von Römer, “Über die androgynische Idee des Lebens,” Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen 5, no. 2 (1903), 188, figure 23, after Frédéric de Clarac, Musée de sculpture antique et moderne, vol. 4, Statues (Paris: Texier, 1836–37), plate 670, no. 1549.
Far from taking no offense at the sculptures, then, many people were uncomfortable with them or alternatively, like Girodet, used them as a provocative model for visualizing unusual or extreme states. The figures made the erotic attractiveness of one’s own (as well as the other) sex to one’s own (as well as the other) sex fully visible to one’s own sex (as well as the other) sex. Indeed, if they used the techniques of canonical idealization—of queer beauty—they tried to make this attractiveness not only artistically visible but also admirable (chapter 1). According to Freud’s theory, “normal people” should take no offense when their high esteem for the universal phallus is low; to a heterosexual man, the important penis should be relatively unimportant. But many people did take offense because they could not tolerate the high esteem of the highly esteemed universal phallus apparently registered in the sculptures and resurgent in their own troubled responses to their peculiar beauty. To this extent Freud was narrowly right by his own lights: as the fantasymemory of childhood wishes, the sculptures could be said to be homosexually disturbing. But, if so, according to his own logic they could only be the homoerotic and even the homosexual outcome of the universal childhood idea of the universal phallus that Freud hoped would explain homosexuality. Like certain men’s erotic dreams of female lovers with male genitals, the sculptures must be a fossil of homosexuality, not its very mechanism.
Armed, however, with what he henceforward took as good evidence for the little boy’s original belief in a maternal phallus, Freud now needed to ask why some little boys cannot give it up. When faced with the possibility of its loss (in seeing, for example, that women do not have one), supposedly such a boy simply denies the possibility, holding fast to his high estimate of its value rather than revising it—finding value in the corporeal conformations and sensuous possibilities identified with the opposite sex. In the final recursion or tertiary regress of his Interesse, in other words, homosexuality arises out of the high esteem of the high esteem of the highly esteemed phallus.
We can now begin to see how this peculiar psychic condition, this extreme interestedness, might be conceived as an extreme homoautoeroticism—self-love of one’s sex in the third degree. Its psychological structure, and even its content, was most closely similar to the kind of continuous, dominating, even frantic masturbation that had been imagined and condemned since the eighteenth century (often imagined in order to be condemned) in European and American campaigns against vice. In the 1870s and eighties the rhetoric of these movements had been carried virtually wholesale into sexological psychiatry. (For example, Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, owned by Freud in its edition of 1894 in a copy signed for him by its author, apparently took over its title from Heinrich Kaan’s anti-onanism treatise of 1844, which in turn had translated Friedrich Karl Forberg’s 1825 typology of Greco-Roman sexual practices into the nosology of sexual and moral hygiene.)11 That Freud shortly chose to describe the condition with a high-sounding mythoscientific label, narcissism, which he adopted from the clinical presentations of Isidor Sadger, does not disguise its origin in a stereotype of the homosexual as a man who has never been able to clamber back up the slippery slope of self-abuse—indeed, who has slid far, far down the slope into distorted and delusional depths of sexual self-love.
Exactly why it was commonly believed that onanism could literally lead to homosexuality is a question I cannot take up in detail here. Catholic casuistry, of course, already classified onanism as a sodomy, whether or not it occurred in a homosexual interaction. When Sadger applied the term narcissism to the sexual perversions, transmuting the initial references of other writers to autoerotic sexuality, he dealt with a case of “megalomania”—delusional or virtually psychotic self-love. This hypertrophy of ordinary egoism was revealed not only in his patient’s supposedly excessive indulgence in masturbating himself, though this was certainly relevant. It could also be observed in his unrealistic demands that other people love and admire him without qualification and live to serve his pleasure—as it were masturbating him continuously.12 It was but a short step, as we will see, for Sadger to attach this “narcissism” to inversion or homosexuality as well. In some cases, moreover, the male masturbator’s focus on his own penis could be thought to have been initiated mutually with other males; masturbation, like homosexuality itself, could be said to be acquired. (Freud himself, however, probably did not think so; the infant’s and the child’s autogenous self-stimulation, as he saw it, was a basic or primary building block of infantile and childhood sexuality in Freud’s sense.) Finally, it might be thought that someone’s fantasy visualizations during masturbation would increasingly require new imagery, new fantasies, to stimulate him. In turn these might call up homosexual and other perverse ideas that would not have been entertained otherwise, especially if the agent had replaced masturbation with fulfilling sexual intercourse with members of the opposite sex. To some extent Freud’s approach shadowed this rhetoric; Freud conceived homosexuality as a wrong turn made on the normal road from autoerotic to heterosexual sexual pleasure. Regardless, he suppressed the obvious logical regress (and implied causal or historical questions) embedded in his account. In Freud’s explicit statements of his theory, the homosexual was supposedly not struggling endlessly up the ladder of his failure to wean from the universal phallus or sliding endlessly down the slope of his failure to stop his sexual self-loving. Instead, he was “fixated.”
