IV

JEALOUSY AND PARANOIA—JEALOUSY AS PROJECTION OF ONE’S OWN INADEQUACY—FREUD’S RESEARCHES ON PARANOIA—THE INVESTIGATIONS OF JULIUSBURGER—THE JEALOUSY OF A PARANOIAC—JEALOUSY DELUSION OF A MERCHANT—JEALOUSY AND ALCOHOLISM—THE EVOLUTION OF MANKIND FROM BISEXUALITY TO MONOSEXUALITY—METAMORPHOSIS SEXUALIS PARANOICA—THE MONOTHEISM OF SEXUALITY—JEALOUSY AND CRIMINALITY.

Die Eifersucht wird immer mit der Liebe geboren aber stirbt nicht immer mit ihr.

—La Rochefoucauld.

Jealousy always arises with love but does not always die out with it.

—La Rochefoucauld.

It is very striking that the feeling of jealousy breaks through all the barriers of culture. Extraordinarily frequent are suspicions of incest,[18]of homosexuality, of masturbation, and zoöphily. Women accuse their husbands of relations with their daughter; or they accuse the man of homosexual relations with a friend. Men bring similar accusations against their wives. All such accusations are projections of subjective sexual tendencies upon the object of their jealousy.Beaussart(La Jalousie; Annales Psychiques, vol. LXXI, 1913), who maintains erroneously that morbid jealousy is more frequent among men than among women, brings out very strongly this peculiarity of jealousy and bases it on the absence of true motivation. But the motivation is transparent enough. Among the cases reported by him I note that of a 75-year-old woman who tortured her husband to death with hergroundless jealousy and who, in a rage, one day, attacked him with a razor. Jealousy is clearly a rationalization of hatred, it harks back to the primary egoistic attitude of the aboriginal man. The phyletic raw sexuality and criminality corresponds to man’s primary ontogenetic attitude towards his environment.

Other jealous persons see their criminal tendencies reflected in the surroundings. A jealous person has the hallucination that the supposed lover of his wife intends to knife him. In this manner the killing of the lover looms up as a logical necessity. Whereas men make use of swords, revolvers, whips, tortures and shackles, woman’s criminality breaks out in such jealousy acts as anonymous letters, libel, poisoning, castration and throwing of acid (Beaussart).

In many cases the barrier between jealousy and insanity, between neurosis and psychosis, is hardly to be distinguished. Often jealousy is the first symptom of paranoia.

The next two cases have also pronounced paranoiac features. We are indebted toFreudfor his significant contributions to our understanding of the nature of paranoia, orparaphrenia, asFreudterms the condition. In his fundamental contribution,Psychoanalytische Bemerkungen über einen autobiographisch beschriebenen Fall von Paranoia(Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, 3rded., Franz Deuticke, Leipzig and Vienna, 1913), he has shown that paranoiac insanity is traceable back to the repressed homosexual components of the sexual instinct. The persecution ideas of paranoiacs (by men) is the projection outward of their own thoughts. The subject is pursued by his own homosexual phantasies and out of those fancies he constructs his notion of a pursuer. Love is transmuted by the subject into its bipolar opposite, hatred.Freudstates on this point:

“‘I do not love him, in fact I hate him.’ This contrary attitude, which cannot mean anything else in the unconscious does not assume that form in the paranoiac’s consciousness. The mechanism governing the formation of symptoms in paranoia requires that the inner apperception,—the feeling of subjection,—should be replaced by some perception from without. The proposition: ‘in fact I hate him,’ is thus changed through projection into another: ‘he hates (pursues) me which consequently justifies me in hating him.’ The unconscious feeling-motive thus appears as though it were an objective perception, a deduction:

“‘I do not love him, in fact I hate him, because he pursues me.’”

Observation leaves no doubt that the pursuer is none other than the formerly beloved person.

Freudhere overlooks entirely the relations of paranoia to criminality. Having persistently overlookedthus far the tremendous significance of latent criminality in the psychogenesis of neurosis and having emphasized only the sexual factors underlying all psychotic and nervous manifestations, he neglects here also the important rôle of criminality in the dynamics of paranoia. That is the reason why his explanation does not fit all cases. For there is also a paranoia which stands for a flight from criminality, even representing a rationalization of criminal tendencies without any homosexuality. Such cases are exceptional but they do occur. The fear of insanity which oppresses so many neurotics, involves as a polar component the wish to lose one’s mind. For the insane is responsible neither to himself nor before the law. “He cannot help it.” That is why paranoiac conditions break out so often with the commission of some crime. On the other hand the paranoiac turns insane as a defence against committing a crime. We shall yet find that isolation in an asylum for the insane corresponds with many a victim’s hidden wish, because there they find peace of mind and security.

The jealousy of paranoia like every other form of jealousy is an expression of rage. Butit serves to rationalize the anger and lends force as well as a measure of emotional justification to the criminal impulse. Many crimes of passion, so-called, are caused by the passion for crime. We have as yet penetrated but little through the mask which coversthe inner criminal. We are still too anxiously concerned with the superficial motivations which bring about sadism to find the path leading towards the fundamental fact. The best measure of culture is the manner in which the man’s primordial character manifests itself in us, our conscious conduct. That is why the advancement of culture is bound to lead to an increase of insanity in the proportion that the jails are emptied.

