THE THEORY OF SEXUAL INVERSION.
What is Sexual Inversion?--Causes of Diverging Views--The Theory of
Suggestion Unworkable--Importance of the Congenital Element in
Inversion--The Freudian Theory--Embryonic Hermaphroditism as a Key to
Inversion--Inversion as a Variation or "Sport"--Comparison with
Color-blindness, Color-hearing, and Similar Abnormalities--What is an
Abnormality?--Not Necessarily a Disease--Relation of Inversion to
Degeneration--Exciting Causes of Inversion--Not Operative in the Absence
of Predisposition.
The analysis of these cases leads directly up to a question of the first
importance: What is sexual inversion? Is it, as many would have us
believe, an abominably acquired vice, to be stamped out by the prison? or
is it, as a few assert, a beneficial variety of human emotion which should
be tolerated or even fostered? Is it a diseased condition which qualifies
its subject for the lunatic asylum? or is it a natural monstrosity, a
human "sport," the manifestations of which must be regulated when they
become antisocial? There is probably an element of truth in more than one
of these views. Very widely divergent views of sexual inversion are
largely justified by the position and attitude of the investigator. It is
natural that the police-official should find that his cases are largely
mere examples of disgusting vice and crime. It is natural that the asylum
superintendent should find that we are chiefly dealing with a form of
insanity. It is equally natural that the sexual invert himself should find
that he and his inverted friends are not so very unlike ordinary persons.
We have to recognize the influence of professional and personal bias and
the influence of environment.
There have been two main streams of tendency in the views regarding sexual
inversion: one seeking to enlarge the sphere of the acquired (represented
by Binet,--who, however, recognized predisposition,--Schrenck-Notzing, and
recently the Freudians), the other seeking to enlarge the sphere of the
congenital (represented by Krafft-Ebing, Moll, Féré, and today by the
majority of authorities). There is, as usually happens, truth in both
these views. But, inasmuch as those who represent the acquired view often
deny any congenital element, we are called upon to discuss the question.
The view that sexual inversion is entirely explained by the influence of
early association, or of "suggestion," is an attractive one and at first
sight it seems to be supported by what we know of erotic fetichism, by
which a woman's hair, or foot, or even clothing, becomes the focus of a
man's sexual aspirations. But it must be remembered that what we see in
erotic fetichism is merely the exaggeration of a normal impulse; every
lover is to some extent excited by his mistress's hair, or foot, or
clothing. Even here, therefore, there is really what may fairly be
regarded as a congenital element; and, moreover, there is reason to
believe that the erotic fetichist usually displays the further congenital
element of hereditary neurosis. Therefore, the analogy with erotic
fetichism does not bring much help to those who argue that inversion is
purely acquired. It must also be pointed out that the argument for
acquired or suggested inversion logically involves the assertion that
normal sexuality is also acquired or suggested. If a man becomes attracted
to his own sex simply because the fact or the image of such attraction is
brought before him, then we are bound to believe that a man becomes
attracted to the opposite sex only because the fact or the image of such
attraction is brought before him. Such a theory is unworkable. In nearly
every country of the world men associate with men, and women with women;
if association and suggestion were the only influential causes, then
inversion, instead of being the exception, ought to be the rule throughout
the human species, if not, indeed, throughout the whole zoölogical series.
We should, moreover, have to admit that the most fundamental human
instinct is so constituted as to be equally well adapted for sterility as
for that propagation of the race which, as a matter of fact, we find
dominant throughout the whole of life. We must, therefore, put aside
entirely the notion that the direction of the sexual impulse is merely a
suggested phenomenon; such a notion is entirely opposed to observation and
experience, and will with difficulty fit into a rational biological
scheme.
The Freudians--alike of the orthodox and the heterodox schools--have
sometimes contributed, unintentionally or not, to revive the now
antiquated conception of homosexuality as an acquired phenomenon, and that
by insisting that its mechanism is a purely psychic though unconscious
process which may be readjusted to the normal order by psychoanalytic
methods. Freud first put forth a comprehensive statement of his view of
homosexuality in the original and pregnant little book, _Drei Abhandlungen
zur Sexualtheorie_ (1905), and has elsewhere frequently touched on the
subject, as have many other psychoanalysts, including Alfred Adler and
Stekel, who no longer belong to the orthodox Freudian school. When inverts
are psycho-analytically studied, Freud believes, it is found that in early
childhood they go through a phase of intense but brief fixation on a
woman, usually the mother, or perhaps sister. Then, an internal censure
inhibiting this incestuous impulse, they overcome it by identifying
themselves with women and taking refuge in Narcissism, the self becoming
the sexual object. Finally they look for youthful males resembling
themselves, whom they love as their mothers loved them. Their pursuit of
men is thus determined by their flight from women. This view has been set
forth not only by Freud but by Sadger, Stekel, and many others.[225] Freud
himself, however, is careful to state that this process only represents
one type of stunted sexual activity, and that the problem of inversion is
complex and diversified.
This view may be said to assume a bisexual constitution as
normal, and homosexuality arises by the suppression, owing to
some accident, of the heterosexual component, and the path
through an autoerotic process of Narcissism to homosexuality. On
this general Freudian conception of homosexuality numerous
variations have been based, and separate features specially
emphasized, by individual psychoanalysts. Thus Sadger considers
that, beneath the male individual loved by the invert, a female
is concealed, and that this fact may be revealed by
psychoanalysis which removes the upper layer of the psychic
palimpsest; he believes that this disposition of the invert is
favored by a frequent mixture of male and female traits in his
near relatives; originally, "it is not man whom the homosexual
man loves and desires but man and woman together in one form";
the heterosexual element is later suppressed, and then pure
inversion is left. Further, developing Freud's view of the
importance of anal eroticism (Freud, _Sammlung Kleiner Schriften
zur Neurosenlehre_, vol. ii), Sadger thinks that it is even the
rule for a passive invert to have experienced anal eroticism in
childhood and been frequently subjected to enemas, which have led
to the desire for the anal intromission of the penis.
