If we now leave the physiologists and consult the psychoanalysts, Freud, Ferenczi, Stekel and Adler will show us that homosexualism can be produced by "purely" psychic factors.
Freud Rejects the Hypothesis of a Third Sex: "Homosexual men who have started in our times an energetic action against the legal limitations of the sexual activity," Freud writes, "are fond of representing themselves, thru theoretical spokesmen, as evincing a sexual variation, which may be distinguished from the very beginning, as an intermediate stage or sex, a third sex. In other words, they maintain that they are men who are forced by organic determinants originating in the germ to find in a man the pleasure which they cannot find in a woman. As much as one would wish to subscribe to their demands, out of humane considerations, one must nevertheless exercise reserve regarding their theories which were formulated without regard for the psychic genesis of homosexuality. Psychoanalysis offers the means to fill the gap and to put to test the assertions of the homosexuals. It is true that psychoanalysis has fulfilled that task in only a small number of people, but all the investigations thus far undertaken have brought the same surprising results.
"In all our male homosexuals, there was a very intense erotic attachment to a feminine person, as a rule to the mother, which was manifested in the very first period of childhood and later entirely forgotten by the individual. This attachment was produced or favored by too much love from the mother herself, but was also furthered by the retirement or absence of the father during the childhood period. Sadger emphasises the fact that the mothers of his homosexual patients were often masculine women, or women with energetic traits of character who were able to crowd out the father from the place allotted to him in the family. I have sometimes observed the same thing, but I was more impressed by those cases in which the father was absent from the beginning or disappeared early so that the boy was altogether under feminine influence."
"It almost seems that the presence of a strong father would assure for the son the proper decision in the selection of his love object from the opposite sex.
"Following this primary stage, a transformation takes place whose mechanism we know but whose motive forces we have not yet grasped. The love of the mother cannot continue to develop consciously so that it merges into repression. The boy represses his love for the mother by putting himself into her place, by identifying himself with her, and by taking his own person as a model thru the similarity of which he is guided in the selection of his love object. He thus becomes homosexual; as a matter of fact, he returns to the stage of autoerotism, for the boys whom the growing adult now loves are only substitute persons or revivals of his own childish person, whom he loves in the same way as his mother loved him. We say that he finds his love object on the road to narcism, after the Greek legend of Narcissus to whom nothing was more pleasing than his own mirrored image.
"Deeper psychological discussions justify the assertion that the person who becomes homosexual in this manner remains fixed in his unconscious on the memory of his mother. By repressing the love for his mother, he conserves the same in his consciousness and henceforth remains faithful to her. When as a lover he seems to pursue boys, he really thus runs away from women who could cause him to be faithless to his mother."
Active and Passive Types. Ferenczi draws a distinction between the active and the passive types of homosexuals, that is, between the man who, in love acts like a woman, in a submissive way, and the man who loves men as he would women, in an agressive way.
"A man who in his love relations with men feels himself to be a woman," he writes, "is inverted in respect to his own ego (homo-erotism thru subject inversion, or, more shortly, subject-homo-erotism). He feels himself to be a woman, and this not only in the love relationship but in all relations of life.
"It is quite otherwise with the true active homosexual. He feels himself a man in every respect, is as a rule very energetic and active, and there in nothing effeminate to be discovered in his bodily or mental organisation. The object of his inclination alone is exchanged, so that one might call him homo-erotic thru exchange of the love object, or more shortly, object-homo-erotic.
"A further and striking difference between the subjective and the objective homo-erotic consists in the fact that the former (the invert) feels himself attracted by more mature, powerful men, and is on friendly terms, as a colleague, one might say, with women; the second type, on the contrary, is almost exclusively interested in young, delicate boys with an effeminate appearance, but meets a woman with pronounced antipathy, and not rarely with hatred which is badly or not at all concealed. The true invert is hardly ever impelled to seek medical advice, he feels at complete ease in the passive rôle and has no other wish than that people should put up with his peculiarity and not interfere with the kind of satisfaction that suits him. He is not very passionate and chiefly demands from his lover the recognition of his bodily and other merits.