I must again point out thatJuliusburgerwas the first to recognize and describe clearly these relations. In fact the credit of having discovered the relations between homosexuality and paranoia belongs to him. In his work entitled, “Die Homosexualität im Vorentwurf zu einem deutschen Strafgesetzbuch” (Allgemeine Zeitschrift f. Psychiatrie, 1911), he already stated:

“Furthermore we find in the insane the well-known delusion of persecution and its motive is often derived from homosexuality inasmuch as the patients complain that they are pursued with homosexual intent, of which they themselves disclaim any guilt. Or, in their morbid state of mind, they believe themselves victims of persecution because it is proposed that they should be driven into the alleged ranks of homosexuals, something they resent most scornfully. In both cases we see a peculiar psychic process which must be conceived as a projection to the surroundings, to the world of external reality, ofunconscious subjective notions. When an individual breaks down mentally complaining to be a victim of watchfulness and persecution for alleged homosexual purposes, the condition may be explained only in the sense that the individual in question actually harbors within himself a powerful homosexual tendency and the latter is projected unto the world of external reality through a peculiar mental mechanism. The old proposition:ex nihilo nihil fitholds true also of the mental sphere and it would be utterly unscientific to fail to recognize in this sphere as well the law of strict causality or motivation. A careful examination of the mental life of our insane man’s unconscious shows that homosexuality is a powerful motive force much more frequently than is ordinarily recognized and this attempt to turn the unconscious subjective feeling of homosexuality into an objective reality, constitutes a pathway for the release of inner psychic tension, so a means for the individual to escape the feeling of guilt roused by his erroneous perception of facts and to pass the responsibility onto other shoulders. Many of the insane notions of our patients become intelligible and we grasp their meaning only when we recognize the powerful rôle which homosexuality plays in man’s unconscious.”

Juliusburgeralso recognizes the significance of sadism and its tremendous rôle in the psychogenesis of the delusion of jealousy. In his contributionreferred to previously,“Zur Psychologie des Alkoholismus” (Zentralblatt f. Psychoanalyse, Vol. III, 1913), he makes the following relevant observations:

“I agree withFreudthat the homosexual or homopsychic component of man and woman finds one of its outlets, as sublimation, in the form of companionship and social drinking. But thus far I remain unconvinced that homosexuality or its psychic substitute plays also a similar rôle in the pathogenesis of the delusion of jealousy. Therefore I still adhere to the view expressed by my colleague,Hans Oppenheim, in his contribution, “Zur Frage der Genese des Eifersuchtswahns” (published in:Zentralblatt f. Psychoanalyse, 1911). As formerly I still regard the sadistic-masochistic instinctive cravings as the strongest root of the delusion of jealousy. I found particularly instructive a certain case in which sadism broke forth in a jealous drinker more quickly than I had ever seen that happen before. This man’s sadism manifested itself concurrently in an incredible cruelty to dogs which could be only explained by his sadism. The oft-recorded fact that the jealous drinker is not satisfied and does not release his victim even after the latter, in an attempt to quiet him, submits to some disgusting act, the continual repetition by him of tortures and cruelties, may be explained only as due to a deeply rooted sadistic impulse everlastinglycraving gratification. The delusion of jealousy is rooted in sadism, the overstressed images accompanying the morbid feeling of jealousy are generated by the sadistic tendency. Sadism is the fertile soil giving rise to the delusions of persecution of the jealous alcoholics, and intimately linked with sadism stands masochism, upon which the feeling of jealousy feeds and grows.”

“Besides the sadistic-masochistic components the pathogenesis of the delusion of jealousy displays also the transposition of a certain feeling of guilt. In my cases at least it was easy to prove that the jealous drinker who forces his wife to commit some punishable offence, is himself inclined to carry out the incriminating acts and controls himself only with difficulty. I found a similar situation in the case of women, victims of delusions of jealousy. The more or less conscious projection of their feeling of guilt upon the partner brings on mental release and a certain sense of freedom, and at the same time furnishes new fuel for the sadistic impulse. Finally for the explanation of the delusion of jealousy we must take into consideration also another factor which may be explained on the basis of atavism. We shall see later that certain atavistic reminiscences play a great rôle in the psychology of alcoholism. The will to power, the yearning to dominate and subdue woman still lies dormant in man’s soul,—a remnant from old. The soul of thealcoholic is particularly prolific in atavistic remnants which show themselves upon close analysis and, besides, the chronic intoxication rouses thedormant atavistic trendswhich lie dormant at the bottom of the soul and brings them to surface. The aboriginal tyrannical self awakens in the drinker and flays a controlling whip over the cowering woman; in the case of female victims of the delusion of jealousy the reverse happens and the primordial matriarchal instinct becomes manifest. We learn progressively to see and appreciate how atavistic remnants break to the surface in the psyche of the insane.”

That conception of jealousy as the “projection upon the surroundings of a subjective feeling of inadequacy” was at one time my starting point in my characterological investigations of jealousy. But I soon learned that the problem is much more complicated. When I found that the neurotics represent regressive stages of development, I conceived jealousy to be a primitive feeling of hatred, characteristic of man in his primordial state. Paranoia discloses the primary tendencies which are glossed over by our cultural development. One’s true character betrays itself in one’s emotions. Jealousy shows us the true inner man in all his passionate cravings and his hidden desires.

The next case illustrates all the characteristic features: the delusion of persecution, the morbidjealousy and the brutal sadism. There is no insight into the condition. The feeling of jealousy is adjudged as justified. Ridiculous incidents are held forth as grounds for suspicion in order to remove from self the sense of guilt. All the alleged “persecutions,” which are looked upon as dangerous, lack any objective grounds. Often sadism breaks through, though under the guise of emotional paralogisms.