(_Medizinische Klinik_, 1909, No. 2.) Jekels pushes this doctrine
further and declares that all inverts are really passive; the
invert is, in his love, he states, both subject and object; he
identifies himself with his mother and sees in the object of his
love his own youthful person. And what, Jekels asks, is the aim
of this mental arrangement? It can scarcely by other, he replies,
than in the part of the mother to stimulate the anal region of
the object which has now become himself, and to procure the same
pleasure which in childhood he experienced when his mother
satisfied his anal eroticism. Jekels regards this view as the
continuation and concretization of Freud's interpretation; and
the main point in homosexuality, even when apparently passive,
becomes the craving for anal-erotic satisfaction (L. Jekels,
"Einige Bemerkungen zur Trieblehre," _Internationale Zeitschrift
für Aerztliche Psychoanalyse_, Sept., 1913). Most psychoanalysts
are cautious in denying a constitutional or congenital basis to
inversion, though they leave it in the background. Ferenczi, in
an interesting attempt to classify the homosexual
(_Internationale Zeitschrift für Aerztliche Psychoanalyse_,
March, 1914), remarks: "Psychoanalytic investigation shows that
under the name of homosexuality the most various psychic states
are thrown together, on the one hand true constitutional
anomalies (inversion, or subject homoeroticism), on the other
hand psychoneurotic obsessional conditions (object homoeroticism,
or obsessional homoeroticism). The individual of the first kind
essentially feels himself a woman who wishes to be loved by a
man, while the other represents a neurotic flight from women
rather than sympathy to men." The constitutional basis is very
definitely accepted by Rudolf Ortvay who points out
(_Internationale Zeitschrift für Aerztliche Psychoanalyse_, Jan.,
1914) that the biological doctrine of recessives and dominants in
heredity helps to make clear the emergence or suppression of
homosexuality on a bisexual disposition. "Infantile events," he
adds, "which, according to Freud, decide the sexual relations of
adults, can only exert their operation on the foundation of an
organic predisposition, infantile impressions being determined by
hereditary predisposition." Isador Coriat, on the other hand,
while recognizing two forms of inversion, incomplete and
complete, boldly asserts that it is never congenital and never
transmitted through heredity; it is always "originated through a
definite unconscious mechanism" (Coriat, "Homosexuality," _New
York Medical Journal_, March 22, 1913). Adler's view of
homosexuality, as of other allied conditions, differs from that
of most psychoanalysts by insisting on the presence of an
original organic defect which the subject seeks to fortify into a
point of strength; he accepts two chief components of inversion:
a vagueness as to sexual differences and a process of
self-assurance in the form of rebellion and defiance, and even
the feminism of the invert may become a method of gaining power
(A. Adler, _Ueber den Neurösen Charakter_, 1912, p. 21).
The mechanism of the genesis of homosexuality put forward by Freud need
not be dismissed offhand. Freud has often manifested the insight of
genius, and he refrains from molding his conceptions in those inflexible
shapes which have sometimes been adopted by the more dogmatic
psychoanalysts who have followed him. Nor need we be unduly shocked by the
"incestuous" air of the "Oedipus Complex,"[226] as it is commonly called,
which figures as a component of the process. The word "incest," though it
has been used by Freud himself, seems scarcely a proper word to apply to
the vague and elementary feelings of children, especially when those
feelings scarcely pass beyond a stage of non-localized and therefore
really presexual feelings (in the ordinary use of the term "sexual") which
may be regarded as natural and normal. The Freudian conception is
misrepresented and prejudiced by the statement that it involves
"incest."[227] When a child loves its mother with an entire love, that
love necessarily involves the germs which in later life become separated
and developed into sexual love, but it is inaccurate to term this love of
the child "incestuous." It is quite easily conceivable that the psychic
mechanism of the establishment of homosexuality has in some cases
corresponded to the course described by Freud. It may also be admitted
that, as psychoanalysts claim, the pronounced _horror feminæ_ occasionally
found in male inverts may plausibly be regarded as the reversal of an
early and disappointed feminine attraction. But it is impossible to regard
this mechanism as invariable or even frequent. It is quite true, and I
have found ample evidence of the fact, that inverts are often very closely
attached to their mothers, even to a greater degree, indeed, than is the
rule among normal children, and often like to be in constant association
with their mothers. But this attraction is quite misunderstood if it is
regarded as a peculiarly sexual attraction. Indeed, the whole point of the
attraction is that the inverted boy vaguely feels his own feminine
disposition and so shuns the uncongenial amusements and society of his own
sex for the sympathy and community of tastes which he finds concentrated
in his mother. So far from such association being evidence of sexual
attraction it might more reasonably be regarded as evidence of its
absence; just as the association of boys among themselves, and of girls
among themselves, even in co-educational schools, is proof of the
prevalence of heterosexual rather than of homosexual feeling. Confirmation
of this point of view may be found in the fact--overlooked and sometimes
even denied by psychoanalysts--that frequently, even in early childhood
and simultaneously with this community of feeling with his mother, the
homosexual boy is already experiencing the predominant fascination of the
male. He feels it long before the age at which Narcissism is apt to occur,
or at which self-consciousness has become sufficiently developed to allow
the internal censure on unpermitted emotions to operate, or any flight
from them to take place. Moreover, while most authorities have rarely been
able to find any clear evidence of the sexual attraction of male inverts
in childhood to mother or sister,[228] an attraction of this kind to
father or brother seems less difficult to find, and if found it is
incompatible with the typical Freudian process. In my own observation,
among the Histories here recorded, there are at least two clear examples
of such an attraction in childhood. It must further be said that any
theory of the etiology of homosexuality which leaves out of account the
hereditary factor in inversion cannot be admitted. The evidence for the
frequency of homosexuality among the near relatives of the inverted is now
indisputable. I have traced it in a considerable proportion of cases, and
in many of these the evidence is unquestionable and altogether independent
of the statement of the subject himself, whose opinion may be held to be
possibly biased or unreliable.[229] This hereditary factor seems indeed to
be called for by the Freudian theory itself. On that theory we need to
know how it is that the subject passes through psychic phases, and reaches
an emotional disposition, so unlike that of normal persona. The existence
of a definite hereditary tendency in a homosexual direction removes that
difficulty. Freud himself recognizes this and clearly asserts congenital
psycho-sexual constitution, which must involve predisposition. On a
general survey, therefore, it would appear that, on the psychic side, we
may accept the reality of unconscious dynamic processes which in
particular cases may be of the Freudian or similar type. But while the
study of such mechanisms may illuminate the psychology of homosexuality,
they leave untouched the fundamental organic factors now accepted by most
authorities.[230]
The rational way of regarding the normal sexual instinct is as an inborn
organic impulse, reaching full development about the time of puberty.[231]
During the period of development suggestion and association may come in to
play a part in defining the object of the emotion; the soil is now ready,
but the variety of seeds likely to thrive in it is limited. That there is
a greater indefiniteness in the aim of the sexual impulse at this period
we may well believe. This is shown not only by occasional tentative signs
of sexual emotion directed toward the same sex in childhood, but by the
frequently ideal and unlocalized character of the normal passion even at
puberty. But the channel of sexual emotion is not thereby turned into an
abnormal path. Whenever this happens we are bound to believe--and we have
many grounds for believing--that we are dealing with an organism which
from the beginning is abnormal. The same seed of suggestion is sown in
various soils; in the many it dies out; in the few it flourishes. The
cause can only be a difference in the soil.
