dream? Has he lost three female ideals? He associates with “_Ein
Fichtenbaum stand einsam im Norden auf kahler Höhe_,” etc., “a pine tree
stood lonely on the bleak heights of the north,” the famous poem by
_Heine_. That pine tree dreams of palms in the glowing climate of the
Southern Country. There are no further associations. The theme “dead
women” is met with considerable resistance.
I pass over a number of days which amounted merely to a preparation for
the coming solution; and I shall report merely the most significant of
the dream material.
Very important appears the following dream:
_Standing with father at a wide stream. A little white steamboat departs
from us, turning and twisting like a reptile. I would have liked very
much to be on it (though I do not know where I could have found place,
it was like a microcosm). The ship is delayed and now we have to return
by train. That the ship would have made better time is an opinion I dare
not share with father._
_Next day I enter a grotto through which a number of others are
wandering ahead of me. The pathway is tortuous and leads upwards. Who
among my acquaintances is joining me I do not know. My whole attention
is centered on snakes which I carry on a cord. They have very friendly
heads, yet somehow I have the impression they can bite. I say to some
one close by that their poison glands have already been removed.
Eventually I reach a house in full daylight and at the top they turn
into dogs who escape my control and quickly clatter down the deep
stairway. Presently they are back and allow meekly to be held in leash._
_At home I find a package of handkerchiefs neatly wrapped in tissue
paper._
This is a combination of a spermatozoon dream and a maternal body
phantasy. The stream in which the tiny boat is moving about, the life
stream, the stream of spermatic fluid carries a particular spermatozoon,
himself. He, now grown up, wants to revert back to the tiny thing,
wiggling like a reptile. He wants to be tiny again, not a child merely,
a spermatozoon (_Samenfaden_). He is dissatisfied with life and would
like to begin his life all over. The path leads from the stream into a
grotto cave,—the maternal body. At the same time the dream symbolizes
his whole life, which leads him upwards through pitfalls and dangers to
the sunshiny heights. His thoughts are represented here as snakes. They
have friendly heads, to be sure, _i. e._, sin beckons, but he holds them
captive. All sins are overcome, all snakes are captive and wear muzzles.
The shiny house is the church. Thus this dream shows the life’s
beginning and end.
The next dream about handkerchiefs, becomes intelligible when we find
out that he masturbates into his handkerchiefs. The packing in tissue
paper shows that the specific masturbatory phantasy is covered up.
The dream is concerned with the father. During the last few days he has
been thinking a great deal about his father. He tells me about that:
“I have had some hard days and I only see now how strongly I was fixed
on father and what a tremendous rôle he has played in my life. Yesterday
I felt in me all the strong hatred that I bore for years against
father.”
“Why did you hate your father?”
“In the first place because he made me and passed on to me his weakly
characteristics. Such men should have no children. I have taken over all
his morbid predispositions. Then I hated him because he parted me from
my friend through that letter which he wrote at mother’s behest.”
“Then you ought to hate your mother. Is it not strange that you should
condone the same conduct in the mother but not in the father? You seem
to appreciate your mother’s side but not your father’s.”
“Naturally, when you put it that way I see clearly that I was unfair to
father. The letter was but an excuse for the great hatred. I recall with
shuddering his last day. I had the feeling that father was afraid of me.
He gazed at me continually with his great glassy eyes while holding on
to mother’s hand. I felt something like jealousy over mother,—now I know
that I was always jealous. My maternal body phantasy means, of course,
that I want to be present at the parental love act. I want to replace
the father in mother’s life. As a small child I loved him very devotedly
and I suffered on account of his coolness. He was immeasurably loving
and devoted; nevertheless I felt that there was something lacking.”
He looked for tendernesses from his father. To this day he indulges in
two phantasies during his sexual acts. He is the boy watching his father
during coitus. That is the particular lavatory phantasy when he watches
elderly men. He permits himself to be used as a _receptaculum seminis_
by a favored person. (Strong desire to carry on _fellatio_ on his
teachers or to subject himself to pederasty.) He is within the maternal
body _und wird vom Vater päderastiert oder felliert_. Or else, he
himself is the father, he identifies himself with the latter, and seeks
young boys who in that case stand for himself.