77. Mr. A. W., a manufacturer, 29 years of age, consults me for anxiety, a condition which has already plunged him into very unpleasant situations. His anxiety broke out in Tyrol the first time. He wanted to meet a certain party and asked his landlord for directions. The latter conducted him personally over the road, which was a very rough and badly neglected one. Suddenly the man saw in front of him some suspicious-looking persons. But he controlled himself, although he surmised they were tramps if not a gang of highwaymen. Next he saw a number of men on the hill hurrying in his direction. At that he broke into a run, and kept running as fast as he could. A shot rang out in the distance, intended for him.... He reached the valley, out of breath, and reported the occurrence to the officer. The latter shook his head and did not even care to question the landlord, who explained that he had merely conducted the gentlemanthrough a short cut in the road which is also used by hunters. That short cut leads to the next broad highway. But A. insisted that all was not well and that an attempt had been made to hold him up. The officer said that in his 30-year experience such a thing had never happened in that locality. But A. remained unconvinced and to this day he believes that he had narrowly escaped a hold-up. That might be thought possibly true if the occurrence stood alone. But he had very many such experiences. During a journey through Sweden he saw the hotel proprietor talk in subdued tones in Swedish with a number of guests who thereupon stared at him queerly. There was no key to his room and the room could not be locked. He could not sleep and kept peering through the window. Then he saw a number of queer fellows foregathering in the hall. He could not stay longer in that house. The owner told him that as he had engaged the room he would have to keep it. They could not come to an understanding. He saw an officer passing by and called upon the representative of law to help him extricate himself. The officer knew a few German words, he stepped in, and they went to the police station together, and there a record was made of his remarkable adventures. He left his lodgings a third time on similar grounds. On his excursions he always carries a revolver and that gives him a certain sense of security.

It is easy to diagnose this as a case of paranoia. The absence of insight after the emotional episodes shows the psychotic character of the trouble. A victim of anxiety neurosis may have similar experiences. But afterwards, perhaps only a few hours after the occurrence, he says to himself: “It was nonsense,” and is ashamed to speak of it later. But this man dwells on his adventures trying to convince me of the dangers he has gone through.

The notion of being watched and pursued is a product of his homosexual leaning which he is unable to control. We inquire into his personal habits and past life and find that his mother died when he was very young and his father assumed also the place of a mother to him. With his father he maintained a sort of “spiritual marriage” relationship up to a few months ago. They always went out together, never one without the other, and they slept in one room. The latter habit was but seldom broken by the presence of friends.

A remarkable episode is brought to memory such as is always found among the homosexuals. He once fell in love with a girl, an employee’s sweetheart. That passion soon blew over. Another love affair, however, almost turned him away from his customary leaning. There was another girl employed in the office, a slim, diminutive figure, rather plain-looking, and underdeveloped (a type resembling the male). That girl was engaged and heryoung man was in the habit of calling to take her home. Everybody in the store knew that the young man was waiting outside at the closing hour (he claims she was cordial also with some other men in the store). He fell in love with the girl and soon showed that uncontrollable passion which is characteristic of homosexuals when they attempt to save themselves from man,—when they try to fly from homosexuality. He soon succeeded in winning her favor against his rival, who was but a poor employee. The poor girl was supremely happy and proud that the wealthy manufacturer’s son had his eye on her. He promptly showed the girl that his intentions were honorable. He withdrew entirely from his father who was bitterly opposed to the affair. He lived with his thoughts exclusively on and for the girl. She had to leave the office. The father requested it and, besides, the other employees gossiped and spread rumors which were unpleasant to him. He received anonymous communications pointing out to him that the girl was flighty. Another employee told him that he had kissed the girl and she was not at all a prude. These persons naturally did not know that their tales only increased his passion for the girl. For it was precisely the thought that she had been kissed by another man that made her so irresistible in his sight. It made him angry and raging mad but his excitation reacted upon his homosexual component. The more he wasroused against the girl the more closely he was enmeshed with her. He met her three times daily. He called for her in the morning, at noon they took a walk together, and the evenings, often the nights, belonged to the girl who proved with a physician’s certificate that she was stillvirgo intacta. His relations with her were of such a nature that her virginity was not endangered. This attitude, this fearsome withholding from the task of defloration under the excuse of ethical considerations, is typical of the neurotic’s feeling of uncertainty and lack of confidence in himself, fear of binding himself, and fear of consequences, and shows an insufficientlibido. The passion was something rather spiritual, a transference, something unreal. For they passed some nights together and he was satisfied merely to be in the same room (they never slept in one bed). Her presence had chiefly a quieting effect on him. Through her he felt himself protected against his homosexual thoughts. He also needed a love affair to show the whole world that he was not homosexual and that he was capable of loving a woman.