Whence this fixation, though? What took Little Hans from affectionately embracing his cousin to declaring, in addition, “I am so fond of you”? According to Sadger, looking at homosexual neuroses in disapproving, troubled families, the fault was the boy’s mother’s: it was she who would not let the boy detach himself from her. Freud quickly revised Sadger’s basic idea to suggest that the little boy “identifies” with his mother because, he believes, she possesses the esteemed phallus. And if the boy identifies with his mother, then he can adopt her point of view. From his point of view, according to the explanations offered in 1909, when he behaves homosexually he is looking for a youth who resembles his mother as she was before he was shocked by her lack of a penis. But, from her point of view, when he behaves homosexually he is looking for a youth who resembles him as he was before he turned against her, shocked by her lack of a penis. (In the Freudian dynamics of sexuality, Kastrationsschreck, the shock of witnessing the lack or loss of the penis, is a mechanism of sexual development, whereas Kastrationsangst, castration anxiety, is the ordinary neurotic condition in which a man fears that he will discover that he himself lacks the penis or phallic potency.) Because the boy combines these points of view in a supposed two-way identification of mother and son, his homosexuality ultimately emerges out of a relation in which his mother has overestimated the value of his penis; it is she who has set the bar of his interest in his own sex far higher than it would otherwise have been and she who has continued fantasmatically to prevent him from becoming properly disinterested in it. In the boy’s resulting confusion (I will not trace all of its twists and turns), repression will be likely to occur. “It is not hard to guess,” Freud said, that the little boy’s troubles in resolving this kaleidoscope of images and impressions force him “to reject and forget them,” leading both to unconscious homosexuality and to the now forgotten heterosexuality to be recovered by psychoanalysis. Supposedly this “brooding and doubting becomes the prototype of all later intellectual work” conducted by such a person. In one of its most extreme and impressive forms, of course, this was the very condition Freud ascribed to Leonardo da Vinci.
§3. As Freud knew, representations of the faulty mother and the transfer of her eroticism to her son’s erotic turmoil could be found not only in Freudian etiological studies. It had already been projected in the homoerotic and homosexualist culture that these descriptions were designed to interpret and if possible to reform. Above all we should recall Walter Pater’s description not of the mother symbolized by Mona Lisa (according to Freud) but of the model depicted in the painting. To quote Pater’s essay on Leonardo in Studies in the History of the Renaissance, published in 1873: “She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her, and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary.”13 We have seen what this vampire seeks in Freud’s account of her: Leonardo’s mother, Freud said, “took her little son in place of her husband, and by the too early maturing of his erotism robbed him of part of his masculinity.” In Pater’s interpretation, however, Lady Lisa was not only the symbol of a pathogenic maternity that continually pulled Leonardo back into a fallen woman’s murky past of intrigue and sensuality—the image “defining itself on the fabric of the painter’s dreams” that Freud pursued in Leonardo, quoting the last phrase from Pater.14 She was also, Pater had written, “a presence expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire.”
All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there… the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias.… The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing itself up in, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.
In turn, in 1890 Oscar Wilde put these lines, an epitome of aestheticism, into the mouth of Gilbert, his fictional aesthete, in his dialogue of 1890 on “The Critic as Artist.”15 Our “fancy of a perpetual life,” one’s humanity as “all modes of thought and life”: these can be taken to be obvious correlates of the primal autoerotic or narcissistic wish. I want all these, and more! I want it all! All is me: I am all!
This oceanic doctrine often served in the later nineteenth century to represent socially proscribed (and perhaps only dimly imagined) nonstandard eroticisms in a publicly acceptable pseudo-spiritualism of pansexual cosmic synthesis. It is most well known today in the poetry of Walt Whitman. In Britain, it was replicated by such disciples of Whitman as John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter (chapters 4 and 5). In Freud’s German-speaking culture it had already been the subject of homosexualist commentaries on Whitman in Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch and elsewhere. Its vision of the “sweeping together” of a cultural history—of a ramified family of images in which (to use Pater’s words) one “sums oneself up”—found succinct and vivid expression in the transformative dream vision of Whitman’s dear friend Richard Maurice Bucke, after 1877 the superintendent of the asylum for the insane in London, Ontario. According to Dr. Bucke’s own words, describing a trip to London, England in 1872,
he and two friends had spent the evening reading Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and especially Whitman. They parted at midnight, and he had a long drive in a hansom. His mind, deeply under the influence of the emotions called up by the reading and talk of the evening, was calm and peaceful. He was in a state of quiet, almost passive, enjoyment. All at once, without warning of any kind, he found himself wrapped around, as it were, by a flame-colored cloud. For an instant he thought of fire—some conflagration in the great city. The next instant he knew the light was within himself. Directly after there came upon a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness, accompanied by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into his brain streamed one momentary lightning-flash of the Brahmic splendor which ever since lightened his life.16
We might put Dr. Bucke’s vision alongside Leonardo’s childhood fantasy or the Wolf Man’s nightmare (chapter 7) as specimens of autogenous sexual self-imaging. But the most direct comparison might be made with Symonds’s recurring “trance” (chapter 4), the emergence, he said, of a “pure, absolute, abstract self.” Because Dr. Bucke’s two friends were British devotees of Whitman (people like Symonds and Carpenter), his vision might well have had a homoerotic social context. Regardless, his metaphor of the burning, self-consuming flame (it stands both for the eruption of erotic desire and for the crucible of art and culture) recurred throughout aestheticist and Decadent rhetoric in the second half of the nineteenth century, most famously in Pater’s preface to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (“to burn always with that hard, gem-like flame is success in life”). But Dr. Bucke’s reputation as a physiologist and alienist gave his account a special appeal. In Cosmic Consciousness (1901), an influential text of fin de siècle illuminism and theosophy, he elaborated his story of his vision in a theory of self-transcendence that echoed Symonds’s ethics of self-overcoming or becoming absolute—of unbecoming.