But we see that these phantasies differ as widely as possible from
reality. He is unable to secure his contact with reality, because he is
continually under the sway of the maternal body phantasy, as shows by
his peeping into lavatories.
His love for the father proves to be the strongest root of his
homosexuality. He wanted to assume the mother’s place in the father’s
life. In his phantasies he is either the father or the mother; he has
not attained his own individuality. He loves himself either with
maternal or with paternal feelings.
I record the following dream among many others. It shows us his typical
attitude towards the mother:
_Am going with mother to the country where we expect to spend a few days
to recuperate ourselves. Locality: forest neighborhood. The journey,
stopping station, roadway familiar partly from actuality partly through
precious dreams. Wonderful woods with fragrant blooming flowers. But the
blooms show numerous brown spots of decay, as after excessive rains.
Elder bushes badly torn up by the weather and by plunderers. The path
leads to an incline which offers a view of the numerous villas in the
valley. I find that we have wandered off, in order to reach the place
where we proposed to stay for a while; we should have taken the path to
the right half way up the road._
This dream represents a love whose bloom is decaying. They have wandered
off (note the double meaning of the expression, _vergehen_), and they
are off the right path.
His past is illumined not only by his dreams. Among his youthful
compositions he finds a poem which portrays clearly a paternal body
phantasy and speaks longingly of the time when he was yet “unformed and
rested quietly in his father’s loins.”...
The revelations in the course of the following days bring to light new
associations. His reveries continually slight the immediate past and
carry him back over a number of generations. He is a person of wonderful
ancestry, he is not at all the son of his father, he is a child whom
gypsies have changed in the cradle, he has fallen into the midst of his
family by accident.
It turns out that two lives were much talked of at home and that has had
a great deal to do with determining his life course and specifically his
fear of woman. In the first place, there was his father’s life. The man
had been previously married to a woman whom he caught in a breach of
marital faithfulness and it led him to fight a duel. He carried a scar
on his forehead as a memento. Then, an uncle took his life when he found
out that his wife whom he considered loyal, proved unfaithful.
These lessons stood before his eyes already when he was a mere boy. They
served as terrible warnings: beware of woman!
During the next days his fear of woman is the chief theme of his
associations. His father’s and his uncle’s fate stand before him as a
perpetual warning. Already as a small child he had absorbed very clearly
the thought: one must beware of women! His mother did everything to fix
permanently this fear in his mind.
But every fear is the fear of self. This fear of women must have a
deeper determinant. The deeper relations are indicated by the following
dream:
_I am on the street and it is towards evening. The roadbed in front of
me is badly torn up. A wagon drives by; it rolls past at dusk and the
farther end of the street is already plunged in darkness. Horse and
driver will not be able to see that the road is torn. A powerful bear
jumps up to warn the horse, the driver draws tight his reins, the animal
turns around at the same time holding his head anxiously away from the
torn pavement until he finally reaches again the straight road. Before
the wagon disappears into the night the powerful bear jumps once more at
it._
_I am tremendously roused to think that such wild animals are sent out
as warning. There might be small children in the wagon who would be
frightened to death._
Every statement in this dream is a psychic disclosure. The dream records
his life’s journey. A portion of the street is torn and impassable. He
can only go through the homosexual pathway. The heterosexual is so
broken up as to be unusable. It is dark and he might easily meet with
disaster in his life’s journey over this point. The darkness symbolizes
the forgetting of the aboriginal determinants; the driver is
consciousness, the horses are the instincts.
A bear warns him of the dangers of the torn-up road. He is angered at
this form of warning. The reference to small children shows that the
warnings date back to childhood, when he was actually threatened with a
bear.
