local inn in connection with his larger business in a small village. In
eight years he made a great success and attained affluence. He has
acquired all the retail business of the place, carries on also a
wholesale business with the neighboring retail dealers, and was on the
way to become a very wealthy man when he began to quarrel with his wife
on account of his jealousy. His wife was of a frigid temperament who
always remained cool during his embrace and it always worried him. After
the birth of a couple of children she grew somewhat more responsive.
When she had her first strong orgasm during his embrace he became
suspicious and concluded at once that she must have had some other
instructor in the art of love. How was it possible for a cool woman,
suddenly, over night, as it were, to turn into a passionate mate? He
began watching his wife and came to the conclusion that she must have
had intercourse with a certain man possessing a very long _phallus_.
There lived in that village a farmer who was no longer young, but
wealthy, and known for his long penis and his virility. That fellow was
his regular guest at the inn. What more natural than that the innkeeper
should conclude that he must be the guilty man. We note that his mind
must have been preoccupied for a long time with the size of that man’s
penis. That phantasy he projected to his wife. His curiosity and longing
to see that _phallus_ he ascribed to his wife. That is how thought
processes originate. Such _autism_ (_Bleuler_) renders us uncritical and
permits us to see the whole world through the subjective coloring of our
own emotions. How could his wife, a woman, fail to be interested in the
size of the peasant’s _phallus_, which was openly the talk of the
tavern, when he, a man, could not help being interested? Such,
approximately, is the logic of this thinking. He began to watch that
peasant and his wife. He pretended to go on a journey telling his wife
he would not be back before the following day. But he returned that very
evening. He tiptoed up the steps to the bedroom. He heard a dull thud.
Naturally it was the peasant, escaping through the window. It was—as the
woman explained—the cat who had been scared off. He insisted a man had
been in the room. His wife felt so indignant that she wanted to leave
him at once and refused to say another word. He became humble and begged
her imploringly for forgiveness telling her the reason for his jealousy.
The wife declared that she had always been passionate but was ashamed to
show it. Finally it came to her all of a sudden that it was foolish on
her part, also, she had learned to love him more than ever. She cannot
help it if she is now more responsive. There followed an interval of
peace but only for a few months. Soldiers were quartered in the place
and a physically impressive captain secured a room. From the moment of
his appearance at the place that captain roused the man’s suspicions. He
found that his wife gave the fellow the best cup of coffee, that she was
altogether too friendly with him, and that she showered upon him all
sorts of pleasant little courtesies. His wife explained to him that this
captain bought of them all the supplies for his company and was the
means of bringing them important business, and that she was friendly
only for business reasons, but that their relations had never trespassed
the limits of propriety. But he kept collecting indications of her
unfaithfulness. Among the proofs he found the butt of a cigarette in his
wife’s room. He questioned her closely and asked the officer’s orderly
to bring him a cigarette from his master’s case, claiming those
cigarettes had such a pleasant aroma he wanted to try one. He thus
secured a cigarette and found that it bore an identical mark. The fact
was he smoked the same brand of cigarettes, but he thought he discovered
a certain stripe which the other cigarettes did not have (I could not
detect the stripe in question). His other proofs were of a like
character. This time he had a terrible quarrel with his wife,—much more
serious than the previous ordeal. Trouble upon trouble followed after
that. He suspected his clerks and dismissed them one after another about
every two weeks. Every one was his wife’s lover. Finally he rushed at
his wife, in a fit of anger, to beat her, and began choking her. The
following day the woman left him, went to live with her sister, and
started proceedings for divorce. She claimed her husband was not normal
and he voluntarily came to Vienna to place himself under my observation.
First I turned my attention to his jealousy and I tried carefully to
correct that. He acknowledged some points, here and there, showed some
insight into his condition, and was not shocked when I refused to give
him a certificate of good health. Meanwhile he had removed his beard to
give himself a younger appearance. That change was not necessary as he
was young-looking enough, but it was part of the outbreak of his
feminine tendencies. He also had a string of dreams in which he was a
woman. Usually he rehearsed the old jealousy scenes and he repeatedly
killed his wife in his dreams.