If, then, we must postulate a congenital abnormality in order to account
satisfactorily for at least a large proportion of sexual inverts, wherein
does that abnormality consist? Ulrichs explained the matter by saying that
in sexual inverts a male body coexists with a female soul: _anima
muliebris in corpore virile inclusa_. Even writers of scientific eminence,
like Magnan and Gley, have adopted this phrase in a modified form,
considering that in inversion a female brain is combined with a male body
or male glands. This is, however, not an explanation. It merely
crystallizes into an epigram the superficial impression of the
matter.[232]
We can probably grasp the nature of the abnormality better if we reflect
on the development of the sexes and on the latent organic bisexuality in
each sex. At an early stage of development the sexes are
indistinguishable, and throughout life the traces of this early community
of sex remain. The hen fowl retains in a rudimentary form the spurs which
are so large and formidable in her lord, and sometimes she develops a
capacity to crow, or puts on male plumage. Among mammals the male
possesses useless nipples, which occasionally even develop into breasts,
and the female possesses a clitoris, which is merely a rudimentary penis,
and may also develop. The sexually inverted person does not usually
possess any gross exaggeration of these signs of community with the
opposite sex. But, as we have seen, there are a considerable number of
more subtle approximations to the opposite sex in inverted persons, both
on the physical and the psychic side. Putting the matter in a purely
speculative shape, it may be said that at conception the organism is
provided with about 50 per cent. of male germs and about 50 per cent. of
female germs, and that, as development proceeds, either the male or the
female germs assume the upper hand, until in the maturely developed
individual only a few aborted germs of the opposite sex are left. In the
homosexual, however, and in the bisexual, we may imagine that the process
has not proceeded normally, on account of some peculiarity in the number
or character of either the original male germs or female germs, or both,
the result being that we have a person who is organically twisted into a
shape that is more fitted for the exercise of the inverted than of the
normal sexual impulse, or else equally fitted for both.[233]
The conception of the latent bisexuality of all males and females
cannot fail to be fairly obvious to intelligent observers of the
human body. It emerges at an early period in the history of
philosophic thought, and from the first was occasionally used for
the explanation of homosexuality. Plato's myth in the _Banquet_
and the hermaphroditic statues of antiquity show how acute minds,
working ahead of science, exercised themselves with these
problems. (For a fully illustrated study of the ancient
conception of hermaphroditism in sculpture see L.S.A.M. von
Römer, "Ueber die Androgynische Idee des Lebens," _Jahrbuch für
sexuelle Zwischenstufen_, vol. v, 1903, pp. 711-939.) Parmenides,
following Alcmaeon, the philosophic physician who discovered that
the brain is the central organ of intellect, remarks Gomperz
(_Greek Thinkers_, Eng. tr., vol. i, p. 183), used the idea of
variation in the proportion of male and female generative
elements to account for idiosyncrasies of sexual character. After
an immense interval Hössli, the inverted Swiss man-milliner, in
his _Eros_ (1838) put forth the Greek view anew. Schopenhauer,
again from the philosophical side, recognized the bisexuality of
the human individual (see Juliusburger, _Allgemeine Zeitschrift
für Psychiatrie_, 1912, p. 630), and Ulrichs, from 1862 onward,
adopted a similar doctrine, on a Platonic basis, to explain the
"Uranian" constitution. After this the idea began to be more
precisely developed from the scientific side, though not at first
with reference to homosexuality, and more especially by the great
pioneers of the doctrine of Evolution. Darwin emphasized the
significance of the facts on this point, as later Weismann, while
Haeckel, who was one of the earliest Darwinians, has in recent
years clearly recognized the bearing on the interpretation of
homosexuality of the fact that the ancestors of the vertebrates
were hermaphrodites, as vertebrates themselves still are in their
embryonic disposition (Haeckel, in _Jahrbuch für sexuelle
Zwischenstufen_, April, 1913, pp. 262-3, 287). This view had,
however, been set forth at an earlier date by individual
physicians, notably in America by Kiernan (_American Lancet_,
1884, and _Medical Standard_, November and December, 1888), and
Lydston (_Philadelphia Medical and Surgical Reporter_, September,
1889, and _Addresses and Essays_, 1892).
In 1893, in his _L'Inversion Sexuelle_, Chevalier, a pupil of
Lacassagne--who had already applied the term "hermaphrodisme
moral" to this anomaly--explained congenital homosexuality by the
idea of latent bisexuality. Dr. G. de Letamendi, Dean of the
Faculty of Medicine of Madrid, in a paper read before the
International Medical Congress at Rome in 1894, set forth a
principle of panhermaphroditism--a hermaphroditic
bipolarity--which involved the existence of latent female germs
in the male, latent male germs in the female, which latent germs
may strive for, and sometimes obtain, the mastery. In February,
1896, the first version of the present chapter, setting forth the
conception of inversion as a psychic and somatic development on
the basis of a latent bisexuality, was published in the
_Centralblatt für Nervenheilkunde und Psychiatrie_. Kurella (ib.,
May, 1890) adopted a somewhat similar view, even arguing that the
invert is a transitional form between the complete man or woman
and the hermaphrodite. In Germany a patient of Krafft-Ebing had
worked out the same idea, connecting inversion with fetal
bisexuality (eighth edition _Psychopathia Sexualis_, p. 227).
