Let us repeat and underscore the far-fetched feature of this method of diagnosis. According to it there is no objective means for ascertaining homosexuality. The only diagnostic guide is the homosexual’s declaration that he has always felt homosexually inclined and that he is indifferent towards the other sex.
The analyst is well qualified to recognise the utter weakness of such a diagnostic guide. We meet continually persons who claim to know themselves thoroughly; they claim that they have investigated their own state very conscientiously but after a few weeks, often only after a few days (illustrations will be fully given in this book) the subject must admit that he did not know himself, that, in fact, he had avoided knowing himself. All persons lie about sexual matters and deceive themselves in the first place. All play Vogel-strauss-politik, the ostrich.
All neurotics falsify their life history or at least retouch it. They simply forget the facts which do not suit their system of thinking. We must also bear in mind Havelock Ellis’ statement that the homosexuals prefer to consider themselves as normal. Similarly the childhood history is distorted consciously or unconsciously and a life history is reconstructed (in retrospect) from which all heterosexual episodes have been eliminated.
Psychoanalysis has proven that all homosexuals, without exception, show heterosexual tendencies in early life. There is no exception to this rule. There are no monosexual persons! The heterosexual period stretches far into puberty. All persons are bisexual. But persons repress either the homosexual or the heterosexual components on account of certain motives or because they are compelled by particular circumstances and consequently act as if they were monosexual. Even the “male hero” (Maennerheld) type and Hirschfeld’s “genuine” homosexual is only apparently monosexual. A glance through the confessions disclosed by all writers is enough to convince one of this fact. Hirschfeld himself points out that it is to the credit of psychoanalysis that it has revealed the transitory heterosexual cravings of the homosexual.
The instinct of the homosexual originally is not exclusively directed towards the same sex. Originally the homosexual is also bisexual. But he represses his heterosexuality just as the heterosexual must repress his homosexuality. Blüher who is unwilling to recognise a pathogenesis of homosexuality for the ‘male hero’ type, contends that one could claim with equal relevance that there is a pathogenesis of heterosexuality.
That is a fact. Every monosexuality is other than normal or natural. Nature has created us bisexual beings and requires us to act as bisexual beings. The purely heterosexual is always a neurotic in a certain sense, that is, the repression of the homosexual components already creates a predisposition to neurosis, or is in itself a neurotic trait shared by every normal person. The psychology of paranoia, for whose investigation we are indebted to the genius of Freud, shows us the extreme result of this process of repression on one side, just as homosexuality shows us the other side of the same process.
There is no homosexual who is not more or less neurotic, that condition being due to the repression of the heterosexuality. The repression is a purely psychic process and has nothing to do with degeneration. Homosexuality is not a product of degeneration in the ordinary sense. It is a neurosis and displays the etiology of a neurosis, as we shall prove later.
I revert to Hirschfeld. Regarding the relationship of neurosis and homosexuality he states:
“1. Pronounced physical and mental stigmata of degeneration are relatively rare among homosexual men and women; at any rate such signs are not more frequent in proportion to the total number of homosexuals than among the heterosexuals of both sexes.
“2. On the other hand we find frequently and not merely as a result of homosexuality, a greater instability of the nervous system (frequently shown in the periodic character of endogenous temperamental instability) (endogene Stimmungsschwankungen).