But during the very first days of this love affair his jealousy began to assert itself, a peculiarity characteristic of these subjects, permitting them to concentrate their mind perpetually on the subject of men. First he began to investigate her past. She had to confess everything to him. Then there followed endless torture over endless days. In themorning he began to look questioningly at her. If she showed blue dark streaks under her eyes, or looked pale, he felt sure that she had been untrue to him that night. Although he conducted her home late at night and called for her early next morning he still thought that she slipped out of the house to meet some strange lover somewhere. Often he stood on watch all night in the front of her home. He saw curious shadows moving across her window blind and was sure that it must be a man. He endured hellish torments over it. He engaged a detective to watch the girl and caught her in an innocent lie. His persistent questionings had cowed her and sometimes she had to lie in order to pacify him. An innocent fib of that character was the starting point of a quarrel which kept up for many weeks. She saw him patrol up and down in front of her house. He looked badly run down as he did not sleep nights and he neglected his affairs at the factory. She made him promise that he would go home nights. He promised and immediately afterwards felt uneasy over it. For he was certain that she made him give that promise so as to be able to deceive him more easily.

Then terrible thoughts of revenge flashed through his mind. He wanted to shoot the unknown lover and strangle the girl. Perhaps he sought a proof of unfaithfulness so as to get rid of the girl and justify his own disloyalty towards her.

He naturally pretended once to go on a journey only to return unexpectedly to the girl. He thought he smelled cigar smoke, dragged her by the hair, and wanted to force a confession from her. He also accused her of intimacy with her 70-year-old guardian.

Such cases are not favorable for analysis and rather hopeless. I am not as lucky asBjerre[19]to be able to report a complete cure of a case of paranoia. Usually these patients abandon the psychoanalysis, finding some pretext to turn from the consultant. It is useless to explain to them the mechanism of transference. From the moment when they perceive a leaning towards their consultant that sympathetic feeling is changed into anxiety and distrust. They are unwilling to recognize their homosexuality. Their psychic disturbance is too deep and a correction is no longer possible. Often the subjects stay away after only a few visits. This sudden abandonment stands in sharp contrast to their initial enthusiasm for the new method of treatment. Others stay on with the analysis for a few weeks but make little or no progress. So long as their homosexual tendencies are not touched upon, it is possible to keep up the psychoanalysis a little longer but the psychoanalysis is superficial under the circumstances, as they cannot be induced toapply candor, always keep secrets from the consultant, and cover under silence whatever comes into their mind bearing on their attitude towards their physician.

He carried his revolver whenever he called at my office, always ready to shoot down the alleged enemy. I tried to make him understand that he was tortured by his own homosexual and criminal thoughts. He listened incredulously but was not so averse as I have seen most paranoiacs.

This patient also stayed away after three weeks of analysis because the analysis produced in him a tremendous excitement. He thought I was in league with his father[20]to part him from his girl. The real object of his love was the father who seems to me to play an important rôle in the psychogenesis of male paranoia.

I saw him two years later during the war. He had joined the army as volunteer, had made an excellent record for himself and had been slightly wounded. Since the war he felt better. He had given up the engagement shortly after the treatment. His ideas of persecution had subsided to a great extent, he claimed.

The next case shows us a paranoiac jealousy with insane notions based on proofs ferreted out and scrutinized with remarkable ingenuity. Such casesform the borderline towards the class of querrulants who clamor always for their “rights,” precisely because an inner voice clamoring for “injustice” must be drowned.

78. Mr. S. D. is referred to me by his family physician from a distance. I am asked to determine whether his jealousy is justified or the result of a morbid state of mind.

He is a very energetic, active 30-year-old merchant, who conducts the local inn in connection with his larger business in a small village. In eight years he made a great success and attained affluence. He has acquired all the retail business of the place, carries on also a wholesale business with the neighboring retail dealers, and was on the way to become a very wealthy man when he began to quarrel with his wife on account of his jealousy. His wife was of a frigid temperament who always remained cool during his embrace and it always worried him. After the birth of a couple of children she grew somewhat more responsive. When she had her first strong orgasm during his embrace he became suspicious and concluded at once that she must have had some other instructor in the art of love. How was it possible for a cool woman, suddenly, over night, as it were, to turn into a passionate mate? He began watching his wife and came to the conclusion that she must have had intercourse with a certainman possessing a very longphallus. There lived in that village a farmer who was no longer young, but wealthy, and known for his long penis and his virility. That fellow was his regular guest at the inn. What more natural than that the innkeeper should conclude that he must be the guilty man. We note that his mind must have been preoccupied for a long time with the size of that man’s penis. That phantasy he projected to his wife. His curiosity and longing to see thatphallushe ascribed to his wife. That is how thought processes originate. Suchautism(Bleuler) renders us uncritical and permits us to see the whole world through the subjective coloring of our own emotions. How could his wife, a woman, fail to be interested in the size of the peasant’sphallus, which was openly the talk of the tavern, when he, a man, could not help being interested? Such, approximately, is the logic of this thinking. He began to watch that peasant and his wife. He pretended to go on a journey telling his wife he would not be back before the following day. But he returned that very evening. He tiptoed up the steps to the bedroom. He heard a dull thud. Naturally it was the peasant, escaping through the window. It was—as the woman explained—the cat who had been scared off. He insisted a man had been in the room. His wife felt so indignant that she wanted to leave him at once and refused to say another word. He becamehumble and begged her imploringly for forgiveness telling her the reason for his jealousy. The wife declared that she had always been passionate but was ashamed to show it. Finally it came to her all of a sudden that it was foolish on her part, also, she had learned to love him more than ever. She cannot help it if she is now more responsive. There followed an interval of peace but only for a few months. Soldiers were quartered in the place and a physically impressive captain secured a room. From the moment of his appearance at the place that captain roused the man’s suspicions. He found that his wife gave the fellow the best cup of coffee, that she was altogether too friendly with him, and that she showered upon him all sorts of pleasant little courtesies. His wife explained to him that this captain bought of them all the supplies for his company and was the means of bringing them important business, and that she was friendly only for business reasons, but that their relations had never trespassed the limits of propriety. But he kept collecting indications of her unfaithfulness. Among the proofs he found the butt of a cigarette in his wife’s room. He questioned her closely and asked the officer’s orderly to bring him a cigarette from his master’s case, claiming those cigarettes had such a pleasant aroma he wanted to try one. He thus secured a cigarette and found that it bore an identical mark. The fact was he smoked the same brandof cigarettes, but he thought he discovered a certain stripe which the other cigarettes did not have (I could not detect the stripe in question). His other proofs were of a like character. This time he had a terrible quarrel with his wife,—much more serious than the previous ordeal. Trouble upon trouble followed after that. He suspected his clerks and dismissed them one after another about every two weeks. Every one was his wife’s lover. Finally he rushed at his wife, in a fit of anger, to beat her, and began choking her. The following day the woman left him, went to live with her sister, and started proceedings for divorce. She claimed her husband was not normal and he voluntarily came to Vienna to place himself under my observation.

