Bi-sexual love; the homosexual neurosis

by Wilhelm Stekel

He recalls that after the first dream he woke up with a terrible hunger. This hunger was even stronger after the second dream but disappeared after the pollution.

I have already maintained in my work on Morbid Anxiety that hunger may stand as a substitute for sexual libido and here this is clearly shown and illustrated.

Now we understand the firing of the engine with the paper packages. The caloric value of paper is as small as that of nutrition, when the latter is substituted for sexual desire. Thus he makes use of his stomach as a remarkable safety valve. He starves himself out because the gratification of food serves as a substitute for sexual gratification. He relates a number of incidents showing how cleverly his neurosis serves him. Every woman he meets excites him but even when he goes so far as to arrange an appointment with one and she agrees to call at his residence or to go to a hotel he stops short of actual intimacy.

From the standpoint of the analysis the prognosis is unfavorable. He does not want to give up the neurosis, his safety valve, he wants to keep up his own way of “firing the engine” and wishes the physician were out of the way. Indeed, he continues to have recourse to masturbation, he endures the consequent regrets and self reproaches, rather than give up his defence.

We observe inwardly a strong “will to power” and formally a decidedly feminine attitude; the orgasm occurs while he plays the role of woman; but the highest gratification always depends on the most powerful inner forces. He does not avoid women because he fears defeat, for he has repeatedly proven his potentia through intercourse with prostitutes and feels supremely confident that he could master any situation involving no moral scruples. What hinders him seems to be the association of his sister with all decent girls, and of his mother with all married women. His homosexuality is inhibited by his fixation on the father. And back of all inhibitions there stands his overstressed religiosity, which he had cultivated for years although he had apparently outgrown it. He intended to embrace a religious career but gave up the idea when he was 14 years of age. It is very likely that most of his troubles will disappear after marriage, if he should break away from the parental circle.

I believe that even one who is inexperienced in dream analysis will readily recognize a phallic symbol in the perolin sprayer which gives forth a soapy fluid. It was natural that at 16 years of age he should fall in love with a colleague who resembled a sister. The obvious incest thoughts kept him from the girl. All girls of good family were sisters; he treated them like sisters. The prostitutes were not in the same class with his sister and he could be potent with them. The homosexual path was closed to him also on account of his sister. In all young men he saw his sister with a phallus.

It is significant that further analysis discloses a fixation upon the father to an extent I had not quite suspected before. Back of the apparent scorn of his father, underneath his tendency to speak lightly of him there was an unquenchable love which nothing could quite gratify. The ugly example given by his teacher suggested intimacies possible only in the realm of phantasy. (His subsequent dreams placed him with me in a similar situation.) Thus he vacillated between homosexuality and Don Juanism.

Why do these men hesitate in the end and why do they not become genuine Don Juans? In large measure this is due to the inner religious scruples. These rudimentary types are weighted down by an excess of morality. They like to play at immorality but very carefully see to it that morality wins in the end.

I wish to add a few remarks about the religious significance of the dream. It is remarkable that all dream interpreters have overlooked the obvious import of dreams, from the religious standpoint, in spite of the fact that they are aware of the great role which religion plays in man’s mental life and must appreciate that such a force necessarily finds expression through the dream.

The subject has been for years a very pious young man. Witches and devils filled his fancies as real tempters. The dream also shows the fear of the devil who misleads the weak to drink, whoredom, shortly, into sin. The homosexual tendency is often felt as the work of the devil.