Thus he dreamed:
_I am with my wife in an old room but dressed as a woman, so as not to
be recognized. My wife steps out of the room, it was very dark. The
captain comes into the room and wants to touch me under the dress. But
some one calls him out of the room. I jump at my wife, enraged: that is
the kind of a h—— you are. Now I know everything about you ... and I
stick a knife in her throat._
In another dream he lies hidden under the bed and feels the swaying
motion of coitus above. It was very characteristic that after quarrels
and scenes of violence he craved intercourse with his wife and his
_libido_ was much stronger ... clearly on account of the sadistic
excitation.
I saw this patient again five years after the psychoanalysis. He was
divorced from his wife and was apparently very quiet. He claimed to be
entirely well, said he was jealous no longer, and every now and then had
intercourse with women. I do not dare decide whether this result may be
ascribed to the analysis and the therapeutic-educational course of
treatment.
The various confusion states, called periodic insanity, must be looked
upon as an equivalent of permanent insanity. It is certainly striking to
see how many alcoholics, morphinists, opium eaters, cocaine fiends and,
in more recent years, victims addicted to adalin, veronal, medinal,
luminal, etc., fear insanity. If such a case is analyzed one always
finds the homosexual component and the repressed sadistic tendency. The
psychic mechanisms of these disorders are the same as those described in
the paranoid form of the jealousy delusion. We have in all these cases
an endopsychic perception that inner forces compel greater stress on the
delusions than on reality.
The next case is a pure example of this condition under a form which
often ends in suicide.
79. Mr. O. L., a very talented violinist, suffers unbearable anxieties,
among them the fear of insanity being the strongest. He also has hours
of terrific, unexplainable depressions for which he is unable to give
any cause. He only _has the feeling that he is about to commit some
terrible deed_ so as to rid himself of the anxiety and have peace once
more. He thinks he might commit some crime and be jailed so as to be
sure that there is nothing further for him to fear. During the first
weeks he speaks only of his anxiety over his father. He has the idea
fixed in his mind that his father will come to Vienna and have him
interned in an insane asylum. Rather than put up with that _he will
shoot his father first and then kill himself_. He reverts every little
while to the suspicion that I am in league with his father. (That is the
form which the identification of the physician with the father assumes
with this class of patients. The physician is the symbol of the father.)
He has been taking various narcotics for a number of years. Not,
exactly, to sleep. For he sleeps well without the aid of veronal or
pantopon. But he suffers so much of anxiety. And he feels that the
narcotics make a better man of him. He uses unbelievable doses of these
drugs. He has once taken with suicidal intent 10 g. veronal in one dose
with the only result that he slept 24 hours “like a top” and woke up
without any ill effects. He sleeps every day till 11 or noon, sometimes
into the afternoon hours, and still wakes up somewhat drowsy.
He now abstains strictly from alcohol. He has done a number of foolish
things under the influence of drink. Once he tackled an officer at a
night resort, wanted to embrace him, kiss him, made various suggestive
proposals and finally had to be thrown out. He has also had serious rows
which put him in the hands of the police. He gave his word of honor to
his father that he would not touch liquor any more because he was
threatened with internment at a sanitarium for alcoholics. He broke his
word only once but has turned to various narcotics. During a six-months
sojourn at a sanitarium he got completely well and abandoned the drugs.
One month after leaving the sanitarium he began again to use the drugs.
He is an impressive, handsome, very powerful man, very “lucky” with
women. But he is true to none for any length of time excepting the last
sweetheart. He did love her and does to this day. He would marry her if
he could support her.
He is tremendously jealous and his jealousy is that typical form which
is concerned with the past, an example of which we have seen in case 75.
He has to be told over and over by his sweethearts how they have been
seduced. He must hear with particular circumstantiality all the details
of the defloration. That causes him tremendous sexual excitation. Only
then is he able to achieve orgasm with women. Otherwise he may keep up
the sexual congress for a half hour without accomplishing
ejaculation.[21]
Finally ejaculation and orgasm are brought about through manual friction
of the penis by the woman. This form of sexual gratification leads back
to a particular incident in his youth when the choice was made. First,
he confesses that at 17 he maintained relations with a boy who gratified
him in that manner. Earlier reminiscences from childhood appear. The
incidents always relate to boys. Now he does not want to recognize any
homosexual tendencies. At 17 years he made a forceful attempt to tear
himself away from his friend and began passionately to run after women
and girls.