First I turned my attention to his jealousy and I tried carefully to correct that. He acknowledged some points, here and there, showed some insight into his condition, and was not shocked when I refused to give him a certificate of good health. Meanwhile he had removed his beard to give himself a younger appearance. That change was not necessary as he was young-looking enough, but it was part of the outbreak of his feminine tendencies. He also had a string of dreams in which he was a woman. Usually he rehearsed the old jealousy scenes and he repeatedly killed his wife in his dreams.

Thus he dreamed:

I am with my wife in an old room but dressed as a woman, so as not to be recognized. My wife steps out of the room, it was very dark. The captain comes into the room and wants to touch me under the dress. But some one calls him out of the room. I jump at my wife, enraged: that is the kind of a h—— you are. Now I know everything about you ... and I stick a knife in her throat.

In another dream he lies hidden under the bed and feels the swaying motion of coitus above. It was very characteristic that after quarrels and scenes of violence he craved intercourse with his wife and hislibidowas much stronger ... clearly on account of the sadistic excitation.

I saw this patient again five years after the psychoanalysis. He was divorced from his wife and was apparently very quiet. He claimed to be entirely well, said he was jealous no longer, and every now and then had intercourse with women. I do not dare decide whether this result may be ascribed to the analysis and the therapeutic-educational course of treatment.

The various confusion states, called periodic insanity, must be looked upon as an equivalent of permanent insanity. It is certainly striking to see how many alcoholics, morphinists, opium eaters, cocaine fiends and, in more recent years, victims addicted to adalin, veronal, medinal, luminal, etc.,fear insanity. If such a case is analyzed one always finds the homosexual component and the repressed sadistic tendency. The psychic mechanisms of these disorders are the same as those described in the paranoid form of the jealousy delusion. We have in all these cases an endopsychic perception that inner forces compel greater stress on the delusions than on reality.

The next case is a pure example of this condition under a form which often ends in suicide.

79. Mr. O. L., a very talented violinist, suffers unbearable anxieties, among them the fear of insanity being the strongest. He also has hours of terrific, unexplainable depressions for which he is unable to give any cause. He onlyhas the feeling that he is about to commit some terrible deedso as to rid himself of the anxiety and have peace once more. He thinks he might commit some crime and be jailed so as to be sure that there is nothing further for him to fear. During the first weeks he speaks only of his anxiety over his father. He has the idea fixed in his mind that his father will come to Vienna and have him interned in an insane asylum. Rather than put up with thathe will shoot his father first and then kill himself. He reverts every little while to the suspicion that I am in league with his father. (That is the form which the identification of the physician with the father assumes withthis class of patients. The physician is the symbol of the father.) He has been taking various narcotics for a number of years. Not, exactly, to sleep. For he sleeps well without the aid of veronal or pantopon. But he suffers so much of anxiety. And he feels that the narcotics make a better man of him. He uses unbelievable doses of these drugs. He has once taken with suicidal intent 10 g. veronal in one dose with the only result that he slept 24 hours “like a top” and woke up without any ill effects. He sleeps every day till 11 or noon, sometimes into the afternoon hours, and still wakes up somewhat drowsy.

He now abstains strictly from alcohol. He has done a number of foolish things under the influence of drink. Once he tackled an officer at a night resort, wanted to embrace him, kiss him, made various suggestive proposals and finally had to be thrown out. He has also had serious rows which put him in the hands of the police. He gave his word of honor to his father that he would not touch liquor any more because he was threatened with internment at a sanitarium for alcoholics. He broke his word only once but has turned to various narcotics. During a six-months sojourn at a sanitarium he got completely well and abandoned the drugs. One month after leaving the sanitarium he began again to use the drugs.

He is an impressive, handsome, very powerfulman, very “lucky” with women. But he is true to none for any length of time excepting the last sweetheart. He did love her and does to this day. He would marry her if he could support her.

He is tremendously jealous and his jealousy is that typical form which is concerned with the past, an example of which we have seen in case 75. He has to be told over and over by his sweethearts how they have been seduced. He must hear with particular circumstantiality all the details of the defloration. That causes him tremendous sexual excitation. Only then is he able to achieve orgasm with women. Otherwise he may keep up the sexual congress for a half hour without accomplishing ejaculation.[21]

Finally ejaculation and orgasm are brought about through manual friction of the penis by the woman. This form of sexual gratification leads back to a particular incident in his youth when the choice was made. First, he confesses that at 17 he maintained relations with a boy who gratified him in that manner. Earlier reminiscences from childhood appear. The incidents always relate to boys. Now he does not want to recognize any homosexual tendencies. At 17 years he made a forceful attempt to tear himself away from his friend and began passionately to run after women and girls.