Krafft-Ebing himself at first simply asserted that, whether
congenital or acquired, there must be _Belastung_; inversion is a
"degenerate phenomenon," a functional sign of degeneration
(Krafft-Ebing, "Zur Erklärung der conträren Sexualempfindung,"
_Jahrbuch für Psychiatrie_, 1894). In the later editions of
_Psychopathia Sexualis_, however (1896 and onward and notably in
_Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen_, vol. iii, 1901), he went
farther, adopting the explanation on the lines of original
bisexuality (English translation of tenth edition, pp. 336-7). In
much the same language as I have used he argued that there has
been a struggle in the centers, homosexuality resulting when the
center antagonistic to that represented by the sexual gland
conquers, and psycho-sexual hermaphroditism resulting when both
centers are too weak to obtain victory, in either case such
disturbance not being a psychic degeneration or disease, but
simply an anomaly comparable to a malformation and quite
consonant with psychic health. This is the view now widely
accepted by investigators of sexual inversion. (Much material
bearing on the history of this conception has been brought
together by Hirschfeld, in _Die Homosexualität_, ch. xix, and
previously in "Vom Wesen der Liebe," _Jahrbuch für sexuelle
Zwischenstufen_, vol. viii, 1906, pp. 111-133.)
A similar or allied view is now constantly met with in writers of
scientific authority who are only incidentally concerned with the
study of sexual inversion. Thus Halban ("Die Entstehung des
Geschlechtscharaktere," _Archiv für Gynäkologie_, 1903) regards
hermaphroditism, which he would extend to the psychic sphere, as
a state in which a double sexual impulse determines the course of
fetal and later development. Shattock and Seligmann ("True
Hermaphroditism in the Domestic Fowl, with Remarks on
Allopterotism," _Transactions of Pathological Society of London_,
vol. lvii, part i, 1906), pointing out that mere atrophy of the
ovary cannot account for the appearance in the hen bird of male
characters which are not retrogressive but progressive, argues
that such birds are really bisexual or hermaphrodite, either by
the single "ovary" being really bisexual, as was the case with a
fowl they examined, or that the sexual glands are paired, one
being male and the other female, or else that there is misplaced
male tissue in a neighboring viscus like the adrenal or kidney,
the male elements asserting themselves when the female elements
degenerate. "Hermaphroditism," they conclude, "far from being a
phenomenon altogether abnormal amongst the higher vertebrates,
should be viewed rather as a reversion to the primitive ancestral
phase in which bisexualism was the normal disposition.... True
hermaphroditism in man being established, the question arises
whether lesser grades do not occur.... Remote evidence of
bisexuality in the human subject may, perhaps, be afforded by the
psychical phenomenon of sexual perversion and inversion."
Similarly in a case of unilateral secondary male character in an
otherwise female pheasant, C.J. Bond has more recently shown
(Section of Zoölogy, Birmingham Meeting of British Medical
Association, _British Medical Journal_, Sept. 20, 1913) that an
ovi-testis was present, with degenerating ovarian tissue and
developing testicular tissue, and such islands of actively
growing male tissue can frequently be found, he states, in the
degenerating ovaries of female birds which have put forth male
plumage. Sir John Bland-Sutton, referring to the fact that the
external conformation of the body affords no positive certainty
as to the nature of the internal sexual glands, adds (_British
Medical Journal_, Oct. 30, 1909): "It is a fair presumption that
some examples of sexual frigidity and sex perversion may be
explained by the possibility that the individuals concerned may
possess sexual glands opposite in character to those indicated by
the external configuration of their bodies." Looking at the
matter more broadly and fundamentally in its normal aspects,
Heape declares (_Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical
Society_, vol. xiv, part ii, 1907) that "there is no such thing
as a pure male or female animal, but that all contain a dominant
and recessive sex, except those hermaphrodites in which both
sexes are equally represented.... There seems to me ample
evidence for the conclusion that there is no such thing as a pure
male or female." F.H.A. Marshall, again, in his standard manual,
_The Physiology of Reproduction_ (1910, p. 655 et seq.), is
inclined to accept the same view. "If it be true," he remarks,
"that all individuals are potentially bisexual and that changed
circumstances, leading to a changed metabolism, may, in
exceptional circumstances, even in adult life, cause the
development of the recessive characters, it would seem extremely
probable that the dominance of one set of sexual characters over
the other may be determined in some cases at an early stage of
development in response to a stimulus which may be either
internal or external." So also Berry Hart ("Atypical Male and
Female Sex-Ensemble," a paper read before Edinburgh Obstetrical
Society, _British Medical Journal_, June 20, 1914, p. 1355)
regards the normal male or female as embodying a maximum of the
potent organs of his or her own sex with a minimum of non-potent
organs of the other sex, with secondary sex traits congruent. Any
increase in the minimum gives a diminished maximum and
non-congruence of the secondary characters.