Similar doctrines were pursued in polemical social theory, such as Max Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, published in 1844 and first translated in English with the title The Ego and His Own. Stirner’s thesis, “Nothing Is More to Me than Myself,” was adopted in the early 1900s by Adolf Brand, Hans Blüher, and other apostles of homoeroticist self-cultivation writing in the journal Der Eigene (The Self-Owner), managed by Brand. These popular writings were complemented by (and sometimes cited) the dicta of formal or technical philosophy, such as William James’s definition of self-consciousness: “The words ME and SELF mean ALL THE THINGS which have the power to produce in a stream of consciousness excitement of a certain peculiar sort. Self-love is not love for one’s own mere principle of conscious identity. My own body and what ministers to its needs are the primitive object, instinctively determined, of my egoistic interests.”17 I am I, I am you, you are me, I am yours, ad infinitum: the interpersonal corporeal pulsation of the “bodily ego” (chapter 10) seen as personal spiritual succession to the One, the transcendent Nirvana and “Brahmic splendor,” of self-completion.
Needless to say, however, the satisfactions of self-sameness (and especially the thrill or the joy of finding one’s like, one’s erotic completion) could not be taken for granted. Not all the things that have the power to produce “excitement of a certain peculiar sort” in “self-love” are within reach, even if they can be envisioned. Leonardo’s Lady Lisa, Pater said, collated the “animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age… the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias.” But such pleasures have rarely been synthesized in the canonical aesthetic and moral ideals of modern culture, even though Mona Lisa, at least in Pater’s description, might be taken as a paradigm of queer beauty. Indeed, Lady Lisa’s collation would seem to be the morally idiosyncratic preserve of a peculiar aestheticist Decadence.
In his privately printed poems, for example, Symonds’s theme was male love in Greece, Rome, the Renaissance, and the modern world. He took them to be summed up pictorially in Simeon Solomon’s Love in Autumn, Amoris Sacramentum, Bacchus, and other drawings and paintings (works also praised by Pater). Solomon’s visualizations of Love, Symonds wrote, were “not classical, not medieval, not Oriental, but have a touch of all these qualities—the pure perfection of the classic form, the allegorical mysticism and pensive grace of the middle age, and the indescribable perfume of Orientalism.”18 Public attacks on Symonds made the connection between this nostalgic syncretism and present-day inversion perfectly clear (chapter 4). As Symonds himself wrote frankly to a friend in 1866, the works of art in question have “transcendental Moralität, Sittlichkeit, and the Pandemic temptations of the uranian enjoyments all worked into one whirlpool.”19 Here he referred specifically to his own cycle of poems, John Mordan, named after a Piccadilly newsboy with whom he was infatuated; mostly unpublished and unpublishable, the cycle included verses on Greek love, Renaissance pederasty, and other homoerotic cultures in history. Sending one of these works to Whitman, Symonds noted that its imagery was “implicit already in [Whitman’s] Calamus, especially in ‘Scented Herbage of My Breast.’”20 To quote Calamus: “No law less than ourselves owning,” say “We Two Boys Together Clinging.” A more pertinent text of the ideology—of the figuration or rhetoric—of “narcissism” projected as homoeroticism would be hard to find. After all, what is it for you or for me—for you and me—to own ourselves in clinging together?
But still: “You are often more bitter to me than I can bear, you burn and sting me,” wrote Whitman in “Scented Herbage of My Breast,” the second poem of Calamus. Like other Uranian writers, Symonds knew unrequited desire for erotic completion with his same, its impossibility or “unreality” as he called it—the pain of “togetherness” misunderstood, stifled, rejected, or reviled. In his unpublished dream book, he recorded a dream that might stand as the converse of Dr. Bucke’s joyous Whitmanian illumination of Brahmic Oneness with himself, with his like-minded friends, and with their mutual aesthetic ideals. In the dream Symonds found himself to be the owner of a vast estate. Uneasily he wandered its walks and parks.
