Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 Sexual Inversion

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.

[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.

[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 "Œdipus 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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.