The most remarkable feature, characteristic of the whole case is the fact last mentioned.
The man is avowedly bisexual with a strong leaning towards homosexuality. This homosexual trend was gratified up till that time through masturbation—as he has pointed out. He sought contact with fully developed women, to forget man. He wanted a very beautiful wife because he imagined her beauty would serve to drive away from him all thought of man and to focus his libido exclusively upon her. He wanted to have the prettiest woman in the world: Helen. If his wife’s appearance pleased other men, this so roused the homosexual component of his libido that he enjoyed sexual intercourse with her more keenly. Above all he wanted to avoid the thought of man. The anxiety on account of man came over him particularly before retiring at night and it was a morbid anxiety over masturbation at the same time. In his head, within his brain, man was a living thought, something that threatened him and demanded release. But this was also something his consciousness refused to recognize and therefore the thought of man tortured him and he could not fall asleep. He projected this intruder into his room and it led him to search his empty closets for a non-existent man, as if saying to himself: I have no trace of any homosexual leaning whatever! That is what he actually told me when I referred to the homosexual significance of his compulsory acts: such a Don Juan as I! I have devoted myself completely to woman. The thought of man is repulsive to me.
I explained to him that disgust is but a hidden form of longing. If he were indifferent to the thought of man it would be more convincing.
“Well then, I am indifferent to the thought.”
Thus he tried to convince me that he was not homosexual. But we conceive that the hairs he discovered upon his wife’s body reminded him of the fatal homosexuality. He felt so unhappy over it he was considering a separation on that account. Whatever reminded him of man was painfully unpleasant to him. He threw himself into love adventures to forget man. He gave up his clubs and male companions because he wanted to be all the time in the company of his wife.
I pass over for the present the further significance of his neurosis as disclosed by the analysis of his dreams. I shall only give an example illustrating how untrustworthy are the statements of those who attempt to give an account of their lives and insist that they remember everything accurately. This or that particular kind of incident, they are sure, has never occurred in their life. Regarding sexual matters all men lie consciously, unconsciously and half-consciously.
After further, continuously progressive analysis the subject himself came to the conclusion that he must have been struggling against homosexuality. Now he understood his sudden decision to get married, after having maintained right along that he would remain a bachelor. He was interested at the time in a laboratory assistant, a young man with pretty rosy cheeks. He showered gifts upon that young man and planned to give him an education so as to have a friend always close to him. The first compulsory acts appeared at the time. He married, felt unhappy for a time but for a few years he lived at least a relatively quiet life. Then another man came into his life destroying his peace of mind, a man who had lived for some time in foreign countries and now returned to his fatherland. This was an uncle.
Now he recalls something of which he had not thought for many years—for he was going to keep this from me,—namely, that he had maintained certain intimacy with this uncle for about a year. They lived in a boarding house where they occupied a room together. The uncle always came to lie in his bed and they played with each other before falling asleep.
His uncle carried out the kind of manipulations which he now required of his women lovers: manual gratification. During his relations with his wife, however, he wanted to avoid all thought of homosexuality; she should not practice this form of gratification for him nor should her body remind him of homosexuality. She must save him of the burden of homosexuality which still plagued him under the form of onanism.
After resurrecting this memory a mass of other homosexual data came trooping forth out of his past.