His homosexuality shows itself in the choice of his love objectives. Usually he seduces the sisters of those of his friends whom he likes in particular. I know no affair of his in which some man did not play a rôle. When a man did not figure at the beginning he was brought in later, so as to complete the constellation necessary for the rousing of his libidinous craving. Very characteristic is the following episode, among the others of the last few years:

He became acquainted at a sanitarium with a young woman who soon became his sweetheart. One of his most intimate friends was also at that sanitarium. He asked his friend to try his luck with the lady because he wanted to test her faithfulness. The friend hesitated. He was afraid of a misunderstanding and the woman was not worth that to him. Then our subject tried to bring him and his sweetheart together in another way. He wagered a large sum of money that he could not get at the girl. His friend accepted the wager, and three days later proved that he had won the bet. O. L. wanted to hear every detail about the seduction and became so enraged that he could have killed his friend. Then that friend seduced again another sweetheart of his, a few months later he attacked him on the street and would have beaten him up if a few colleagues had not restrained him.

Now here in Vienna he is convinced that “thatd—— fellow” will seduce also his present sweetheart, a girl whom he truly loves. But if so, he will find the fellow and kill him as well as the girl. The woman has a brother who plays an important rôle in the psychogenesis of this love. Once the woman told him how devotedly she loved her brother. She could understand how a sister may give herself to a brother. Now he urged the woman to give herself to the brother, setting up but one condition: he should witness the act. This phantasy assumed compulsive strength. On every occasion he tortured her, insisting that she ought to grant him the wish, and he kept calling in the brother when she did not want him. Once they were alone. He broke his word and they drank merrily. He got very drunk and made a passionate love declaration to his sweetheart’s brother, begging him to accompany him to the house and take the sister’s place.

His mother died when he was 15 years of age. The father engaged a young woman to take care of the house and he fell in love with her. At the same time he also hated her, fearing that his father would disinherit him in favor of this woman. He even planned to put the woman out of the way with poison. Wholly unconscious and most deeply repressed is his love for the father, whom he worries and to whom he causes no end of trouble. He was at the threshold of a wonderful career, all teachers had prophesied that he would be some day one of theworld’s greatest violinists. His first concert was an unprecedented success. Then his neurosis broke out and now he is through with his career. Done with it and with life.

Back of the neurosis the motive of which is to worry the old father, to irritate him and force him to pay attention to the unsuccessful son, stands hidden his passionate love of the father, though he writes him scolding letters, 20 sheets long, and threatens to shoot him, should he dare cut down his rightful inheritance. A certain memory trace leads to various childhood fancies resembling the affairs with boys already mentioned. Finally he brings forth a reminiscence placing his father in an unpleasant light. The father was also a drinker....

It seems as if he had tried to forget that fact. His fancies of murder are directed against the father. That becomes clearer all the time. He turns ill and addicted to veronal so as to commit no crime. He feels his father slights and neglects him. They quarrel all the time on account of his dissipations. The father threatens he will be no longer responsible for his debts. The son must give up his expensive habits of living. Then the war broke out. He was among the first volunteers to answer the call, distinguished himself several times with his conduct, and finally met his death in an engagement.

I have already pointed out elsewhere in this workthe latent homosexuality of drinkers. In the light of these new considerations, the well-known jealousy of drinkers reveals an additional feature. The intoxication is to a certain extent a periodic artificial paranoia during which the ideas of persecution come to the foreground. This is very clearly to be seen in many cases. In that particular respect the alcohol addict is hardly different from the paranoiac. Both believe in the objectivity of their insane notions.

The following two case histories of drinkers’ jealousy will conclude this lengthy list of illustrative cases:

80. Mr. N. V., Captain, married at the age of 34 and has been married two years. His marriage was unhappy from the very first day. Previous to that he had had intercourse only withpuellæ publicæand with them was always potent. With his wife he is impotent. He is very unhappy over it and consoles himself with street women. He began to drink and beats his wife while intoxicated. He scolds her, calls her a whore and accuses her of intimacy with all the officers. Although he had been drinking formerly, he did so with moderation, but now he is a confirmedpotator, spends his time in dram shops and while intoxicated becomes very friendly with the waiters and other underlings, kissing them and toasting their comradeship. He isfirmly convinced that his wife is unfaithful to him and even suspects his boy whom he beats mercilessly when under the influence of drink.

The woman left her husband and fled to her parents.

That affected the man so depressingly that, after a three months’ stay at a sanitarium, he returned penitently, a changed man, and prevailed upon the wife to return and live with him again. But in a few weeks his old demoniac jealousy set in once more. This time he accused her of the most horrible crimes. He reproached her that she allowed herself to be licked by the dog and shot the animal. He watched her carefully and denied her the least social intercourse. Finally he accused her of intimacy with her 15-year-old brother. He found a small spot on the bed linen and he cut that out to preserve as proof of her infidelity. He pounced on her one night, choked her, and tried to force her to confess her doings with the brother. Again she fled to her parents but hesitated to turn her husband over to the lunacy board. She did not want to be the cause of his commitment to a sanitarium.

