DR. JAMES J. PUTNAM, Boston: I am very much interested in Dr. Burrow's
paper and understand it as illustrating the argument brought forward by him
last night. As I remember the situation I do not quite see why this idea is
not essentially the same that has been endorsed by Freud and others. One's
interest in one's self is certainly in part the basis of homosexuality, and
this is intensified by the reflection from the mother.
DR. JOHN T. MAC CURDY, New York: When Dr. Burrow first brought up this
subject last year it struck me as being the most original theory in
psychoanalysis that had been formulated in this country and one of the most
important of all the additions to our general psychoanalytic concepts.
Personally, I found that it immediately solved certain problems which had
been in my mind for some time. I had never been able to see how it came
about that the alcoholic had a strong latent homosexuality. The ordinary
interpretations of drinking as a fellatoristic substitute has always seemed
unlikely, for, if this were so any liquid would serve the purpose, so why
alcohol? Now it is manifest that the alcoholic is an individual who is
taking a drug which dulls his sensibility. That is a way of retiring from
reality, of getting away from objectivity, retiring from what Dr. Burrow
calls the subjective phase. Now we understand why the patient in an acute
alcoholic hallucinosis almost invariably hears voices making homosexual
accusations. The unreality complex is translated into sexual terms and he is
accused of unreal love. I have been struck in dream analysis by the almost
constant coincidence in dreams of Mutterleib symbols in the same dream that
on analysis proved to be homosexual in principle. I can quote one dream
that demonstrates dramatically every point which Dr. Burrow makes in his
thesis. This patient, a man who was being treated for homosexual tendencies
which worried him a great deal, on one of the first days brought this dream.
He was a hospital interne. Someone came to him and said a nurse had cut
herself. He ran up to the surgical amphitheatre where preparations were made
to fix her wound. He suddenly discovered that his was the cut and that it
was on the ventral surface of the penis corresponding to the primitive
subincision operation. He took up a needle, sewed it up and put on a
bandage. At the end of the dream he wondered what was going to happen,
whether the bandage would come off or not. Any psychoanalyst can imagine
what the incision indicated, that it led directly to the idea of a vagina,
also to the idea of castration which is combined with that. The bandage led
to swaddling clothes. Here we have the whole situation rehearsed. The
associations went to the mother. The mother changes into himself. At the
same time he represents himself with a vagina and gives birth to a child,
his own penis which he can fondle as his mother did him.
DR. SMITH ELY JELLIFFE, New York: It seems to me the phrase identification
with the mother is very illuminating. I have no doubt that Dr. Burrow would
say that the failure to develop away from this primary identification lies
at the basis of what is called Narcissism. I have noted this identification
with the mother, i. e., with the female, in many patients. They are, in
ordinary life, after making a very hard fight with unconscious homosexual
trends and are managing themselves with great difficulty. This shows
particularly in the analysis of alcoholics especially of periodic types.
Self-fertilization is a frequent symbol in the unconscious. In males,
particularly, the identification with the mother is a frequent factor and
often explains the value of the instinctively sought relief through narcosis
and withdrawal from the conflict. Male hysterias also show it markedly. The
aggression towards the father is a frequent female symbolization in hysteria
as well.
DR. TRIGANT BURROW, Baltimore: It seems to me that the President's
reference to this heterosexual instance need not necessarily be heterosexual
in a psychological sense. It is important to recognize that though the
object of the male in a particular case be a woman, yet psychologically this
need not be a heterosexual adaptation. In the case I have cited the
relation of the patient to his wife is psychologically a homosexual one. We
have seen in this case the presence of a profound neurosis and coexistent
with it an apparently normal sexual life. This we know from the Freudian
standpoint is impossible. The heterosexual adaptation is but apparent.
DR. TRIGANT BURROW, Baltimore: In regard to Dr Putnam's comment that my
thesis contains what has been said already by Freud. Undoubtedly to a large
extent it has. There is, though, some modification here which seems to me of
importance, if only in the way of an extension of Freud's original
conception. One gets a very clear idea from Brill's excellent paper on
homosexuality of Freud's essential thesis. Here the idea of homosexuality is
that of a revulsion from the mother. The child is assumed to adapt itself
as the mother in order to get rid of the mother as object. This first
hypothesis related only to the male child. To explain homosexuality in the
female, either an analogous mechanism must be assumed, according to which
the female child adopts homosexuality to escape the father image, and
analysis does not bear out this explanation; or, assuming the same reaction
in respect to the mother in the female as in the male, the result would
entail not homosexuality but a heightened heterosexuality. I think the
formulation I have here advanced offers us a distinct advantage in placing
the causative factor in homosexuality in either sex upon an identical
genetic basis.