Homosexualism can be best understood when viewed as a neurotic phenomenon, not as a neurosis in itself, but as a detail of the neurotic attitude to life outlined by Adler. Homosexualism is, in its last analysis, an organic striving away from life's normal goals.
A Denial of Life. Homosexualism cannot be understood unless we associate it with a denial of life and all its duties. Nor could love be understood if we tried to dissociate it from its primary sexual goal which is the acceptance of life with its duties, symbolised by the procreation of life and the creation of new duties by the individual, duties which he considers as a source of joy.
Homosexualism Is Love, Negative Love, quite as involuntary and as obsessive as normal, heterosexual, positive love.
A homosexual teacher wrote to Plazek: "A glance at the literature and art produced by homosexuals as well as insight into actual conditions, reveals that abnormal love can conjure up the same emotional display as normal love. Longing, faithfulness, devotion, self sacrifice, blossom forth in abnormal love as well as in normal love.
"In both, complete communion may be the goal and climax of feelings which are perhaps among the deepest and finest which mankind can experience."
Their Love Letters. The absolute similarity of heterosexual and homosexual love in their written expression can be judged by perusing the sonnets which Michael Angelo wrote to young Tommaso dei Cavalieri and which could very well have been addressed to a woman.
A sober scientist like Winckelman was carried away by his homosexual love for Frederick von Berg to the point of writing the following epistle which might emanate from a lovelorn highschool boy:
"All the names I might call you are not sweet enough and do not do justice to my love. All the things I might say to you sound too weak to give voice to my heart and my soul. I love you, my dearest, more than the whole world and neither time nor circumstances nor age could ever cause my love to diminish."
Deeds of Violence. Homosexual love has led to as many deeds of violence on the part of disappointed lovers as heterosexual love. The papers frequently publish without comments stories of the shooting of a woman by another woman, caused by the fact that the victim was "too attentive to another woman."