We thus see that the ancient medico-philosophic conception of organic
bisexuality put forth by the Greeks as the key to the explanation of
sexual inversion, after sinking out of sight for two thousand years, was
revived early in the nineteenth century by two amateur philosophers who
were themselves inverted (Hössli, Ulrichs), as well as by a genuine
philosopher who was not inverted (Schopenhauer). Then the conception of
latent bisexuality, independently of homosexuality, was developed from the
purely scientific side (by Darwin and evolutionists generally). In the
next stage this conception was adopted by the psychiatric and other
scientific authorities on homosexuality (Krafft-Ebing and the majority of
other students). Finally, embryologists, physiologists of sex and
biologists generally, not only accept the conception of bisexuality, but
admit that it probably helps to account for homosexuality. In this way the
idea may be said to have passed into current thought. We cannot assert
that it constitutes an adequate explanation of homosexuality, but it
enables us in some degree to understand what for many is a mysterious
riddle, and it furnishes a useful basis for the classification not only
of homosexuality, but of the other mixed or intermediate sexual anomalies
in the same group. The chief of these intermediate sexual anomalies are:
(1) physical hermaphroditism in its various stages; (2) gynandromorphism,
or eunuchoidism, in which men possess characters resembling those of males
who have been early castrated and women possess similarly masculine
characters; (3) sexo-esthetic inversion, or Eonism (Hirschfeld's
transvestism or cross-dressing), in which, outside the specifically sexual
emotions, men possess the tastes of women and women those of men.
Hirschfeld has discussed these intermediate sexual stages in
various works, especially in _Geschlechtsübergänge_ (1905), _Die
Transvestiten_ (1910), and ch. xi of _Die Homosexualität_.
Hermaphroditism (the reality of which has only of late been
recognized and is still disputed) and pseudohermaphroditism; in
their physical variations are fully dealt with in the great work,
richly illustrated, _Hermaphroditismus beim Menschen_, by F.L.
von Neugebauer, of Warsaw. Neugebauer published an earlier and
briefer study of the subject in the _Jahrbuch für sexuelle
Zwischenstufen_ vol. iv, 1902, pp. 1-176, with a bibliography in
vol. viii (1906) of the same _Jahrbuch_, pp. 685-700. Hirschfeld
emphasizes the fact that neither hermaphroditism nor eunuchoidism
is commonly associated with homosexuality, and that a large
proportion of the cases of transvestism, as defined by him, are
heterosexual. True inversion seems, however, to be not
infrequently found among pseudohermaphrodites; Neugebauer records
numerous cases; Magnan has published a case in a girl brought up
as a youth (_Gazette médical de Paris_, March 31, 1911) and
Lapointe a case in a man brought up as a girl (_Revue de
psychiatrie_, 1911, p. 219). Such cases may be accounted for by
the training and associations involved by the early error in
recognition of sex, and perhaps still more by a really organic
predisposition to homosexuality, although the sexual psychic
characters are not necessarily bound up with the coexistence of
corresponding sexual glands. Halban (_Archiv für Gynäkologie_
1903) goes so far as to class the homosexual as "real
pseudohermaphrodites," exactly comparable to a man with a female
breast or a woman with a beard, and proposes to term
homosexuality "pseudohermaphroditus masculinus psychicus." This,
however, is an unnecessary and scarcely satisfactory confusion.
To place the group of homosexual phenomena among other intermediate groups
on the organic bisexual basis is a convenient classification. It can
scarcely be regarded as a complete explanation. It is probable that we may
ultimately find a more fundamental source of these various phenomena in
the stimulating and inhibiting play of the internal secretions.[234] Our
knowledge of the intimate association between the hormones and sexual
phenomena is already sufficient to make such an explanation intelligible;
the complex interaction of the glandular internal secretions and their
liability to varying disturbance in balance may well suffice to account
for the complexity of the phenomena. It would harmonize with what we know
of the occasional delayed manifestations of homosexuality, and would not
clash with their congenital nature, for we know that a disordered state of
the thymus, for instance, may be hereditary, and it is held that status
lymphaticus may be either inborn or acquired.[235] Normal sexual
characters seem to depend largely upon the due co-ordination of the
internal secretions, and it is reasonable to suppose that sexual
deviations depend upon their inco-ordination. If a man is a man, and a
woman a woman, because (in Blair Bell's phrase) of the totality of their
internal secretions, the intermediate stages between the man and the woman
must be due to redistribution of those internal secretions.[236]
We know that various internal secretions possess an influential sexual
effect. Thus the atrophy of the thymus seems to be connected with sexual
development at puberty; the thyroid reinforces the genital glands; adrenal
overdevelopment can produce in a female the secondary characteristics of
the male, as well as cause precocious development of maleness; etc. "An
alteration in the metabolism," as F.H.A. Marshall suggests, "even in
comparatively late life, may initiate changes in the direction of the
opposite sex." Metabolic chemical processes may thus be found to furnish a
key to complex and subtle sexual variations, alike somatic and psychic,
although we must still regard such processes as arising on an inborn
predisposition.
Whatever its ultimate explanation, sexual inversion may thus fairly be
considered a "sport," or variation, one of those organic aberrations which
we see throughout living nature, in plants and in animals.
