Bi-sexual love; the homosexual neurosis

by Wilhelm Stekel

Such a dream is a resistance dream and indicates that the subject does not want to get well. His soul is an ocean, continuously in a state of agitation. “I think it a pity that the waves should cease,” means: I do not want to become quiet at all! The boat symbolizes the illness, the neurosis. His neurosis covers everything he loves, including his mother; and should he give up all that? Impossible! He cannot renounce his infantile sexuality. He wants to remain a child and be ill.

The analysis is carried out under very great resistance but satisfactory progress is made. I want to outline the results limiting myself to the most important points.

His sexual life comes more and more to light. It appears that in his free account he covered under silence a important form of pleasurable gratification because he was ashamed of it. He indulges in a very curious form of infantile sexuality. The habit must be widespread but in this form I have met it only twice.

Every two weeks he does as follows: he lies down in bed dressed in his underclothes and defecates. Then he lies in his stools for several hours. After that he takes great pains to remove every trace. He washes the drawers and the shirt or he burns them up. At the baths, where he is always very excited sexually he does the same thing. He does that there more readily because the means are at hand for cleaning himself afterwards. He usually takes along a package of clean linen. At the public baths every cabin has a couch. He lies down and allows his bowels to move. There he lies feeling very satisfied and masturbates or has a spontaneous ejaculation. Then he bathes to clean himself and the package of soiled linen he throws into a river or anywhere where it disappears quickly.

In these scenes he reproduces the infant in swaddling clothes. He even presses the covers tightly around him so that he cannot move, to give himself the illusion of being tied down. He repeats the infantile scenes of cleaning by the mother, during which in his fancy he plays the double role of mother and child.

He struggles with greatest anxiety against this remarkable paraphila but always submits to it in the end. The longest interval up to the time of the psychoanalysis was four weeks. After that “orgy of filth,”—as he calls it—he feels depressed and is ashamed of himself. He has not mentioned this to a living soul and even the physician at the sanitarium knew nothing about it. He went through this act several times not at the sanitarium, but in his room because the baths were not private. When discussing sexual infantilism we shall learn of several similar cases. His attitude towards his mother is very changeable but not so emotionally tense as his relations with his father. He carries on a quiet and occasionally affectionate exchange of letters with his mother, but with his father, never. He is to a certain extent fond of his mother. As he tried masturbation in front of his father as a child so now he keeps nothing of his sexual life secret before me. He relates frankly everything. As a child he loved his mother very much and often wished to be with her. His mother is now an old woman, partially paralysed. Nevertheless he noticed during his last visit home that she is still a pretty woman and repeatedly felt impelled to approach her.... At such times he treats her very roughly and scornfully, and is inclined to make fun of her and her age. He has had repeatedly affairs with old women. At his last lodging place there was an elderly woman, whose face was badly wrinkled, with whom he became intimate but after a short time he sought a quarrel with her and moved out. That is the way he behaves with everybody. He quarrels over some trifle, becomes very excited and makes a terrible scene. Then he is through with that person for good.

We shall see that this is his way of protecting himself against temptation. He quarrels only with persons with whom he has pleasant relations and who play some role in his sexual fancies. That is also how he parts from his mother, for he usually leaves her after a bitter quarrel. This is also why his parents let him dwell among strangers, although they think a great deal of him. His letters are sufficiently irritating but easier to endure than the scenes he creates when at home.

His attitude towards his father is worse. He is easily moved to anger when speaking of him. He makes copious use of vile terms when referring to him. Such expressions as “the old rascal,” the “miserable thief,” are customary with him when speaking of his father. He knows no reason why he should feel so bitter towards his father. That is, he gives a thousand reasons but all trivial and hardly relevant. The father brought him up badly; the father is responsible for his condition; the father is wealthy, nevertheless complains always that he has nothing; the father lives only for his mother and cares nothing for him. He wants to make himself independent and wants to get money from his father for that purpose. The very thought that his father may deny him the money makes him angry: “I shall go to him and kill him and shoot myself.” Such murder fancies are not infrequent about his father.

How close the neurotic is to the criminal! Against his father he raises all sorts of complaints, equally unreasonable. One day he called on me to say that, having passed a sleepless night he has figured out at last the reason for his illness: the father has murdered his brother! The brother was incurably ill and a burden to his father. He knew it well and had decided to go home and confront his father with the truth, then demand his share of the inheritance. Even as a boy it was clear to him that the father had deliberately put his brother out of the way. The father always felt uncomfortable when the talk turned to the boy and always tried to avoid the subject.

He judges his father according to his own inner self. He carries within himself the soul of a murderer, as the pathologic strength of his instinctive cravings already indicates. The suspicion directed against his father is determined psychically by the fact that during his own youth he wished his brother’s death because he did not want to have any competitor for household favors and he knew well that the fortune would have to be divided between them. But he was not the kind of man who would consent to dividing anything. He wanted everything for himself exclusively. He wanted his brother out of the way and had actually indulged in various fanciful dreams how to go about it. Now he shifted his fancies over to his father, while for himself he conjured up an attitude of sympathy and regret whenever his brother was mentioned. He is most unhappy because he has no brother, his father has robbed him of what was most precious in his life. Had his brother lived he would not be ill, only the realization of his father’s deed is what brought him to such a state. The father passes for a prominent person and enjoys a high position in his community, he has been mayor of the town, but should he start proceedings against him, the father would land in jail. He is filled with jealousy because his father has done so well; his own incapacity he explains away chiefly on the score of his illness.