THE following notes apply to both the homosexuals whom I am now treating (C. is a homosexual with inhibitions, who has made heterosexual attempts; T. is entirely uninhibited, but has some religious scruples (fear of hell)):
Homosexuals love women too strongly (terrible intensity, mostly a sadistic colouring of love, perverse fantasies). They shrink back from it in terror. Repression. Return of the repressed in the form of homosexuality, which for the unconscious still represents the old, intolerably strong fantasies (attached to mother or sister). They idealize women (for them women who have coitus are whores), and this is accompanied by the following unconscious fantasy:
I. I (the homosexual) am mother (whore), who requires a a different man each time (both cases identical in this); the man with whom I have relations is myself. (For this reason the homosexual is never completely satisfied, because his young male partner can never be sufficiently like himself.) Both patients seek out only quite young men. The uninhibited one longs quite consciously for a young man in a sailor suit, such as he once wore himself. Other homosexuals (the more passive ones) prefer older, bearded men. In this case the fantasy is: ‘I am mother, he father.’
One patient (the uninhibited T.) likes to remain in the dark about the young man’s genitals. He never does anything with the young man’s genitals, likes him to wear short swimming trunks, which conceal them, and he rubs his member against his thighs. He generally satisfies himself with kissing.
T.’s recklessness and unconcern (his father occupies one of the highest positions in the state police, and he himself is a lieutenant of gendarmerie) means:
He longs, for instance, for a young, handsome apache (apa in Hungarian=father), i.e. he would like to be one himself (a parricide).
II. The inhibited patient (C.) is making real progress. In addition to the fantasy already described (in the unconscious he is himself or his father; the man with whom he has relations is his mother (back=chest, shoulder-blades=breasts, anus=vagina), the following unconscious fantasies were reconstructed (certain!):
1. He is mother (whore), the young man is himself (exactly as in the case of T.).
2. The left half of his body is similar to that of his mother, while the right half is male, himself. The two halves copulate. His father is dead, murdered. (In his unconscious now he himself and now his mother figures as the murderer.) In his passion to spare his father from death, he sometimes turns himself (the right half of his body) into his father, so that his father and mother copulate; he is ‘between’ them, and he kisses his mother and father in turn (he always kisses his mother first, and then kisses his father to console him). He carries all these things over into the transference:
While telling me such things one of his legs stiffens instead of an erection (his penis remains limp). At the same time he often has cramps or a stiff neck.
The meaning of the two halves of the body always betrays itself by passagère sensations which generally last until he (or mostly I) find the right solution.
I regard as the fundamental characteristic of homosexuality the reversal (inversion) of roles which in neurosis as in dream means mockery and contempt and at the same time concealed revolt against the lie.
I find the origin of this method of representation in the infantile. If a child wishes to express its ridicule (of a statement made about its parents, for instance) in a form unintelligible to adults it does so:
1. By exaggerating the opposite (e.g. exaggerated acceptance of a paternal statement that he finds incredible).
2. By inversion (reversal):
I owe this remark (about the lamb) to my small nephew, aged five, with whom I occupy myself a great deal. He and his parents moved into Budapest not long ago from a provincial town. He is very intelligent, but his stupid nurse has filled him with superstitious and frightening ideas, from which I am gradually freeing him. She has frightened him, for instance, with stories about wild animals, and these have recently been plaguing him in his dreams (tendency to anxiety, as with little Hans, determined by fear of the father). To reassure him, I told him that lions were frightened of men; they were dangerous only when they were attacked. ‘And aren’t wolves frightened of lambs, Uncle Sandor?’ he said. ‘Because a lamb could gobble a wolf up, couldn’t it?’ Such statements are generally attributed to children’s stupidity, but I saw through his little trick, and said he didn’t want to believe me when I told him that lions were afraid of men. He blushed, kissed me, and said: ‘You won’t be angry with me, will you, Uncle Sandor?’
This kind of secret language of children, in which they may perhaps be intelligible to one another, but which is perhaps really made up for their own use, to relieve their own inner tension (urge for truth), ought to be intensively studied. It might result in the explanation of many characteristics of the neuroses.
My patient C. brings up things exactly like this. Inverted words, dates, spring to his mind, and, senseless, inverted situations and pictures. They always mean mockery, contempt, and disbelief (about his parents, myself, analysis, etc.). I could quote a hundred examples.