It is not here asserted, as I would carefully point out, that an inverted
sexual instinct, or organ for such instinct, is developed in early
embryonic life; such a notion is rightly rejected as absurd. What we may
reasonably regard as formed at an early stage of development is strictly a
predisposition; that is to say, such a modification of the organism that
it becomes more adapted than the normal or average organism to experience
sexual attraction to the same sex. The sexual invert may thus be roughly
compared to the congenital idiot, to the instinctive criminal, to the man
of genius, who are all not strictly concordant with the usual biological
variation (because this is of a less subtle character), but who become
somewhat more intelligible to us if we bear in mind their affinity to
variations. Symonds compared inversion to color-blindness; and such a
comparison is reasonable. Just as the ordinary color-blind person is
congenitally insensitive to those red-green rays which are precisely the
most impressive to the normal eye, and gives an extended value to the
other colors,--finding that blood is the same color as grass, and a florid
complexion blue as the sky,--so the invert fails to see emotional values
patent to normal persons, transferring those values to emotional
associations which, for the rest of the world, are utterly distinct. Or we
may compare inversion to such a phenomenon as color-hearing, in which
there is not so much defect as an abnormality of nervous tracks producing
new and involuntary combinations. Just as the color-hearer instinctively
associates colors with sounds, like the young Japanese lady who remarked
when listening to singing, "That boy's voice is red!" so the invert has
his sexual sensations brought into relationship with objects that are
normally without sexual appeal.[237] And inversion, like color-hearing is
found more commonly in young subjects, tending to become less marked, or
to die out, after puberty. Color-hearing, while an abnormal phenomenon, it
must be added, cannot be called a diseased condition, and it is probably
much less frequently associated with other abnormal or degenerative
stigmata than is inversion; there is often a congenital element, shown by
the tendency to hereditary transmission, while the associations are
developed in very early life, and are too regular to be the simple result
of suggestion.[238]
All such organic variations are abnormalities. It is important that we
should have a clear idea as to what an abnormality is. Many people imagine
that what is abnormal is necessarily diseased. That is not the case,
unless we give the word disease an inconveniently and illegitimately wide
extension. It is both inconvenient and inexact to speak of
color-blindness, criminality, and genius as diseases in the same sense as
we speak of scarlet fever or tuberculosis or general paralysis as
diseases. Every congenital abnormality is doubtless due to a peculiarity
in the sperm or oval elements or in their mingling, or to some disturbance
in their early development. But the same may doubtless be said of the
normal dissimilarities between brothers and sisters. It is quite true that
any of these aberrations may be due to antenatal disease, but to call them
abnormal does not beg that question. If it is thought that any authority
is needed to support this view, we can scarcely find a weightier than that
of Virchow, who repeatedly insisted on the right use of the word
"anomaly," and who taught that, though an anomaly may constitute a
predisposition to disease, the study of anomalies--pathology, as he called
it, teratology as we may perhaps prefer to call it--is not the study of
disease, which he termed nosology; the study of the abnormal is perfectly
distinct from the study of the morbid. Virchow considers that the region
of the abnormal is the region of pathology, and that the study of disease
must be regarded distinctly as nosology. Whether we adopt this
terminology, or whether we consider the study of the abnormal as part of
teratology, is a secondary matter, not affecting the right understanding
of the term "anomaly" and its due differentiation from the term "disease."
At the Innsbruck meeting of the German Anthropological Society,
in 1894, Virchow thus expressed himself: "In old days an anomaly
was called pathos, and in this sense every departure from the
norm is for me a pathological event. If we have ascertained such
a pathological event, we are further led to investigate what
_pathos_ was the special cause of it.... This cause may be, for
example, an external force, or a chemical substance, or a
physical agent, producing in the normal condition of the body a
change, an anomaly pathos. This can become hereditary under some
circumstances, and then become the foundation for certain small
hereditary characters which are propagated in a family; in
themselves they belong to pathology, even although they produce
no injury. For I must remark that pathological does not mean
harmful; it does not indicate disease; disease in Greek is nosos,
and it is nosology that is concerned with disease. The
pathological under some circumstances can be advantageous"
(_Correspondenz-blatt Deutsch Gesellschaft für Anthropologie_,
1894). These remarks are of interest when we are attempting to
find the wider bearings of such an anomaly as sexual inversion.
This same distinction has more recently been emphasized by
Professor Aschoff (_Deutsche medizinische Wochenschrift_,
February 3, 1910; of. _British Medical Journal_, April 9, 1910,
p. 892), as against Ribbert and others who would unduly narrow
the conception of pathos. Aschoff points out that, not merely for
the sake of precision and uniformity of terminology but of clear
thinking, it is desirable that we should retain a distinction in
regard to which Galen and the ancient physicians were very
definite. They used pathos as the wider term involving affection
(_affectio_) in general, not necessarily impairment of vital
tissue; when that was involved there was nosos, disease. We have
to recognize the distinction even if we reject the terminology.
A word may be said as to the connection between sexual inversion and
degeneration. In France especially, since the days of Morel, the stigmata
of degeneration are much spoken of. Sexual inversion is frequently
regarded as one of them: i.e., as an episodic syndrome of a hereditary
disease, taking its place beside other psychic stigmata, such as
kleptomania and pyromania. Krafft-Ebing long so regarded inversion; it is
the view of Magnan, one of the earliest investigators of
homosexuality;[239] and it was adopted by Möbius. Strictly speaking, the
invert is degenerate; he has fallen away from the genus. So is a
color-blind person. But Morel's conception of degenerescence has
unfortunately been coarsened and vulgarized.[240] As it now stands, we
gain little or no information by being told that a person is a
"degenerate." It is only, as Näcke constantly argued, when we find a
complexus of well-marked abnormalities that we are fairly justified in
asserting that we have to deal with a condition of degeneration. Inversion
is sometimes found in such a condition. I have, indeed, already tried to
suggest that a condition of diffused minor abnormality may be regarded as
a basis of congenital inversion. In other words, inversion is bound up
with a modification of the secondary sexual characters. But these
anomalies and modifications are not invariable,[241] and are not usually
of a serious character; inversion is rare in the profoundly degenerate. It
is undesirable to call these modifications "stigmata of degeneration," a
term which threatens to disappear from scientific terminology, to become a
mere term of literary and journalistic abuse. So much may be said
concerning a conception or a phrase of which far too much has been made in
popular literature. At the best it remains vague and unfitted for
scientific use. It is now widely recognized that we gain little by
describing inversion as a degeneration. Näcke, who attached significance
to the stigmata of degeneration when numerous, was especially active in
pointing out that inverts are not degenerate, and frequently returned to
this point. Löwenfeld, Freud, Hirschfeld, Bloch, Rohleder all reject the
conception of sexual inversion as a degeneracy.
Moll is still unable to abandon altogether the position that
since inversion involves a disharmony between psychic disposition
and physical conformation we must regard it as morbid, but he
recognizes (like Krafft-Ebing) that it is properly viewed as
being on the level of a deformity, that is, an abnormality,
comparable to physical hermaphroditism. (A. Moll, "Sexuelle
Zwischenstufen," _Zeitschrift für aerztliche Fortbildung_, No.