Meanwhile the patient’s insanity grew rapidly. He drank to great excess and raised a big row in front of her parents’ home. He complained to the police that his wife and her younger brother, with whom she maintains criminal relations, had set a number of desperate-looking characters on his trail.He served notice that he would give those fellows something to remember him by and that the first one who would dare come too close to him would be shot down. Commitment. Delirium tremens. Exitus in consequence of an intercurrent malady.

It is noteworthy that the suspected little brother-in-law had been a great favorite of his; he had been fond of taking the boy along on his hunting trips. When completely under the influence of drink he always wanted to embrace him and pet him.

A connection between paranoia and alcoholism is shown also by the last of this series of observations, which follows:

81. This is a woman no longer in her prime of life. She is the grandmother of several children, 54 years of age, and, up to a few years ago, she was not jealous. As soon as her husband ceased to have intercourse with her she was seized with the idea that he must have intercourse with a certain pretty girl who had been formerly in their employ and had left. She had seen that girl often in the neighborhood and wondered that the girl looked so well and was so well dressed. She had always liked the girl very much. In fact, she wept when the girl left the house. Now she tortured her husband with the accusation that he was intimate with that girl,—she was sure of it. The man denied it, but—grilled by her—he had to admit that he had met the girl on the street a fewtimes and had spoken to her. That led to such terrible quarrels,—he had to leave the house and was gone for weeks on a journey. He wanted to have peace and was energetic enough to bring it about. In fact, he threatened to sue for separation.

The woman began to drink, specially liqueurs, but also ordinary whiskey. When intoxicated she behaved very vulgarly and cursed the girl; called her a whore, and shouted that she ought to have the clothes torn off her. She threatened her youngest daughter’s husband and entertained the notion of throwing acid at him. While intoxicated she also felt an impulse to seek out her youngest daughter (obviously to find her son-in-law) and ran to the railroad station, entered the wrong train, and committed all sorts of nuisances so that she had to be committed. At the asylum she had to give up drink but showed no ill effects from the enforced abstinence, only she figured daily what her husband was up to with the girl. Like most paranoiacs she claimed that she had telepathic powers and felt at a distance that her husband was with the girl. That was an absolute fact and no physician could convince her it was not so.

That contention embodied an inner truth: the man in her was with the girl, that is, the man in her was continually preoccupied with the girl. In fact, she had no other thought than the girl. It was as if she was saying to herself:If I were a man I wouldfall in love with this girl and would not leave her alone a minute. She would have to be mine only.

After the marriage of her youngest daughter she fell into a depression during which she first began the habit of indulging in alcoholic drinks.

Obviously the woman had two homosexual objectives which she fused: the servant girl and the youngest daughter. In fact, she began early to think that her husband was intimate with the daughter in question. She even lodged with the authorities a complaint to that effect and asked to be allowed to bring proofs of the assertion. Now her husband wanted to poison her. She had been given coffee which had an arsenical smell.

She transfers to the surroundings her subjective criminal ideas. We see that she had to drink in order to deafen in her the wild beast which endeavored to break forth in all its primordial crudity. Her commitment to an asylum did not change her leanings. She swore at her man who conspired with the hateful son-in-law to have her put out of the way so as to prevent her from exposing their evil doings before the whole world.

How close the forbidden tendencies are to one another in such cases! Almost uniformly the same picture throughout: criminality, homosexuality and incest. After years of the compulsory yoke of a formal monosexuality the repression gives way and the underlying pansexuality and criminal tendenciesmanifest themselves in pathologic form. For all these case histories center around the “other,” the second, self,—the repressed component of human nature.

We knowmany persons who prove themselves victims of our monosexual culture. The race is paying for the development of monosexuality with neurotic homosexuality, with all the various neuroses, with alcoholism and paranoia!

But it would be erroneous for that reason to decry the course of cultural development or to look for the improvement of conditions to changes in law or in the formal code of morals. All lovers of mankind surely must fight for the abandonment of the moral opprobrium and legal persecution of homosexuals and for a greater freedom from bias in the perception of the problem of all paraphilias. But we must not fail to recognize that we are dealing here with tremendous social forces and with developmental tendencies striving, beyond all human range, for the attainment of unknown higher ideals.The development of the race is from bisexualism to monosexualism. Even the “genuine” homosexuality as we know it today everywhere is a proof in favor of this contention.