“There may be small children in the wagon who would be frightened to
death,” records the dream. As a child he has heard repeatedly about his
uncle’s suicide, because of the wife’s faithlessness. In the depths of
his soul this story could not but act as a perpetual warning against
woman. The story of his father’s duel, too, and the latter’s scar on the
forehead influenced his childhood and filled him with fear of woman.[41]
It made him resolve to submit to no woman. And is not hatred the surest
self-defence against the dangers of love?
Who or what is the mysterious bear in the dreams? Naturally,—like every
figure in the dream, it is the dreamer himself. There is the power of a
wild beast in his breast. We recall that one of his dreams was staged at
_Schönbrunn_, the Zoölogical Garden of Vienna, where the wild beasts may
be seen. We recall Shylock, the pound of flesh, and the various sadistic
determinants of his neurosis.
We now approach the kernel of his homosexual neurosis which turns out to
consist of a powerful protective wall against his criminal self. His
attitude towards woman is characterized by a tremendous hatred. He is a
_Lustmörder_, the wild bear who attacks women, who strangles them and
would drink their blood. The bear represents his own image and a
terrible warning.
Beware of the women! It will turn you into a murderer. Better remain a
child, enjoy whatever brings gratification to a child. Woe to you if
your life’s journey should lead you through the open road where all wild
passions lurk which have already filled you as a child! Oh, better if
you had never been born, or if you could begin life all over....
Blood is his true requirement. Spermatic fluid, urine, fæces,—all these
are substitutions representing blood.[42]
Now we begin to understand why he must not be a man and why he wants to
be a woman. His great aggressive trend is linked with the notion of
maleness. The passive attitude, suffering, patience, is identified with
femaleness.
After these revelations, which were supported by a large mass of
memories, the patient stayed away for a few days. Then he reappeared and
told me that he had successful intercourse with a _puella publica_. He
thought he might be able to overcome his homosexuality. But he received
a telegram recalling him to Denmark.
I have not heard anything about his subsequent history. Did he become
bisexual? Did he overcome his infantilism? Did the torn portion of the
road become passable at last?
I am unable to state anything definite. But we have obtained here a
clear insight into the psychogenesis of homosexuality and we have seen
that many determinants are at work shaping the original predisposition.
Let us briefly mention the most important data in this clinical history.
It must be looked upon really as but a fragment of an analysis. But it
leads us to the core of the neurosis and shows us the subject’s inner
predisposition, so sharply contrasting with his conscious attitude.
This man carries within himself the aboriginal instincts of mankind. His
dreams carry him back to the paternal body and back to the prehistoric
phase of his existence not without reason. He carries within himself the
engrams of thousands of years, the remnants of the wildest instinct of
primordial man. The phylogenesis of his being corresponds with his
ontogenesis. What does he lack for a typical primordial being? In his
dreams and phantasies he shows the terrible blood lust, the
imperativeness of wishes, the brutal egoism of the periods of long past.
Even man’s primordial toleration of filth is not absent; this subject’s
history discloses urolagnistic and coprophagic tendencies.
Consider the contrast between his instinctive and his cultural self. He
is a man of refinement and a marked personality, a genuine artist, a man
who appreciates the beautiful, a man who is transfixed before a
representation of Tristan, or before a statue and whom the beauties of
nature plunge into ecstasy; a man who seems capable of adding some day
to the world’s art possessions a worthy contribution.
This case proves most decidedly that my view that homosexuality
represents a regression is correct. Other physicians will prefer to
speak of degeneration. Indeed,—but this subject has no sign of physical
degeneration, there is no pathologic family history such as might be
regarded as predisposing to degeneration. One might as well consider all
artists degenerates inasmuch as all artists show the primordial cravings
which we find in our patients. The very fact that all human progress is
brought about through individuals who represent regressions should teach
us more carefully the term degeneration and to apply it only to the
cases in which the conjunction of physical signs of degeneration with
moral inferiority leaves no doubt.
We trace here the operation of that primordial hatred which threatens to
smother the mind’s safety valve as it presses for expression. A portion
of this hatred may turn into love and lead the subject into the pathway
which makes prophets, religious reformers, philanthropists or champions
of the people. Another part of it persists and strengthens infantile
trends.