24, 1904.) Näcke repeatedly emphasized the view that inversion is
a congenital non-morbid abnormality; thus in the last year of his
life he wrote (_Zeitschrift für die Gesamte Neurologie und
Psychiatrie_, vol. xv, Heft 5, 1913): "We must not conceive of
homosexuality as a degeneration or a disease, but at most as an
abnormality, due to a disturbance of development." Löwenfeld,
always a cautious and sagacious clinical observer, agreeing with
Näcke and Hirschfeld, regards inversion as certainly an
abnormality, but not therefore morbid; it may be associated with
disease and degeneration, but is usually simply a variation from
the norm, not to be regarded as morbid or degenerate, and not
diminishing the value of the individual as a member of society
(Löwenfeld, _Ueber die sexuelle Konstitution_, 1911, p. 166; also
_Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft_, Feb., 1908, and
_Sexual-Probleme_, April, 1908). Aletrino of Amsterdam pushes the
view that inversion is a non-morbid abnormality to an undue
extreme by asserting that "the uranist is a normal variety of the
species _Homo sapiens_" ("Uranisme et Dégénérescence," _Archives
d'Anthropologie Criminelle_, Aug.-Sept., 1908); inversion may be
regarded as (in the correct sense of the word here adopted) a
pathological abnormality, but not as an anthropological human
variety comparable to the Negro or the Mongolian man. (For
further opinions in favor of inversion as an anomaly, see
Hirschfeld, _Die Homosexualität_, p. 388 et seq.)
Sexual inversion, therefore, remains a congenital anomaly, to be classed
with other congenital abnormalities which have psychic concomitants. At
the very least such congenital abnormality usually exists as a
predisposition to inversion. It is probable that many persons go through
the world with a congenital predisposition to inversion which always
remains latent and unroused; in others the instinct is so strong that it
forces its own way in spite of all obstacles; in others, again, the
predisposition is weaker, and a powerful exciting cause plays the
predominant part.
We are thus led to the consideration of the causes that excite the latent
predisposition. A great variety of causes has been held to excite to
sexual inversion. It is only necessary to mention those which I have found
influential. The first to come before us is our school-system, with its
segregation of boys and girls apart from each other during the periods of
puberty and adolescence. Many inverts have not been to school at all, and
many who have been pass through school-life without forming any passionate
or sexual relationship; but there remain a large number who date the
development of homosexuality from the influences and examples of
school-life. The impressions received at the time are not less potent
because they are often purely sentimental and without any obvious sensual
admixture. Whether they are sufficiently potent to generate permanent
inversion alone may be doubtful, but, if it is true that in early life the
sexual instincts are less definitely determined than when adolescence is
complete, it is conceivable, though unproved, that a very strong
impression, acting even on a normal organism, may cause arrest of sexual
development on the psychic side.
Another exciting cause of inversion is seduction. By this I mean the
initiation of the young boy or girl by some older and more experienced
person in whom inversion is already developed, and who is seeking the
gratification of the abnormal instinct. This appears to be a not uncommon
incident in the early history of sexual inverts. That such
seduction--sometimes an abrupt and inconsiderate act of mere sexual
gratification--could by itself produce a taste for homosexuality is highly
improbable; in individuals not already predisposed it is far more likely
to produce disgust, as it did in the case of the youthful Rousseau. "He
only can be seduced," as Moll puts it, "who is capable of being seduced."
No doubt it frequently happens in these, as so often in more normal
"seductions," that the victim has offered a voluntary or involuntary
invitation.
Another exciting cause of inversion, to which little importance is usually
attached, but which I find to have some weight, is disappointment in
normal love. It happens that a man in whom the homosexual instinct is yet
only latent, or at all events held in a state of repression, tries to form
a relationship with a woman. This relationship may be ardent on one or
both sides, but--often, doubtless, from the latent homosexuality of the
lover--it comes to nothing. Such love-disappointments, in a more or less
acute form, occur at some time or another to nearly everyone. But in these
persons the disappointment with one woman constitutes motive strong enough
to disgust the lover with the whole sex and to turn his attention toward
his own sex. It is evident that the instinct which can thus be turned
round can scarcely be strong, and it seems probable that in some of these
cases the episode of normal love simply serves to bring home to the invert
the fact that he is not made for normal love. In other cases, it
seems,--especially those that are somewhat feeble-minded and
unbalanced,--a love-disappointment really does poison the normal instinct,
and a more or less impotent love for women becomes an equally impotent
love for men. The prevalence of homosexuality among prostitutes may be, to
a large extent, explained by a similar and better-founded disgust with
normal sexuality.[242]
These three influences, therefore,--example at school, seduction,
disappointment in normal love,--all of them drawing the subject away from
the opposite sex and concentrating him on his own sex, are exciting causes
of inversion; but they require a favorable organic predisposition to act
on, while there are a large number of cases in which no exciting cause at
all can be found, but in which, from earliest childhood, the subject's
interest seems to be turned on his own sex, and continues to be so turned
throughout life.
At this point I conclude the analysis of the psychology of sexual
inversion as it presents itself to me. I have sought only to bring out the
more salient points, neglecting minor points, neglecting also those groups
of inverts who may be regarded as of secondary importance. The average
invert, moving in ordinary society, is a person of average general health,
though very frequently with hereditary relationships that are markedly
neurotic. He is usually the subject of a congenital predisposing
abnormality, or complexus of minor abnormalities, making it difficult or
impossible for him to feel sexual attraction to the opposite sex, and easy
to feel sexual attraction to his own sex. This abnormality either appears
spontaneously from the first, by development or arrest of development, or
it is called into activity by some accidental circumstance.
FOOTNOTES:
[225] See _passim, Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische Forschungen,
Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse_, and _Internationale Zeitschrift für
Aerztliche Psychoanalyse_; also Sadger, "Zur Aetiologie der Konträren
Sexualempfindung," _Medizinische Klinik_, 1909, No. 2.
[226] For an exposition of this by an able English representative of
Freudian doctrines, see Ernest Jones, "The Oedipus Complex As An
Explanation of Hamlet's Mystery," _American Journal of Psychology_,
January, 1910.
[227] The love of relations may be tinctured by all degrees of sexual
love, some of which are so faint and vague that they cannot be considered
unnatural or abnormal; it is misleading to term them incestuous. The
Russian novelist, Artzibascheff, in his _Sanine_ described a brother's
affection for his sister as thus touched with a perception of her sexual
charm (I refer to the French translation), and the book has consequently
been much abused as "incestuous," though the attitude described is very
pale and conventional compared to the romantic passion sung in Shelley's
_Laon and Cythna_, or the tragic exaltation of the same passion in Ford's
great play, "_'Tis Pity She's a Whore_."