My feeling [in the dream] was that for a time I had been forgetting the main factor of my life and being, and that the things upon which I had been innocently priding myself were as nothing in relation to that. Just then two figures on horseback appeared. One was my youngest daughter riding a spirited little Turkish horse. The other was a groom, stalwart but supple, mounted on a noble bright bay hunter. The girl, as she approached, waved her hand. The groom touched his hat, and looked me in the eyes with one of those faces, like a Greek athlete’s, which comely English peasants sometimes have. Then, like a stabbing flash of forked lightning, the truth of my misfortune pierced sense and brain, and clove the marrow of my soul. Involuntarily, I plunged my hand to the flesh above my heart, and found and recognized the devil’s brand, the black broad-arrow of insanity—unmentionable, unconquerable—the misery that levels and makes prisoners of all men who are marked by it.21
This dream said many things. Surely it said that the dreamer loves the “Greek athlete,” a masculine beauty canonically acceptable for male appreciation and admiration (and long incarnated for Symonds in such works of art as the Lysippan Apoxyomenos in the Vatican [see figure 19]). But it also said that he will not possess the groom sexually, though a sexual interaction was not impossible, or, more important, that he will not fully engage him erotically, even though the groom “looked [him] in the eyes.” That desire was wholly unrealizable; the very idea of connection and fulfillment was his “misfortune,” his “insanity.” More exactly, although the groom recognized him, looking into his eyes, perhaps even sharing his desire, he did not see—he could not see—that for Symonds he replicated the statue or modeled a Greek athlete: he was within the system of the subject’s projected self-sameness in its cultural summing-up and ideal totalization in the discovery of an other, now seen by Symonds to be incomplete, impossible, in the very moment of finding the likeness that seemed to realize the fantasy imago. In the dream Symonds’s daughter, an index of the real and morally sanctioned family, waved her hand. By contrast, the groom-double, the replication of Symonds’s fantasy lover in a lineage of same-sex love, offered only the formal gesture of social distance and reserve, “touching his hat.” Thus Symonds’s primal narcissism (he owned the vast estate) remained divided from its fantasmatic homoerotic completion, in part (though not entirely) because of class and status differences between men. And there could be no synthesis until social reunion, some kind of real community of erotic equivalence that did not yet exist between them, had somehow been secured.22
When the assumed social context of erotogenic interaction is maternal and heterosexual, the transfer of narcissism into homosexuality is given—to an extent foregiven. It could be represented in Leonardo’s memory of his childhood fantasy because “mother” and “son” were reciprocally defined social identities; their “clinging together” constituted a real and recognized social unit, even if it was disturbed in Leonardo’s case. (Freud implied that the pathogenic mother would not have robbed her boy-child of a mature sexuality if he had not been born to an unwed woman.) Mother and child, indeed, once were really one—mother with child. But when the implied horizon of union in an amphigenic homoerotic encounter would seem to be merely sodomitical or homosexual, as one strand of Symonds’s dream clearly wished, the synthesis of narcissism and homosexuality has no normative social frame. In modern society “man” and “man,” unlike mother-and-child or mother-with-child, form no categorically legitimated erotogenic unit, man-with-man (“we two together clinging”), regardless of the social and sexual power that accrues to them in other ways—including the power to administer the erotogenic unit of mother-and-child and to distort or even to destroy it, as Leonardo’s father had done. Instead, the erotic love that emerges between men must somehow coordinate the disjunct, solipsistic self-loves of two people who have come into an accidentally stimulating sensuous contact with one another. As it were always already divorced, these people have already been constituted sexually in the erotogenic sexuality of canonical maternal, patriarchal, marital, and familial relations, including the primal erotogenic social unit of mother and child. And in turn the narcissistic homosexuality created in that history, according to Freud, is the very cause of the fact that the amphigenic encounter of the two men, however like they might be, cannot become mutually erotogenic, regardless of the feeling of each subject considered on his own or as alone.
Here we have reached the fundamental contrast between Freudian and homosexualist doctrines of same-sex love. In Freud’s account, narcissism has to be seen as a new kind of instinctual disposition, hitherto unobserved—as it were a kind or type of sexuality discovered specifically by psychoanalysis. Narcissism disables love; it is the reason, indeed, that homosexual love (according to the social ideology replicated by psychoanalysis) is not really love at all. In the homosexualist account, by contrast, narcissism really can be nothing more or less than same-sex love calling out to the world. And this quest for love cannot be the cause of homosexual attractions. It is one of their aesthetic and cultural forms—the Uranian mode of becoming. As we will see in the remainder, it was performed socially and enacted aesthetically by Freud’s patients. But Freud reified it. He saw it as the very structure of their psyches, a pathogenic cyst that causes (and continually reinforces) aloneness rather than the self-forwarding antennae that seek (and perhaps sometimes actually find) togetherness.
§4. In October 1909, as we have seen in chapter 7, Freud told Jung that the “riddle of Leonardo’s character” had suddenly become clear. He was awaiting the book on Leonardo’s youth in which he would learn about the artist’s recollection of his childhoood fantasy.
In the meantime [he went on] I will reveal the secret. Do you remember my remark in the “Sexual Theories of Children” that children’s primitive ideas were bound to fail and that this could have a paralyzing effect on them? Well, great Leonardo was such a man; at an early age he converted his sexuality into an urge for knowledge and from then on the inability to finish anything became a pattern to which he had to conform in all his ventures: he was sexually inactive or homosexual.
In other words, Freud saw Leonardo as a grown-up little boy who, unable to unwind the torsion or mitigate the tension of his high estimate of the value of his highly esteemed phallus, partly implanted by his mother, repressed the feeling in “ideal” or chaste homosexuality, even though he also managed to sublimate it, that is, partly to discharge the repression in artistic expression. “Not so long ago,” Freud concluded, “I came across Leonardo’s image and likeness (without his genius) in a neurotic,” a patient who presumably displayed homosexual repression without sublimation in great works of art.23
It happens that Sadger described just such a man to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in early November 1909.24 It is not entirely clear whether this person was the neurotic patient that Freud had mentioned to Jung two weeks earlier. Freud probably knew about Sadger’s cases before their results were presented to the group. It is possible, in fact, that Freud had referred the patient to Sadger in the first place, a practice that became increasingly common in Freud’s professional life. Regardless, in his verbal and published descriptions of the case, Sadger, as noted, was the first psychoanalyst to use the formula that the “path to homosexuality lies through narcissism” adopted by Freud in writing Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood in the early months of 1910.