What is _Sigma’s_ conscious attitude? Love for men, indifference towards
women, hatred of the father, a bipolar vacillation towards his
mother,—love and hate![43] But unconsciously he loves his father and
hates all women,—perhaps because he must love them. His ordinary
attitude requires the projection of his love feeling in its bipolar form
upon all the objectives of his affection. One loves and hates at the
same time. But he hates only the women. How has this primordial hatred
been attained by the subject? Why is he incapable of assuming the usual
bipolar attitude towards women?
If we go far back into his childhood we find that he was in love with
his father and jealous of his mother. At that time all women were
possible rivals in love for the father. He himself wanted to be a woman,
the woman to love his father. This father _Imago_ he seeks to this day
in all his teachers, older friends, in his superiors. He must
necessarily stand in a homosexual relationship towards them so long as
he is unable to overcome his infantile constellations. Everything
peculiar about his attachment to the mother is traceable back to his
identification with the father. From the latter he has derived his
quiet, timid, patient temperament,—that attitude of passivity which
really masks a tremendous aggressivity. That infantile attitude
determines the survival of all infantile excitations in his _vita
sexualis_.
How may the cure be effected? The subject must be made to understand
that he will never really carry out the crimes which contact with women
suggest to his unconscious. He must learn to apply love in its bipolar
form alike to men and women. His plethora of cravings should enable him
to awaken within himself the hitherto badly neglected love for woman.
Before the analysis all his erotic trends were directed towards male
friends. The cure leads through approach of woman as friend. First she
is a friend, and subsequently—after much struggle and searching—the
beloved. He must learn to play the rôle of father to some strange woman.
Is analysis the proper means? Who, in the present state of our
knowledge, knows another? What can we accomplish through commands,
punishment, formal training, or hypnosis? Primordial love achieves
supremacy only through the exacting process of self-knowledge and
through the recognition of the primordial instincts, including the
primordial hatred. The subject has concentrated his primordial love
feeling wholly upon his own person.
Like all homosexuals he loves only himself. This peculiarity, too, he
shares with all primordial beings. Does primordial man know any other
love than love of self?[44]
I have already pointed out that _urnings_ always seek themselves first
and assume subsequently the rôle of another person; or else they seek in
the male different variants of their own childhood. The same is true
_pari passu_ also of the _urlinds_. To be in love always means to find
one’s self in another. But why do _urnings_ not find themselves in the
female _Imago_? This question cannot be covered with a generalization
that will hold good for all cases. In the two last cases the fact that
the subjects regarded themselves as the reverse of handsome played an
important rôle. They had a sense of inferiority with regard to woman and
a feeling of envy. Self-love induced fear of defeat by woman on account
of lack of attractiveness. How could they feel confident of conquering
woman in view of their ugliness? How could they play the rôle of a Don
Juan to which their latent homosexuality might otherwise have driven
them? Among men physical beauty does not matter. What is important is
the size of the genitalia.
If love capacity be measured by the size of one’s genitalia, the patient
_Delta_ (Case 83) could measure himself against any one. He took
ridiculous pride in his great penis,—a pride shown by many men. His
whole sexuality was centered upon the symbol of masculinity. With
_Sigma_, with whom the penis played but a secondary rôle, the case was
different. _Sadger_ who sees in narcissism the love of one’s genitalia
would find his view corroborated by the history of the first case but
not by the second, the subject in the latter instance showing not the
least interest in his penis.
The first of these cases portrays the mechanisms described by _Adler_,
the second barely a trace. This shows how easy it is to build certain
assumptions through a one-sided selection of cases. It is obvious that
every earnest investigator must come upon certain aspects of the truth.
What we obtain always are mere sectional views of homosexuality. A cross
section yields merely a corresponding view of the picture. Only the
apposition of the various sectional views can furnish us the proper
perspective for reconstructing the whole picture of homosexuality.
