[252] This is also the opinion of Numa Praetorius, Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, Jan., 1913, p. 222.
[253] See, especially, Sadger, Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft, Heft 12, 1908; also Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, vol. ix, 1908; Sadger's methods are criticised by Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität, ch. xxii, and defended by Sadger, Internationale Zeitschrift für Aerztliche Psychoanalyse, July, 1914, p. 392. For a discussion of the psychoanalytic treatment of homosexuality by a leading American Freudian, see Brill, Journal American Medical Association, Aug. 2, 1913.
[254] Internationale Zeitschrift für Aerztliche Psychoanalyse, March, 1914.
[255] This is now generally recognized. See, e.g., Roubinovitch and Borel, "Un Cas d'Uranisme," L'Encéphale, Aug., 1913. These authors conclude that it is today impossible to look upon inversion as the equivalent or the symptom of a psychopathic state, though we have to recognize that it frequently coexists with morbid emotional states. Näcke, also, in his extensive experience, found that homosexuality is rare in asylums and slight in character; he dealt with this question on various occasions; see, e.g., Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, vol. viii, 1906.
[256] Krafft-Ebing considered that the temporary or lasting association of homosexuality with neurasthenia having its root in congenital conditions is "almost invariable," and some authorities (like Meynert) have regarded inversion as an accidental growth on the foundation of neurasthenia.
[257] Féré expressed himself concerning the general treatment of homosexuality in the same sense, and even more emphatically (Féré, L'Instinct Sexuel, 1899, pp. 272, 286). He considers that all forms of congenital inversion resist treatment, and that, since a change in the invert's instincts must be regarded rather as a perversion of the invert than a cure of the inversion, one may be permitted to doubt not only the utility of the treatment, but even the legitimacy of attempting it. The treatment of sexual inversion, he declared, is as much outside the province of medicine as the restoration of color-vision in the color-blind. The ideal which the physician and the teacher must place before the invert is that of chastity; he must seek to harness his wagon to a star.
[258] I have been told by a distinguished physician, who was consulted in the case, of a congenital invert highly placed in the English government service, who married in the hope of escaping his perversion, and was not even able to consummate the marriage. It is needless to insist on the misery which is created in such cases. It is not, of course, denied that such marriages may not sometimes become eventually happy. Thus Kiernan ("Psychical Treatment of Congenital Sexual Inversion," Review of Insanity and Nervous Diseases, June, 1894) reports the case of a thoroughly inverted girl who married the brother of the friend to whom she was previously attached merely in order to secure his sister's companionship. She was able to endure and even enjoy intercourse by imagining that her husband, who resembled his sister, was another sister. Liking and esteem for the husband gradually increased and after the sister died a child was born who much resembled her; "the wife's esteem passed through love of the sister to intense natural love of the daughter, as resembling the sister; through this to normal love of the husband as the father and brother." The final result may have been satisfactory, but this train of circumstances could not have been calculated beforehand. Moll is also opposed, on the whole (e.g., Deutsche medicinische Presse, No. 6, 1902), to marriage and procreation by inverts.
[259] Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität, ch. xxi. It might seem on theoretical grounds that the marriage of a homosexual man with a homosexual woman might turn out well. Hirschfeld, however, states that he knows of 14 such marriages, and the theoretical expectation has not been justified; 3 of the cases speedily terminated in divorce, 4 of the couples lived separately, and all but 2 of the remaining couples regretted the step they had taken. I may add that in such a case even the expectation of happiness scarcely seems reasonable, since neither of the parties can feel a true mating impulse toward the other.
[260] Hirschfeld also notes (Die Homosexualität, p. 95) that women often instinctively feel that there is something wrong in the love of their inverted husbands who may perhaps succeed in copulating, but betray their deepest feelings by a repugnance to touch the sexual parts with the hand. The homosexual woman, also, as Hirschfeld elsewhere points out with cases in illustration (p. 84), may suffer seriously through being subjected to normal sexual relationships.
[261] Féré reports the case of an invert of great intellectual ability who had never had any sexual relationships, and was not averse from a chaste life; he was urged by his doctor to acquire the power of normal intercourse and to marry, on the ground that his perversion was merely a perversion of the imagination. He did so, and, though he married a perfectly strong and healthy woman, and was himself healthy, except in so far as his perversion was concerned, the offspring turned out disastrously. The eldest child was an epileptic, almost an imbecile, and with strongly marked homosexual impulses; the second and third children were absolute idiots; the youngest died of convulsions in infancy (Féré, L'Instinct Sexuel, p. 269 et seq.) No doubt this is not an average case, but the numerous examples of the offspring of similar marriages brought forward by Hirschfeld (op. cit., p. 391) scarcely present a much better result.