[228] Thus Numa Praetorius, a sagacious observer with, a very wide and
thorough knowledge of homosexuality, finds himself quite unable to accept
the "Oedipus Complex" explanation of inversion (_Jahrbuch für sexuelle
Zwischenstufen_, July, 1914, p. 362).
[229] It cannot be maintained that the frequency of inversion among the
near relatives of inverts is a chance coincidence, for it must be
remembered that few estimates of the prevalence of inversion yield a
higher proportion than 3 per cent.
[230] See also a discussion of the Freudian view by Hirschfeld, who
concludes (_Die Homosexualität_, p. 344) that we can only accept the
Freudian mechanism as rare, and in all cases subordinate to organic
predisposition.
[231] It has been denied by some (Meynert, Näcke, etc.) that there is any
sexual _instinct_ at all. I may as well, therefore, explain in what sense
I use the word. (See also "Analysis of the Sexual Impulse" in vol. iii of
these _Studies_.) I mean an inherited aptitude the performance of which
normally demands for its full satisfaction the presence of a person of the
opposite sex. It might be asserted that there is no such thing as an
instinct for food, that it is all imitation, etc. In a sense this is true,
but the automatic basis remains. A chicken from an incubator needs no hen
to teach it to eat. It seems to discover eating and drinking, as it were,
by chance, at first eating awkwardly and eating everything, until it
learns what will best satisfy its organic mechanism. There is no instinct
for food, it may be, but there is an instinct which is only satisfied by
food. It is the same with the "sexual instinct." The tentative and
omnivorous habits of the newly hatched chicken may be compared to the
uncertainty of the sexual instinct at puberty, while the sexual pervert is
like a chicken that should carry on into adult age an appetite for worsted
and paper. It may be added here that the question of the hereditary nature
of the sexual instinct has been exhaustively discussed and decisively
affirmed by Moll in his _Untersuchungen über die Libido Sexualis_, 1898.
Moll attaches importance to the inheritance of the normal aptitudes for
sexual reaction in an abnormally weak degree as a factor in the
development of sexual perversions.
[232] This view was revived in a modified form by Näcke (_Zeitschrift für
die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie_, vol. xv, Heft 5, 1913), who
supposed that there may be an anatomical "homosexual center" in the brain;
i.e., a feminine libido-center in the inverted man, and a masculine
libido-center in the inverted woman. He expressed a hope that in the
future the brains of inverted persons would be more carefully
investigated.
[233] I do not present this view as more than a picture which helps us to
realize the actual phenomena which we witness in homosexuality, although I
may add that so able a teratologist as Dr. J.W. Ballantyne considers that
"it seems a very possible theory."
[234] This explanation of homosexuality has already been tentatively put
forth. Thus, Iwan Bloch (_Sexual Life of Our Time_, ch. xix, Appendix)
vaguely suggests a new theory of homosexuality as dependent on chemical
influences. Hirschfeld also believes (_Die Homosexualität_, ch. xx) that
the study of the internal secretions is the path to the deepest
foundations of inversion.
[235] A.E. Garrod, "The Thymus Gland in its Clinical Aspects," _British
Medical Journal_, Oct. 3, 1914
[236] "The pure female and the pure male are produced by all the internal
secretions," Blair Bell, "The Internal Secretions," _British Medical
Journal_, Nov. 15, 1913.
[237] After this chapter was first published (in the _Centralblatt für
Nervenheilkunde_, February, 1896), Féré also compared congenital inversion
to color-blindness and similar anomalies (Féré, "La Descendance d'un
Inverti," _Revue Générale de Clinique et Thérapeutique_, 1896), while
Ribot referred to the analogy with color-hearing (_Psychology of the
Emotions_, part ii, ch. vii).
[238] See, e.g., Flournoy, _Des Phenomènes de Synopsie_, Geneva, 1893; and
for a brief discussion of the general phenomena of synesthesia, E. Parish,
_Hallucinations and Illusions (Contemporary Science Series_), chapter vii;
Bleuler, article "Secondary Sensations," in Tuke's _Dictionary of
Psychological Medicine_; and Havelock Ellis, _Man and Woman_, 5th ed.,
1915, pp. 181-4.
[239] Magnan has in recent years reaffirmed this view ("Inversion Sexuelle
et Pathologic Mentale," _Revue de Psychothérapie_, March, 1914): "The
invert is a diseased person, a degenerate."
[240] It is this fact which has caused the Italians to be shy of using the
word "degeneration;" thus, Marro, in his great work, _I Caratteri del
Delinquenti_, made a notable attempt to analyze the phenomena lumped
together as degenerate into three groups: atypical, atavistic, and morbid.
[241] Hirschfeld and Burchard among 200 inverts found pronounced stigmata
of degeneration in only 16 per cent. (Hirschfeld, _Die Homosexualität_,
ch. xx.)
[242] Alcohol has sometimes been considered an important exciting cause of
homosexuality, and alcoholism is certainly not uncommon in the heredity of
inverts; according to Hirschfeld (_Die Homosexualität_, p. 386) it is well
marked in one of the parents in over 21 per cent, of cases. But it
probably has no more influence as an exciting cause in the individual
homosexual person than in the individual heterosexual person. From the
Freudian standpoint, indeed, Abraham believes (_Zeitschrift für
Sexualwissenschaft_, Heft 8, 1908) that even in normal persons alcohol
removes the inhibition from a latent homosexuality, and Juliusburger from
the same standpoint (_Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse_, Heft 10 and 11,
1912) thinks that the alcoholic tendency is unconsciously aroused by the
homosexual impulse in order to reach its own gratification. But we may
accept Näcke's conclusions (_Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie_, vol.
lxviii, 1911, p. 852), that (1) alcohol cannot produce homosexuality in
persons not predisposed, that (2) it may arouse it in those who are
predisposed, that (3) the action of alcohol is the same on the homosexual
as the heterosexual, and that (4) alcoholism is not common among inverts.