Infantile reminiscences in both cases were partial determinants which
lead to a lasting fear of women and to withdrawal from heterosexual
love. _Delta_ had witnessed an unhappy marriage as a child, _Sigma_
heard a great deal about faithlessness and about woman’s lack of
loyalty. Both shared also a strong sadism, a feature which we have
observed in all cases of homosexuality thus far analyzed.
We are thus led to a synthetic formulation of male homosexuality which,
in reversed terms, holds true also of women:
_The homosexual neurosis is a flight back to one’s own sex induced by a
sadistic predisposition towards the opposite sex._
VII
THE NEUROTIC’S INABILITY TO LOVE—THE NARCISSISM OF THE
HOMOSEXUAL—PROGRESSIVE SEXUAL DIFFERENTIATION WITH THE GROWTH OF
CULTURE—THE POSITION OF THE HOMOSEXUAL IN THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN
SEXES—THE SOCIAL CAUSES OF HOMOSEXUALITY—HOMOSEXUALITY AMONG
GREEKS—INCREASE OF POLAR SEXUAL TENSION—VARIOUS THERAPEUTIC
MEASURES—HYPNOSIS—MOLL’S ASSOCIATION THERAPY—PSYCHOANALYSIS—THE
PATH TOWARDS CURE AND THE CONDITIONS FOR RECOVERY.
_Im Hass ist Furcht, ein grosser, guter Teil Furcht. Wir Furchtlosen
aber, wir geistigeren Menschen dieses Zeitalters, wir kennen unseren
Vorteil gut genug, um gerade als die Geistigeren in Hinsicht auf dieser
Zeit ohne Furcht zu Leben. Man wird uns schwerlich köpfen, einsperren,
verbrennen; man wird nicht einmal unsere Bücher verbieten und
verbrennen. Man ist seines Faches um den Preis, auch das Opfer seines
Faches zu sein._
—_Nietzsche._
VII
_Hatred means fear, it contains a great, big part of fear. But we the
Fearless ones, we the more intellectual men of our age, precisely as the
more emancipated ones, with reference to our age, are well aware of our
advantage of living without fear. We shall be bitterly pursued, jailed,
burned at the stake; our books will more than once fall under the ban
and be burned. One is a man after one’s own kind only at the risk of
paying the price demanded of one’s kind._
—_Nietzsche._
We have seen with what powerful hatred the homosexual encounters his
environment. Whether he turns his hatred towards the other sex, his own,
or, under certain circumstances, against himself, he remains the
inveterate hater vainly trying to reconcile the feeling of man’s
aboriginal nature with the ethical requirements of later culture. The
question rises whether he is at all capable of loving. One may point out
that in a certain sense he does love his mother, father, some friend or
that perhaps he even has a “sweetheart.” But it only seems that he loves
them! The truth is that he is unable to love. That peculiarity he shares
with all artists who, in fact, are also incapable of loving. I repeat
myself and reproduce below my statements on this point as incorporated
in my work “_Die Träume der Dichter_.”[45]
All my inquiries into the psychogenesis of these disorders have led me
back to the manifestations of hatred. Already in my work, _Die Sprache
Des Traumes_ (_the Language of Dreams_), I have pointed out that
antagonism (or hatred) is man’s primary feeling responsible for the
development of neuroses in those ethical-minded persons who still
preserve strongly their aboriginal instinctive cravings. “_The neurosis
is the endopsychic perception of hatred in terms of a guilty
conscience_” (_The Language of Dreams_, page 563 of the 1st German
edition; English version of the latter edition is now in preparation by
the translator of the present volume.)
I believe I have proven successfully that the homosexual is a neurotic,
that he represents a type of regression to man’s primordial instincts;
and that homosexuality is a sort of compromise healing process in the
mental conflict between the abnormal, raw cravings, and the cultural
need for their suppression.
But we must not think that, like the average neurotic, the homosexual is
incapable of love. Only, all his love is a love centered exclusively on
self. Yet all cultural progress consists of the sublimation of self-love
into social love. That is the meaning of the majestic injunction: _love
thy neighbor as thyself_!