It seemed that her tremendous inclination to love was struggling with an equally powerful antagonism. During that difficult period her only consolation was a woman friend and her sister to whom she felt herself very closely attached.
But her dreams show that back of her running after men there was something else: the homosexual instinct which was struggling powerfully to come to surface and which she tried to hold back by her love affairs with men. She showed a number of unmistakable signs. She dressed simply and rather mannishly; she cut her hair short, and began smoking cigarettes; her appearance and gait assumed more and more a mannish form; she lost her mildness and soft nature becoming hardened and strong. Her whole nature expressed one supreme wish: I want to be a man, he has a better life! And, strange enough! Now she does attract men and they dangle after her by the dozen. But she only played and when it came to a serious issue in the course of any of her adventures,—for some of the men had earnest intentions,—she deliberately turned the whole thing into a huge joke.
She was no longer lured by men alone. She was on the point of becoming overtly homosexual passing through the last phase of the struggle. The nausea stood more and more clearly as a protection and defence against the homosexual inclination. Her dreams were filled with homosexual episodes. She herself was astonished when she began to observe her dreams. The very first dream she related concerned her sister and her friend:
I am with my friend on the Gaensehäufel (a popular promenade on the Danube embankment in Vienna) and we are naked; I say: How beautiful you are! You are more beautiful than any man. She embraces me and kisses me on the breast, on the spot where I am so sensitive. I wake up with dread,—palpitation of the heart and nausea.
Other dreams represent endless variants of this theme. Men figure in them but seldom. Occasionally she is pursued by them and flees to her sister or her friend. Thus her conflict is also shown in her dreams as a flight away from men, an escape through homosexuality.
This young woman also imagined herself to be a radical although inwardly she was pious. Sundays she visited the church, to hear the music, she was not a believer, but occasionally she prayed, because it was an old habit, she was fond of reading the Bible and she had to suppress a small inner voice which impelled her to go to confession. One day she said to me: “Do you know, yesterday it occurred to me that if I were again a believer and could go to confession, everything would be all right....”
Here we see a young woman who was at first on the proper path to become a normal, heterosexual woman. She experiences a serious trauma and begins to despise all men. She turns away from them. This aversion is favored by the fact that all men remind her of the love for her brother, which was repressed and forgotten but which flared up again on the occasion of her unfortunate experience. That was the reason why she was able to entertain herself best with elderly gentlemen and go on excursions with them, etc., without being overcome with nausea. The danger was not so great and these men were less typical of her brother.... She turns away from men and her sexuality flows into another channel. We have therefore a regression back to a childhood phase, apparently past and gone, in Freud’s sense. She also becomes more agreeable at home, where during the past years she had been accustomed to pay no attention to her mother. She again becomes fixed upon her family and turns once more to her childhood piety. The period of her nausea represents the last stage in her struggle against homosexuality.
As we glance over the three cases just analyzed we are impressed in the first place by the powerful rôle of the inner religiosity, which often passes unrecognized. Both men stood upon that emotional level which leads to polygamy as a defence against homosexuality. But they were unable to overcome their religious scruples. Too weak openly to embrace asceticism, they wandered through complicated neurotic by-paths in the attempt to circumvent all the dangers that threatened them. One of them played very cleverly the rôle of ‘Pechvogel,’—a man who would gladly be a libertine but who was not lucky enough to succeed,—the other was prevented by his stomach trouble from abandoning the path of virtue.
The counterpart is the “modern girl” who dreams about free love and mother-rights and at the same time generates a nervous nausea as a defence against any danger to her virtue. Here again we must admire the subtlety of the neurotic who finds such clever means to assume a certain rôle in the eyes of the world no less than before himself, in order to cover up his true nature. All men who really lack inner freedom are overanxious to act as if they were free. They apparently adopt some modern liberal principle while as a matter of fact secretly they adhere to the religious scruples of their ancestors.