“Du meines keuschen Herzens Allgebieterin,Der ich mich neige in tiefer Demut...”“You, mistress of my chaste heart,To whom I bow in deep humility...”
“Du meines keuschen Herzens Allgebieterin,Der ich mich neige in tiefer Demut...”“You, mistress of my chaste heart,To whom I bow in deep humility...”
“Du meines keuschen Herzens Allgebieterin,Der ich mich neige in tiefer Demut...”
“Du meines keuschen Herzens Allgebieterin,
Der ich mich neige in tiefer Demut...”
“You, mistress of my chaste heart,To whom I bow in deep humility...”
“You, mistress of my chaste heart,
To whom I bow in deep humility...”
The verses are full of yearning and passion. His blood calls for her, his heart is filled only with yearning for her. These are the utterances of a man who has lost his head by falling in love.
This case illustrates plainly the manner in which monosexuality leads to homosexuality. But the subject himself did not want to recognize any of these relations. All the powers of sublimation at his disposal he had turned into his love for the mother. Therefore he had to cling to a portion of his mysophilia (dirt compulsion). What he overdid on one side in the way of cleanliness was compensated for on the other by a sinking into filth. It is noteworthy that he does not care to be cleared of his homosexuality. He looks upon it as a protection and as something that sets him apart from other men. This again shows the hopelessness of any therapeutic endeavors in most cases of this type.
Since taking account of his dreams he is astonishedhow often heterosexual excitations come to the surface. Last night he dreamed, first, that he was with a naked woman, of wonderful build and that hein vaginam et in anum immisithis finger.
Further, another remarkable dream, which played an important rôle in the solution of his neurosis:
I am with mother at the Opera. A long hallway at the end of which one obtains a view of Vienna. One sees the wonderful St. Stephen’s Church, a fine cloud like a smoke or like a fine powdery water spray over its tower. The Opera is changed. Instead of Don Juan, the Donna carissima.
Already the first dream indicated a definite trend towards woman and now the change of program discloses the source of his neurosis. I ask him for a description of the woman in the first dream. He did not see her face at all. He merely saw the wonderful bewitching white body.
Such dreams—figures without faces—are very frequent and serve to hide the beloved person and to prevent recognition. I know dreamers who have pollutions with such half figures. The face is never visible. Often only a portion of the body. Through the second dream we may assume that the figure represents the mother. Otherwise it is hardily possible to explain why the face should have been subjected to the dream’s censorship.
The second dream belongs to the category of maternal body fancies. He is within the mother’s womb. The long passage he associates with: life’s pathway. It is in fact the pathway through which he came into life. Stephen’s tower is a phallic symbol. The smoking room,ejaculatioormictio. It is a representation of the illusion that he is within the maternal body and is able to observe from that point of vantage the process of generation. The dream becomes even more transparent when we learn that his father’s name is Stephen.[40]
Now his sexual infantilism becomes intelligible. He is under the spell ofMutterleibsphantasie, maternal body phantasy. Every lavatory becomes for him the symbol of the maternal body. There he watches the man urinating as he might have watched the father in the maternal body if he had had enough intelligence to do so as an embryo. It seems unbelievable that intelligent persons should become victims of so puerile a phantasy. Various facts always uphold the sense of such a phantasy. In this particular instance there was dislike for, and unpleasant sensations in, closed rooms, also a series of paraphiliac trend which found their explanation only through that phantasy. He revelled in the thought of permitting himself to be besprinkled with the spermatic fluid by his beloved male friend;he had a cravingmembrum erectum amati viri fellare; his urolagnic and coprolagnic proclivities, too, were dominated by the same phantasy. He behaved as if he were still in the maternal body.
But the dream declares clearly that a change of program is taking place in the play of his life. Don Juan becomes aDonna—Carissima,—she who is most dear to him. He has changed programs; and the love for the father he has transferred to his mother. He is within the maternal body,—he himself is the mother. He seeks himself, he is his dearest woman, he loves the womanly in himself. We have here the never absent love of the homosexual for himself—narcissism.
Various recollections come to surface, all showing alike that his earliest predisposition was distinctly heterosexual. Thus, for instance, at five years of age he fell in love with a girl, wanted to marry her, and called her his bride. We hear only of three heterosexual episodes belonging to his later life. It is not yet clear how this complete turning away from woman came about. Further inquiries reveal dreams of which I can only give a part. Thus he dreams:
I study for an hour. My textbook is on various physical experiments, further on it turns into history. There is something in it about Bavarian history. The year 4005 plays an important rôle. The whole thing ends with a fairy tale about threepines which stand on a winter’s night before the house and signify three dead women.
Later I act successfully as an imitator of women.
The figure 4005 brings the following associations: 00 is the sign for lavatory; 45 is the opus number of one of his favorite opera scores, the Salome of Richard Strauss; 4 and 5 are the bad marks at school.
The Salome of Strauss and a previous dream lead us to his sadistic trends. It becomes progressively clearer that his aboriginal sadism was extraordinarily great. To this day he revels in phantasies about sexual crimes, violent murders, etc. He toyed with the plan of killing himself as well as his whole family. Any opposition at home immediately suggests to him thoughts of murder. His original attitude towards woman, too, was sadistic. The chief motive of Salome is the severed head of the prophet. Also the pound of flesh in Shylock, in the first dream, refers to this trend; finally the dream about the bedbug. His religious trend set in early, thus protecting him against the wild beast within him. At six years of age he played that he was a preacher and he had his own altar. He fled from woman because he was not sure of himself....
He has a large number of idiosyncrasies which may be explained through a repressed sadism. He cannot eat peaches because their skins resemble humanskin; he cannot tolerate the skin on parboiled milk, it brings on disgust and nausea; he often turns against meat and for a long time he confined himself to vegetarianism. Meat he calls animal carcass. The thought of a menstruating woman is particularly repulsive to him. All associations with blood are strongly affective, partly in a positive and partly in a negative way.
What is the meaning of the three pines which symbolize dead women in the 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 byHeine. 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 isdelayed 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,—thematernal 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 areceptaculum seminisby a favored person. (Strong desire to carry onfellatioon his teachers or to subject himself to pederasty.) He is withinthe maternal bodyund 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 anincline 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 faithfulnessand 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 disappearsinto 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 foreheadinfluenced 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 atSchönbrunn, 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 aLustmörder, 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 apuella 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 reallyas 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 isSigma’sconscious 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 projectionof 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 fatherImagohe 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 hisvita 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 thaturningsalways 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 truepari passualso of theurlinds. To be in love alwaysmeans to find one’s self in another. But why dourningsnot find themselves in the femaleImago? 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 patientDelta(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. WithSigma, with whom the penis played but a secondary rôle, the case was different.Sadgerwho 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 byAdler, the second barely a trace. Thisshows 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.Deltahad witnessed an unhappy marriage as a child,Sigmaheard 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.