His homosexuality shows itself in the choice of his love objectives.
Usually he seduces the sisters of those of his friends whom he likes in
particular. I know no affair of his in which some man did not play a
rôle. When a man did not figure at the beginning he was brought in
later, so as to complete the constellation necessary for the rousing of
his libidinous craving. Very characteristic is the following episode,
among the others of the last few years:
He became acquainted at a sanitarium with a young woman who soon became
his sweetheart. One of his most intimate friends was also at that
sanitarium. He asked his friend to try his luck with the lady because he
wanted to test her faithfulness. The friend hesitated. He was afraid of
a misunderstanding and the woman was not worth that to him. Then our
subject tried to bring him and his sweetheart together in another way.
He wagered a large sum of money that he could not get at the girl. His
friend accepted the wager, and three days later proved that he had won
the bet. O. L. wanted to hear every detail about the seduction and
became so enraged that he could have killed his friend. Then that friend
seduced again another sweetheart of his, a few months later he attacked
him on the street and would have beaten him up if a few colleagues had
not restrained him.
Now here in Vienna he is convinced that “that d—— fellow” will seduce
also his present sweetheart, a girl whom he truly loves. But if so, he
will find the fellow and kill him as well as the girl. The woman has a
brother who plays an important rôle in the psychogenesis of this love.
Once the woman told him how devotedly she loved her brother. She could
understand how a sister may give herself to a brother. Now he urged the
woman to give herself to the brother, setting up but one condition: he
should witness the act. This phantasy assumed compulsive strength. On
every occasion he tortured her, insisting that she ought to grant him
the wish, and he kept calling in the brother when she did not want him.
Once they were alone. He broke his word and they drank merrily. He got
very drunk and made a passionate love declaration to his sweetheart’s
brother, begging him to accompany him to the house and take the sister’s
place.
His mother died when he was 15 years of age. The father engaged a young
woman to take care of the house and he fell in love with her. At the
same time he also hated her, fearing that his father would disinherit
him in favor of this woman. He even planned to put the woman out of the
way with poison. Wholly unconscious and most deeply repressed is his
love for the father, whom he worries and to whom he causes no end of
trouble. He was at the threshold of a wonderful career, all teachers had
prophesied that he would be some day one of the world’s greatest
violinists. His first concert was an unprecedented success. Then his
neurosis broke out and now he is through with his career. Done with it
and with life.
Back of the neurosis the motive of which is to worry the old father, to
irritate him and force him to pay attention to the unsuccessful son,
stands hidden his passionate love of the father, though he writes him
scolding letters, 20 sheets long, and threatens to shoot him, should he
dare cut down his rightful inheritance. A certain memory trace leads to
various childhood fancies resembling the affairs with boys already
mentioned. Finally he brings forth a reminiscence placing his father in
an unpleasant light. The father was also a drinker....
It seems as if he had tried to forget that fact. His fancies of murder
are directed against the father. That becomes clearer all the time. He
turns ill and addicted to veronal so as to commit no crime. He feels his
father slights and neglects him. They quarrel all the time on account of
his dissipations. The father threatens he will be no longer responsible
for his debts. The son must give up his expensive habits of living. Then
the war broke out. He was among the first volunteers to answer the call,
distinguished himself several times with his conduct, and finally met
his death in an engagement.
I have already pointed out elsewhere in this work the latent
homosexuality of drinkers. In the light of these new considerations, the
well-known jealousy of drinkers reveals an additional feature. The
intoxication is to a certain extent a periodic artificial paranoia
during which the ideas of persecution come to the foreground. This is
very clearly to be seen in many cases. In that particular respect the
alcohol addict is hardly different from the paranoiac. Both believe in
the objectivity of their insane notions.