By this way of reacting of his (taken in conjunction with the above-mentioned experience with children) he produces another of the ‘fundamental reasons’ of homosexuality.
Homosexuality is a wholesale inversion (inversion en masse). Recognition of the sexual lie in themselves and in adults cannot be repressed by children without a substitute formation, and a number choose for the representation (which gradually becomes unconscious) of their feelings the formula which children use otherwise also for the representation of an untruth: inversion. But the inversion of the libido generally takes place only in puberty, when sexual desires arc biologically strengthened and are therefore inhibited and transposed to the infantile level. There must, of course, be a ‘primary homosexuality’; what I mean is that such an inversion must really have already taken place in infancy if the subsequent repression is to lead to homosexuality (a form of psychoneurosis).
Translated into terms of reason, homosexual inversion means roughly the following:
‘It is as true that my parents are decent and chaste as that I am my mother and that my mother is myself.’
(The idea that ‘I am you and you are me’ often came into the head of my patient C. (who when he identified himself with his mother spoke German); compare the childish jingle:
He learned this jingle from his mother, who used to point to him and to herself alternately as she recited it. The game was to repeat the jingle in such a way that you were pointing at the other person when you finished up on the last syllable, du.)
Or another idea that struck him was: ‘All right, it’s not true that I should like to sleep with my mother instead of my father and do such things with her, and that I should like to do away with my father—but in that case I’m mother and my mother is her son’ (i.e. it isn’t true!).
In the subsequent sexual revolution (puberty) this infantile structure proves itself invaluable in the repression drive. The boy on the threshold of manhood is filled with fear of his own sexual impulses (which are still directed at his parents) and represses them. As a substitute (if the necessary preconditions dating from his infancy are present) he becomes homosexual. Homosexuality contains the whole truth in completely inverted form:
Conscious |
Unconscious |
|---|---|
Men, father, over-estimated |
Father murdered |
Women, mother, hated |
Mother loved |
Women idealized |
All women, including mother, are whores |
I love young men |
Young man=myself |
myself = mother |
|
I copulate with my mother |
|
I copulate with a man from behind |
I copulate with a woman from in front |
etc., etc. |
|
The credit of establishing that the chief role in homosexuality is played by the mother belongs to Sadger. He thus cleared the way for the discovery that homosexuality was a psychoneurosis, and that its foundation was therefore the nuclear complex of all neuroses. This does not explain the essence of homosexuality, however, because the nuclear complex is common to every neurotic (and every normal person). Only the elucidation of its more detailed structure can help to show us the way in which one neurosis or another is built up out of the nuclear complex. That will leave open only the problem of the choice of neurosis, but in solving this final question the structure can give us some help.
Homosexuality is a neurosis closely related to impotence; the flight from women is common to both. An impotent man suppresses the genital reflex. (He is perhaps helped by some physical factor, the ‘somatic compliance’.)
Impotence is noticeably often a family phenomenon; three or four men in the same family (brothers). The homosexual is less able to repress; his conscious sexuality is displaced towards men, but he remains loyal to the other sex in his unconscious.
Impotence, like homosexuality, can only be cured if it causes the patient suffering.
I do not believe in innate homosexuality. At most I am prepared to admit that degree of inherent inclination (sexual constitution) that must also be assumed in the explanation, e.g. of hysteria. A person with a given sexual constitution can then be made a hysteric or a homosexual by events (‘the vicissitudes of the libido’). The sexual constitution is something potential; the neurosis on sexual grounds must be present for it to be able to exercise its power of influencing the direction taken. It is by no means the only factor; exogenous factors can also exercise an influence on the direction taken (the choice of neurosis). Thus an individual with a hysterical or homosexual constitution need not necessarily become a hysteric or a homosexual.
The ‘third sex’ theory was invented by homosexuals as a scientific form of resistance.
Homosexuality in the sense of pederasty (the third sex) does not exist in the animal world (I am not speaking of hermaphroditism). The attraction of opposites draws the young male to the young female more than to another young male. Male dogs play with each other (male monkeys do so too). Thus a certain amount of libido among animals of the same sex is certainly present. But such play is not to be compared with the earnestness of the heterosexual love impulse.
I am convinced that the same applies to human beings, and that, wherever excessive homosexuality appears, it is to be attributed to the repression of heterosexuality; probably to the repression of excessively powerful heterosexuality (intolerable to the ego), which persists undiminished in the unconscious and lives on under the mask of homosexuality.