For if homosexuality were an inborn trait, asHirschfeldand his pupils maintain, it would be the pattern-type of health and homosexuals would show no repressed heterosexuality; there would be no morphinists,no drinkers, and no dipsomaniacs[22]among them. Their number may not be large, but that is because the uranists’ homosexuality is already a compromise, an attempt on the part of nature, and of the psyche, to escape the insolvable bisexual conflict. The very fact that all neurotics representretrogressions shows that the race is advancing towards monosexuality. The neurotic, as a bisexual being, might stand for an earlier developmental phase, if the cultural standards of morality would not hinder. When he attempts it (like, for instance,Oscar Wilde) he draws upon himself the deadly scorn of his fellowmen; he is ostracized as a citizen. Homosexuality leads but seldom to paranoia when associated with heterosexuality, as happens in the reverse instance,—heterosexuals trying to repress their homosexuality. That in itself shows homosexuality to be a neurosis,—the premonitory phase of the paranoiac psychosis. When paranoia breaks out, the homosexual holds to the delusion that he belongs to the opposite sex and may go so far as to disregard his genitalia and to acquire the feeling that he is physically changed. The paranoia attempts to round out physically the delusion of sexual transformation it has initiated psychically. The wish of the male homosexual: “I want to be a woman!” is fulfilled in paranoia. In that state he finds a thousand proofs that he is a woman. Many such cases have been described especially byKrafft-Ebing, who has called them “metamorphosis sexualis paranoica.” The subjects imagine that they have the monthly flow because they have the nose-bleed every four weeks (this happens also with nonparanoiaurnings),—they have a flow from the lower parts for five days at every full moon. A patientofKrafft-Ebing’srelates (Obs. 134, p. 245): “Every four weeks at the full moon I have for 5 days themolimina, like any woman, physically and mentally, only I do not flow,—but I have a sensation of discharging fluid, a feeling of fulness about the genitals and the lower part of the body (within); a very pleasant time it is, especially later (in a couple of days) when the physiologic craving for procreation looms forth with its all-pervading womanly force.” Another paranoiac claims that he has always been woman, but when he was a child a French magician had miraculously endowed him with male organs and, with a certain salve, hindered the development of his breasts. A girl under my observation felt her penis, pointed to the hairs on her face, and thought she was a bewitched male. But she could feel her penis growing within and almost coming through.

The following statement by the highest expert on homosexuality shows that the repression of heterosexuality may have serious effects upon the homosexual,—it may drive him to drink, or into a delusion of persecution:

“I have seen, in the homosexual, states of precordial anxiety with strong vasomotor excitation as serious as such conditions could be. Next to anxiety neurosis, an occasional consequence of abstinence seems to me to be the occurrence of a sort of persecution mania which is rather difficult to determinewhether it belongs to the compulsive neuroses or is actually a part of the picture of paranoia. Such persons imagine everybody suspects their homosexuality; they look at their hands and laugh sheepishly because they wear no engagement or marriage ring; at restaurants persons sitting at neighboring tables whisper and knowingly nod among themselves as they talk about the ‘eingefleischten Junggesellen’; porters and waiters at hotels ‘catch on’ to ‘what is up’ and treat them either more or less attentively than other customers; passers-by on the street comment on their tripping gait; in short, they feel that they are watched everywhere and are uncomfortably self-conscious; some blush continually, others become morbidly suspicious and timid, others again—and that is the worst—take to drink. Convinced of the truthfulness of their notions and refractory in their attitude towards the physician, patients of this type make up their minds late and only after considerable struggle, to consult a physician and even then they often do it under an assumed name. If the ideas of persecution have already persisted for a long time, the condition is hardly one that can be influenced by treatment,—in any case it requires the greatest skill and patience on the part of the physician as well as his whole therapeutic armamentarium, of which psychotherapy and hydrotherapy are most importantmeans, while drugs, rather excessively favored nowadays, should be used but sparingly.” (Hirschfeld, loc. cit., p. 455.)

This observation ofHirschfeld’sdiscloses the homosexual’s deep feeling of self-reproach which must be ascribed to hidden criminality rather than to the homosexuality. Perhaps that fusion of homosexuality with criminality, of pathologic self-love and repressed hatred, that incapacity for true love, is the reason why men struggle against monosexuality and why innumerable victims fall in that struggle, their refined souls crushed by the conflict. Just as we no longer have the gods of antiquity—men with female bosoms and women with a tremendousphallus—just as we have accepted the division of God into three components (man, woman, and child) which unitedly represent but one force, so we must choose, in our day, our ideal.That is the monotheism of sexuality,—more unyielding and strict than religious monotheism. “To love means to find one’s God,” I stated. But there must be no other gods besides that one. This struggle for the single god of love sums up the erotic tragedies of our cultural development: the struggle for the true ideal and for monogamy which for the present appears the utmost sexual ideal of our current cultural level. Between the primitive man’s pansexualism and the monosexuality of modern man may be foundall the developmental phases and inhibitions which manifest themselves as neuroses, paraphilias, drunkenness, psychoses, etc.

The analysis of jealousy has shown us clearly that with the outbreak of the repressed homosexuality criminality, too, comes to the surface. The patients whose histories we have recorded, fight, carry revolvers and threaten murder. Many a jealousy murder is due to the instinctive asocial cravings. We must bear in mind that the repression keeps down the homosexuality as well as the other paraphiliac instincts, including the criminal tendencies. When the repressed homosexuality breaks through the protecting covers and out of the unconscious, it carries along and brings to surface all the repressed antagonistic cravings. This mental mechanism explains the gruesome crimes which the paranoiacs commit who believe themselves pursued or threatened. They project to their surroundings not only the pursuit with homosexual intent but their subjective criminal tendencies as well. Someone is after them to kill them ... it really means: “I want to kill and therefore I assume, that others want to kill me.”

Looking upon homosexuality as an archaic symptom, a regressive manifestation, we may understand also that the incest, in all its forms, must play a greater rôle among homosexuals than among the normals. Theurning, in point of psychic progression,is nearer the ancientŒdipusand theurlindis nearer ancientElektrathan the normal man. Their will to power also manifests itself through stronger tendencies. The very repression of his heterosexual component shows that the homosexual tries to achieve mastery over self, and is a proof of the one-sided emphasis of his stubborn will to self-control. The will to power breaks out in violent, affectively stressed jealousy deeds, which shows the intimate inner relations between homosexuality and sadism,—a subject to which we shall give more careful consideration in our next chapter.

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