The following two case histories of drinkers’ jealousy will conclude
this lengthy list of illustrative cases:
80. Mr. N. V., Captain, married at the age of 34 and has been married
two years. His marriage was unhappy from the very first day. Previous to
that he had had intercourse only with _puellæ publicæ_ and with them was
always potent. With his wife he is impotent. He is very unhappy over it
and consoles himself with street women. He began to drink and beats his
wife while intoxicated. He scolds her, calls her a whore and accuses her
of intimacy with all the officers. Although he had been drinking
formerly, he did so with moderation, but now he is a confirmed
_potator_, spends his time in dram shops and while intoxicated becomes
very friendly with the waiters and other underlings, kissing them and
toasting their comradeship. He is firmly convinced that his wife is
unfaithful to him and even suspects his boy whom he beats mercilessly
when under the influence of drink.
The woman left her husband and fled to her parents.
That affected the man so depressingly that, after a three months’ stay
at a sanitarium, he returned penitently, a changed man, and prevailed
upon the wife to return and live with him again. But in a few weeks his
old demoniac jealousy set in once more. This time he accused her of the
most horrible crimes. He reproached her that she allowed herself to be
licked by the dog and shot the animal. He watched her carefully and
denied her the least social intercourse. Finally he accused her of
intimacy with her 15-year-old brother. He found a small spot on the bed
linen and he cut that out to preserve as proof of her infidelity. He
pounced on her one night, choked her, and tried to force her to confess
her doings with the brother. Again she fled to her parents but hesitated
to turn her husband over to the lunacy board. She did not want to be the
cause of his commitment to a sanitarium.
Meanwhile the patient’s insanity grew rapidly. He drank to great excess
and raised a big row in front of her parents’ home. He complained to the
police that his wife and her younger brother, with whom she maintains
criminal relations, had set a number of desperate-looking characters on
his trail. He served notice that he would give those fellows something
to remember him by and that the first one who would dare come too close
to him would be shot down. Commitment. Delirium tremens. Exitus in
consequence of an intercurrent malady.
It is noteworthy that the suspected little brother-in-law had been a
great favorite of his; he had been fond of taking the boy along on his
hunting trips. When completely under the influence of drink he always
wanted to embrace him and pet him.
A connection between paranoia and alcoholism is shown also by the last
of this series of observations, which follows:
81. This is a woman no longer in her prime of life. She is the
grandmother of several children, 54 years of age, and, up to a few years
ago, she was not jealous. As soon as her husband ceased to have
intercourse with her she was seized with the idea that he must have
intercourse with a certain pretty girl who had been formerly in their
employ and had left. She had seen that girl often in the neighborhood
and wondered that the girl looked so well and was so well dressed. She
had always liked the girl very much. In fact, she wept when the girl
left the house. Now she tortured her husband with the accusation that he
was intimate with that girl,—she was sure of it. The man denied it,
but—grilled by her—he had to admit that he had met the girl on the
street a few times and had spoken to her. That led to such terrible
quarrels,—he had to leave the house and was gone for weeks on a journey.
He wanted to have peace and was energetic enough to bring it about. In
fact, he threatened to sue for separation.
The woman began to drink, specially liqueurs, but also ordinary whiskey.
When intoxicated she behaved very vulgarly and cursed the girl; called
her a whore, and shouted that she ought to have the clothes torn off
her. She threatened her youngest daughter’s husband and entertained the
notion of throwing acid at him. While intoxicated she also felt an
impulse to seek out her youngest daughter (obviously to find her
son-in-law) and ran to the railroad station, entered the wrong train,
and committed all sorts of nuisances so that she had to be committed. At
the asylum she had to give up drink but showed no ill effects from the
enforced abstinence, only she figured daily what her husband was up to
with the girl. Like most paranoiacs she claimed that she had telepathic
powers and felt at a distance that her husband was with the girl. That
was an absolute fact and no physician could convince her it was not so.
That contention embodied an inner truth: the man in her was with the
girl, that is, the man in her was continually preoccupied with the girl.
In fact, she had no other thought than the girl. It was as if she was
saying to herself: _If I were a man I would fall in love with this girl
and would not leave her alone a minute. She would have to be mine only._
After the marriage of her youngest daughter she fell into a depression
during which she first began the habit of indulging in alcoholic drinks.
Obviously the woman had two homosexual objectives which she fused: the
servant girl and the youngest daughter. In fact, she began early to
think that her husband was intimate with the daughter in question. She
even lodged with the authorities a complaint to that effect and asked to
be allowed to bring proofs of the assertion. Now her husband wanted to
poison her. She had been given coffee which had an arsenical smell.