Sadger’s patient was a thirty-two-year-old Swedish baron, an archaeologist and art historian. He lived with a woman but had fallen in love with a young male waiter. (I have not been able to identify this man despite the clues provided in Sadger’s reports, and contemporary accounts of homosexual life and culture in Scandinavia are difficult to find, although Anton Nyström offered a few firsthand observations in the first chapter of his Das Geschlechtsleben und seine Gesetze, published in 1907.) The baron was a cornucopia of sexual peccadilloes, including “autoerotism, onanism, narcissism, a sort of autocoitus, exhibitionism, [and] an infatuation for statues.” Apparently he came to psychoanalysis not because of his homosexual romances but because he was having convulsions—what Sadger called hysterical lapses. He admired both androgynous young men and older, virile men, but only if they were not overtly homosexual; he disdained sex, but liked, as Sadger reported it, to be “loved and fondled” by other men, for example, by a fellow cadet at the military academy that he had attended. His father had been absent, even disturbed, though Sadger said little about the circumstances of his troubles; the boy’s mother treated him as her favorite child. (Like Leonardo, then, he had had no opportunity, as the psychoanalysts saw it, to develop a robust identification with his father. Sadger took care to observe that an uncle who could have substituted for his father was himself a “feminine” man, perhaps an invert.) With little or no correction from his father, his mother overvalued him. When the time came for him to begin sexual relations with members of the opposite sex, she would not let him go. In puberty, he thought, she had spied on him; doing nothing to prevent his masturbation, the patient and his analyst inferred that she had taken pleasure in his self-pleasuring. The patient blamed her for his bisexuality (Sadger’s account suggests that he overtly embraced the Freudians’ word as a self-description); he was impotent with women and passive in relation to men when they admired him in the way (Sadger inferred) that his mother had done.
As the Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society show, Freud was quite impressed with Sadger’s lengthy account.25 Not only did unconscious homosexuality “fit in very well with the baron’s interest in ancient art,” as Eduard Hitschmann, a member of the society, remarked in response to Sadger’s presentation. (We might imagine that everyone in the group was thinking of Winckelmann.) The psychoanalysts also had information, or so they thought, about why the baron’s mother had overvalued him. According to Sadger, she had what he called “anal” demands for order and hygiene, though presumably Sadger had not spoken directly with her. With Freud’s concurrence, Sadger inferred that she must have overeroticized the boy’s anal-genital region in cleaning and caring for him as an object under her control when his father was gone, like Leonardo’s mother who supposedly “kissed him passionately” as her toobeloved substitute for the man who had not married her. Freud seized on this factor as the crucial determination of homosexuality in the recursions of homoautoerotism.
As he got older, the baron, like Little Hans, came to over-overestimate the phallus. He studied archaeology so that he could continue to look at it in the idealized form of ancient sculptures. And he developed “exhibitionist” habits. As Sadger reported, “he made himself a loincloth and, naked, practiced muscle exercises. At the age of fifteen, he began to sketch himself in the nude.” (Elsewhere Sadger noted that these self-portraits, which he seems to have seen, pictured the young man with an erection.) “Drawing to him was a means of idealizing himself. He would undress completely in front of his comrades and engage in a sort of sexual gymnastics with them.”
To be sure, representations of activities of this kind were a staple in contemporary homosexualist literature. In Achille Essebac’s novel Dédé (1905), for example, the frontispiece depicted an older cadet unbuttoning the shirt of a younger friend, as it were a virtual illustration of one of the fantasies reported by the baron to Sadger; and illustrations in Max des Vignons’s Fredi s’amuse (1929), a somewhat later homosexualist novel of sexual coming-of-age, depicted the main character, Fredi, lying naked on the rug in the apartment of a friend, prancing with his fellows in revealing swimwear, and carefully arranging his looks in the mirror. In Austria and Germany at the time, as noted in §3, both physical culture and Freikörperkultur (naturism or nudism) were specifically linked with homoerotic sociability by such reformers as Hans Blüher; its aesthetics had been promoted in Der Eigene and other homoeroticist magazines. In the summer of 1912, in fact, Blüher went so far as to send Freud the manuscript of an essay on the “German Wandervogelbewegung [outdoor, hiking, or orienteering movement] as an erotic phenomenon”; it was published that year and went through several editions, establishing Blüher’s lifelong reputation as the leading European homoerotic apostle of the movement, though needless to say his explicit recognition (and promotion) of homoerotic sexuality in the interrelated movements of physical culture, nudism, and outdoorsmanship led to public controversy.
Blüher was well versed in psychoanalysis; he could have read Sadger’s clinical presentation of the Scandinavian baron as well as Freud’s essay on Leonardo. He knew that his essay would interest Freud. Perhaps, too, he suspected that it could help to educate him: in 1909 and 1910 Sadger and Freud had little or no idea of the cultural icons—the queer beauty—that the young baron seems to have assimilated in his “narcissism” and “exhibitionism,” especially in his athletic and artistic activity at the turn of the century. For them, much or all of it was aberration, neurosis, or perversion. Although they only dimly realized it, at the time of his enrollment as a titled young officer-in-training in the Swedish royal cadet corps the young man had evidently begun to enter a homoeroticist (and possibly a homosexualist) culture of the kind originally imagined by the first historian of Greek art, Winckelmann; he recognized that the idealization and display of his body and of his athletic and artistic skills was (or could be) socially linked to homoerotic bonding and perhaps even to homosexual activity. Sub-Winckelmannian ideologies of homoeroticist Bildung were widespread at the time, especially among homosexualist writers and artists who rejected strictly biophysiological or instinctualist accounts of homosexuality (see chapter 7). In 1907, for example, the polemicist Elisar von Kupffer, a painter, illustrated his latest book, Redemptive Art: A Discourse in Florence, with a photograph captioned “Renaissance Idyll” (figure 39). It showed a boy about fourteen or fifteen years old (the age of Sadger’s young baron when he took up this form of culture) strumming a lute. The youth seems to be dressed in imitation of a pageboy or squire in an Italian Renaissance painting. A miniature copy of the Praxitelean Apollo Sauroktonos stands in the corner; according to later eighteenth and nineteenth century aesthetic canons, the work was a paradigmatic exemplification of Winckelmann’s “beautiful style” of Greek sculpture. On the wall behind him, we can discern a reproduction of Pierre-Paul Prud’hon’s painting Zephyr of 1814 (in turn it was a partial replication of the figure of Eros approaching the body of the sleeping youth in Girodet’s Sleep of Endymion of 1791) and a work, likely a painting by Kupffer himself, derived from one of Sodoma’s saints or from Leonardo’s St. John. (Indeed, in 1908, shortly before Freud became interested in writing on Leonardo, Kupffer published a long essay on Antonio Bazzi, “Il Sodoma,” in Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch; Freud must have seen it. In Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood Freud took care to say that Leonardo, whose homosexuality was supposed ideal or unenacted, had probably never known this pupil of his art, whose male love affairs were well known. Freud’s psychobiographical essay was in part, then, a psychoanalytic riposte to Kupffer’s homoerotic history.)26 As Sadger put it, as if describing the kind of array that was figured in Kupffer’s photograph, “in the people the person loves,” including the images and artworks that he admires and identifies with, “one can recognize the person himself; he loves the type that evolved in him when he tried to do without the love of his mother; there seems to be a flight from the mother who no longer satisfies him”—supposedly because she lacks the penis he values—“toward the mother who once loved him” because he has the penis that they both overvalue.
FIGURE 39. Elisar von Kupffer (1872–1942), A Renaissance Idyll. From Elisar von Kupffer, Heiland Kunst: Ein Gespräch in Florenz (Jena: H. Costenoble, 1907).5
It is not exactly clear what Freud meant in saying to Jung that he had encountered a patient “in the image and likeness of Leonardo.” Obviously he had come to know (or to know of) a patient, whether Sadger’s baron or a closely similar man, with the repressed homosexuality that he wanted to attribute to Leonardo. But he did not already know that this history could be ascribed to Leonardo. Rather, the patient’s history helped him, as he said, to solve the riddle of Leonardo’s personality. In turn, the solution was shortly confirmed by Freud’s finding of Leonardo’s recollection of his childhood fantasy, the image of a bird alighting in his cradle, where “it opened [his] mouth with its tail and struck [him] many times with its tail against [his] lips.” Freud interpreted this fantasm as a synthetic fantasy of the mother’s passionate love (that is, the bird kissing him), the boy’s phallic image of her (the bird’s tail), his mother’s (and his own) anger and fear at their loss of each other (the striking), and his homosexual revision (his sucking on the tail, the breast-penis of the phallic mother and her later avatars).
The artistic sublimation of this crucial moment was neither Mona Lisa nor the Virgin and St. Anne, though Freud’s essay was often taken by its readers chiefly to be about these works. The two famous paintings, Freud concluded, were sublimations of periods of archaic fantasy in Leonardo’s life that were either earlier or later than the specifically homosexual fantasy that emerged in Leonardo’s passage from autoerotism to object love. Supposedly Mona Lisa reactivated the earliest infantile memory of the boy’s adoring but faulty mother, and supposedly the Virgin and St. Anne reactivated the later childhood memory of the older child (now living in his father’s house) conjoining images of his first, real mother and his “new” mothers in the paternal household, namely, his paternal grandmother and his father’s new wife. Almost as if responding to models of the process like Kupffer’s “Renaissance Idyll,” in Freud’s account Leonardo sublimated the crucial “transition to homosexuality,” otherwise repressed, in paintings of young St. John and of Bacchus, “a young Apollo [here Freud quoted the words of the art historian Richard Muther] who, with a mysterious smile on his lips, and with his smooth legs crossed, gazes at us with eyes that intoxicate the senses.”
These pictures [Freud went on in his own words] breathe a mystical air into whose secret one dares not penetrate; the figures are still androgynous, but no longer in the sense of the vulture-phantasy. They are beautiful youths of feminine delicacy and with effeminate forms; they do not cast their eyes down, but gaze in mysterious triumph, as if [als ob] they knew of a great achievement of happiness, about which silence must be kept. The familiar smile of fascination leads one to guess that it is a secret of love.
But whom do they love? Who loves them? Indeed, can love really be found here? If the “young Apollo” who is Saint John or Bacchus really smiles inwardly—smiles to himself—about his secret of gleichgeschlechtliche Liebe, same-sex love, his smile not only mirrors his mother’s original love for him. It also must express his happiness in having found his same, a man like him who has returned his love for him. But Freud’s logic entailed that this “great achievement of happiness” was still unreal—a fantasy, even a delusion. What we see in St. John or Bacchus is the self-image of the youth, mirroring the self-image of the painter, smiling as if he had attained the triumph of love—especially his love for the love given to him by others who are just the same as him. But his narcissism is such, or, better, the inherently narcissistic logic of the situation is such, that he cannot really see that this love is self-illusion. In the end, apparently, love of the same is not, after all, love all the same.
§5. To understand this result (in the essay of 1910 Freud’s observations on Leonardo’s “young Apollos” were his final observations on Leonardo’s art), it must be stressed that in Leonardo and related studies Freud identified no clear basis for the narcissistic disposition that supposedly underlies homosexuality. In the end, then, he failed fully to decide the question of the congenital or acquired origin of “contrary” or homosexual sexual feeling, even though it was the question that had motivated him to investigate homosexual life histories in the first place. This lacuna distinguished Freud’s theory of narcissism in homosexuality (or homosexuality as narcissism) from his theories of the psychogenesis of other erotic dispositions. In the near-contemporary case of the Wolf Man, for example, Freud wanted to root the characteristic inclinations of the patient, his anality and his sadism, in what Freud called prehistory, that is, the patient’s familial heredity and cultural genealogy. In the Wolf Man’s childhood supposedly these inherited or imprinted dispositions were transferred into latent homosexuality, establishing its peculiar coloring and in particular focusing its imagery, such as the Wolf Man’s erotic fascination with female backsides and his obsessive (and homosocially managed) attention to the movement of his bowels. No such filtering and focusing dispositions—such prehistoric parameters—in Leonardo’s narcissism were specified by Freud. He presented the artist’s narcissism as the very ground of the traits of mind or character, such as “brooding and doubting,” that marked Leonardo’s later life and career.
Indeed, in Leonardo Freud’s explication of narcissism was really sociological rather than strictly psychoanalytic. Supposedly an adult homosexual, a “Leonardo,” has not been able to move beyond his repetition of the pleasures initially drawn out of him by a phallic maternity that was itself created in a perturbation of the family and especially of its ideal marital arrangements. Recall that Leonardo’s mother was unmarried and that he was therefore classified as illegitimate. (Moreover, Leonardo’s father, though not the focus of Freud’s inquiry, must have been a philanderer or possibly an adulterer, and to some extent he had to be portrayed as a polygamist.) These legal-juridical facts framed the social marginality and disenfranchisement of mother and son; in turn, they caused the destructive intensity of their love for one another. In light of all this, Leonardo’s homosexuality, as Freud conceived it, might best be seen as a byproduct of modern patriarchy or, more exactly, of a devalued social unit—an unwed mother and her bastard child—that struggled socially and psychically with the erotic, moral, and legal impossibility, even the prohibition, of its legitimate completion in patriarchy. (Its social devaluation, as we have seen, was transformed into the overvaluations that marked and marred the mutual fantasy images of mother and child.) Freudian theory could go so far as to hint that the psychic incidence of homosexuality in Freud’s sense must be an inevitable precipitate of modern familial and gender relations, as it were a form of psychopathia socialis as much as psychopathia sexualis.27
For these reasons, as Freud account had it, Leonardo’s narcissistic homosexuality permeated his adult social relations: inherited from his own constitution as a social being (albeit a disenabled one), homosexuality became the interpersonal principle according to which the artist constituted his own next generation, his own disturbed or deviant patriarchum. Its members included the painter’s apprentice Gian Giancarlo, “Il Salai,” the little devil, who stole from him but continued to receive his love, a new little narcissist Leonardo had created in indulging the boy and who could be fantasized to smile upon the painter, his “mother,” in the way that the painter’s mother had once smiled upon him; the painter’s model Francesco Melzi, later his long-time helpmeet and companion, a pretty man-about-town who figured in nineteenth-century aestheticist literature as the very type of homoerotically desirable beauty;28 the painter’s virtuoso stylistic follower Antonio Bazzi, “Il Sodoma,” who pursued erotic interests—chasing after good-looking youths without a second thought—that Leonardo himself repressed (though Freud denied that Leonardo had ever personally known this student of his art, Sodoma had long been seen as Leonardo’s closest imitator in sfumato, the soft blending of oils that creates the blur of the Leonardesque image, its pictorial ambiguity, and promotes uncertainty, say, about depicted sex or the emotions relayed in a smile, as in Sodoma’s saints and angels); and, finally, in Leonardo’s “sublimation” of his homosexual repression, the paintings of the youthful Saint John or young Bacchus that really did return the original pathogenic smile of the painter’s mother to him in the image of the beautiful youth who resembled and replaced her. Homosexual narcissism, then, seemed to spread through Leonardo’s social relations. As a result of the prior and fundamental cleavage in the original, proper family-that-never-was, the failed union of Leonardo’s biological parents, it constituted a same-sex family that existed only in cultural replications or only as a history of images. But in the end this was the logical fulfillment of the implicit recognition that same-sex love, as I put it in chapter 7, was aesthetogenic—that it was caused by (and that it caused) the interest some people take in the erotic beauty of their own sex.
Leonardo’s same-sex family had proliferated, of course, by the time Freud and his followers encountered its living members in their consulting rooms. The patient “in the image and likeness of Leonardo,” whether he was Sadger’s aristocratic Swedish archaeologist or someone else, can only have seemed to Freud to be the solution to the puzzle of Leonardo if somehow he evoked Leonardo. In this light Freud’s cryptic description of him makes greater sense. Like Sadger’s young baron or Kupffer’s German and Italian student beloveds, the patient must have presented himself—or at least imagined himself—as if he were a likeness of an image by Leonardo, a young Bacchus, or professed a taste for images made by Leonardo, like the Bacchus, and including, perhaps, Leonardo’s own likeness. And indeed it is possible that the patient reminded Freud of Leonardo’s images or of his likeness—must have done so, in fact, for Freud to see his history as the solution of Leonardo’s history even as this identification circulated homosexuality through Freud himself or more exactly circulated it into Freud. (Freud also nominated himself, along with Goethe, as a “descendant” and psychic image of Leonardo, that is, someone who had successfully converted his homosexual neuroses into high creative achievement.) In pursuing this genealogy headed, as it were literally seeded, by Leonardo as the ur-type of all the Leonardos, Freud implanted the culturally imagined teleologies of homoerotic desire, its gradually realized aesthetic and social system of self-identification and self-recognition, deep into the self as the very historical explanation of that system. As his own origin as a homosexual, Leonardo supposedly resumed within himself the way in which Leonardo symbolized homosexuality for homoerotic and homosexualist culture—indeed, the way in which imitation of images by Leonardo and of Leonardo as a “Leonardo” literally created contemporary homosexuals.
At the same time, Freud resisted the most radical means nineteenth-century homoerotic society had so far established in order to represent its own nature, and indeed to attain its reproduction as a society in signs of self-recognition, relays of attraction, and symbols of identification. In Freud’s account of him, as we have seen, Leonardo became homosexual not by entering the circuitry of homoerotic Bildung in his own Renaissance time and place, as one might think, and as homosexualist commentators and historians like Numa Praetorius, Hirschfeld, and Kupffer implied or asserted. Rather, his homosexuality had descended, according to Freud, from a disturbance in primal bisexuality and particularly in a distortion of his heterosexuality caused by a prior defect in his mother’s ability to attain legitimate and fulfilling relations with his father. If homoerotic culture wanted—if it needed—to see itself when it looked in the mirror, then, Freud only saw it seeing its parental progenitors. And the new same-sex family, the family that Freud’s inverted patients wished for, could not—it could never—escape the old family, marked and marred not by the same-sex love it harbored but by the failure of love between the sexes.
As Freud saw it, gleichgeschlechtliche Liebe was a delusion, albeit a predictable and understandable one—even an admirable and progressive one in the prevailing legal-juridical situation in Austria. Its fantasy, however, did not consist in denying the claim that erotogenic sexuality is impossible between people of the same sex, as homosexualists were sometimes rhetorically forced to do in order to rally their own tribe, many of whom had resigned themselves to l ’amour de l ’impossible not only in rhetorical but in real social terms. (Hirschfeld’s and other lists of famous homosexuals, including Leonardo, were meant to show, of course, that loving and productive homoerotic sexual sociability was not impossible.) Freud admitted that same-sex sexual interaction and erotic pleasure was not impossible, or even terribly uncommon, and that there was no need to try to make it impossible. (He was happy, for example, to sign one of Hirschfeld’s petitions demanding changes in the law.) The delusion of same-sex love, its peculiar self-image and family romance, consisted simply in supposing that it might be possible to constitute a sexuality that consisted in loving someone within one or one’s own sex when a prior lack of loving sexuality between the sexes had constituted that desire for same-sex love in the first place, as the Freudian theory of homosexuality required. In the end, gleichgeschlechtliche Liebe or same-sex love was simply a failure of geschlechtliche Liebe or sexual love tout court—its misfire in social devolution and in particular in descent from progenitors to their offspring.
In Freud’s terms, no amount of idealization can overcome this deficit—whether idealization of the self or idealization of others like oneself, and whether they are others like oneself that one wants to be like or that one wants to like him. Indeed, the entire system of idealization really must be seen as an outcome of the original deficit. In turn, then, the aesthetic and artistic idealization advocated in homoerotic cultures since the era of Winckelmann and performed by many of Freud’s inverted patients, all the Leonardos, could not be regarded by the Freudians as the way in to a fulfilling sexuality, as its Winckelmannian and later exponents might long have thought and hoped. Aesthetic idealization could not even be regarded as a way out of an unfulfilling sexuality, even in the case of “ideal” homosexuals like the historic Leonardo as Freud described him. In the last analysis, aesthetic idealization and the works of art and culture it precipitated could only be regarded within psychoanalysis as one of the endless ways back to the maze of sexuality—to its unavoidable perversions and inevitable frustrations.