She transfers to the surroundings her subjective criminal ideas. We see
that she had to drink in order to deafen in her the wild beast which
endeavored to break forth in all its primordial crudity. Her commitment
to an asylum did not change her leanings. She swore at her man who
conspired with the hateful son-in-law to have her put out of the way so
as to prevent her from exposing their evil doings before the whole
world.
How close the forbidden tendencies are to one another in such cases!
Almost uniformly the same picture throughout: criminality, homosexuality
and incest. After years of the compulsory yoke of a formal monosexuality
the repression gives way and the underlying pansexuality and criminal
tendencies manifest themselves in pathologic form. For all these case
histories center around the “other,” the second, self,—the repressed
component of human nature.
_We know_ many persons who prove themselves victims of our monosexual
culture. The race is paying for the development of monosexuality with
neurotic homosexuality, with all the various neuroses, with alcoholism
and paranoia!
But it would be erroneous for that reason to decry the course of
cultural development or to look for the improvement of conditions to
changes in law or in the formal code of morals. All lovers of mankind
surely must fight for the abandonment of the moral opprobrium and legal
persecution of homosexuals and for a greater freedom from bias in the
perception of the problem of all paraphilias. But we must not fail to
recognize that we are dealing here with tremendous social forces and
with developmental tendencies striving, beyond all human range, for the
attainment of unknown higher ideals. _The development of the race is
from bisexualism to monosexualism. Even the “genuine” homosexuality as
we know it today everywhere is a proof in favor of this contention._
For if homosexuality were an inborn trait, as _Hirschfeld_ and his
pupils maintain, it would be the pattern-type of health and homosexuals
would show no repressed heterosexuality; there would be no morphinists,
no drinkers, and no dipsomaniacs[22] among them. Their number may not be
large, but that is because the uranists’ homosexuality is already a
compromise, an attempt on the part of nature, and of the psyche, to
escape the insolvable bisexual conflict. The very fact that all
neurotics represent retrogressions shows that the race is advancing
towards monosexuality. The neurotic, as a bisexual being, might stand
for an earlier developmental phase, if the cultural standards of
morality would not hinder. When he attempts it (like, for instance,
_Oscar Wilde_) he draws upon himself the deadly scorn of his fellowmen;
he is ostracized as a citizen. Homosexuality leads but seldom to
paranoia when associated with heterosexuality, as happens in the reverse
instance,—heterosexuals trying to repress their homosexuality. That in
itself shows homosexuality to be a neurosis,—the premonitory phase of
the paranoiac psychosis. When paranoia breaks out, the homosexual holds
to the delusion that he belongs to the opposite sex and may go so far as
to disregard his genitalia and to acquire the feeling that he is
physically changed. The paranoia attempts to round out physically the
delusion of sexual transformation it has initiated psychically. The wish
of the male homosexual: “I want to be a woman!” is fulfilled in
paranoia. In that state he finds a thousand proofs that he is a woman.
Many such cases have been described especially by _Krafft-Ebing_, who
has called them “_metamorphosis sexualis paranoica_.” The subjects
imagine that they have the monthly flow because they have the nose-bleed
every four weeks (this happens also with nonparanoia _urnings_),—they
have a flow from the lower parts for five days at every full moon. A
patient of _Krafft-Ebing’s_ relates (Obs. 134, p. 245): “Every four
weeks at the full moon I have for 5 days the _molimina_, like any woman,
physically and mentally, only I do not flow,—but I have a sensation of
discharging fluid, a feeling of fulness about the genitals and the lower
part of the body (within); a very pleasant time it is, especially later
(in a couple of days) when the physiologic craving for procreation looms
forth with its all-pervading womanly force.” Another paranoiac claims
that he has always been woman, but when he was a child a French magician
had miraculously endowed him with male organs and, with a certain salve,
hindered the development of his breasts. A girl under my observation
felt her penis, pointed to the hairs on her face, and thought she was a
bewitched male. But she could feel her penis growing within and almost
coming through.
The following statement by the highest expert on homosexuality shows
that the repression of heterosexuality may have serious effects upon the
homosexual,—it may drive him to drink, or into a delusion of
persecution: