She recalls that that particular driver was in their service when the cook was a younger woman and that her father had dismissed him. He watched for her father once, as he was coming out of a restaurant to waylay him. But her father was stronger and threw the servant to the ground with such force that the fellow fractured a bone. But she thinks that the neighborhood did not know the true reason for the battle, every one naturally thinking that the servant planned the attack out of revenge.
Finally she confessed to me that there was one experience of which she had not thought before for a long time which she must tell me about. She wanted to tell me about it for some time but an inexplicable shyness prevented her. She was 16 years of age when she once heard her father leaving his study room to steal upstairs to the garret. It was the maid’s day out and her mother was lying down not feeling well. She took her shoes off and followed him quietly up the stairs. The door to the servants’ room stood open. The father was somewhat under the influence of drink and so was also the cook, who always managed to secure some liquor for herself on the sly. A candle was burning in the room and the stairway was dark. She could see plainly everything that was going on. She now saw pater membrum suum in os ancillæ immisit. The sight of his reddish face now distorted under the influence of passion was so repulsive to her and struck her so powerfully that she could never forget it in her life. Even to this day when she thinks of it she feels nauseated. (While she is telling the incident she is struggling against the impulse to vomit.) After that episode she developed a nervous complaint of the stomach, chiefly a nervous vomiting. Even during the year just passed there were times when she could not swallow a morsel of meat and she had attacks of uncontrollable vomiting.
It was after that occurrence that she fell in love with her teacher. That episode was what had determined the course of her sexual development and what drove her to homosexuality because it made her look at all men in the light in which she had seen her father. Her inclination towards elderly married men (always platonic) is also traceable to her father Imago. She was aiming to find a nobler and more delicate father.
Whenever a man tried to get closer to her it reminded her of the painful incident she had witnessed, which summed up in her mind all the misery in her home, the whole outrageous situation, the humiliation of her mother, and her father’s morbid passion. For her father who did have some splendid qualities and who enjoyed an enviable position in society she once had as great a love and as deep a respect as for her noble mother. Then she had to go through the disastrous situation in the house. That experience could but serve her as a warning against men, a warning and a lesson! It could not but implant deeply in her soul a lasting dread of man and of man’s terrible passion. She naturally shrank back from any close contact with man for there was always a picture before her mind which plainly carried the message: “do not trust any man lest you should go through what your mother did!”
What might have been the future of this brave girl if the father had not acted in that way, if the marriage of the parents had been a happy one, if she had not witnessed that terrible scene which impressed her the more painfully because she had no inkling whatever of the brutal side of sexuality? I make bold to assert that she would have developed into a quiet pleasant housewife and she would have given vent to her homosexual tendencies along quiet and innocent paths. But as it was she devoted herself to girls and avoided men more and more. She did permit herself to be attracted by men. But they had to be married and unattainable. Thus there could be no danger for her. When the husband of a friend of hers of whom she also was very fond declared that for her sake he would be willing to divorce his wife, she fled and presently found some other unreachable ideal to which she attached herself. All her ideals were practically desexualized while her sexuality she exercised exclusively on women. The love among women loomed up in her mind as pure and elevating, while the love of men she considered brutal. Even coitus seemed to her a disgusting brutal act.
The traumatic incident occurred after puberty yet it had a very tremendous effect. The question rises whether the traumas occurring during childhood may also influence the particular direction of sexual development. This question has long since been solved in harmony with Binet’s view and psychoanalysis has taught us some additional facts regarding the influence of traumas. The narrower Freudian school has gone so far as to overvalue the influence of traumas and has designated as traumas certain relatively trivial experiences which do not deserve that designation. I want to sound again a warning against underestimating the role of traumas. Certain minor fetichistic tendencies are easily and sometimes fairly satisfactorily explained on that basis, although the more complicated forms of fetichism, such as we shall study later, are not to be explained solely upon the theory of traumatic causation. Here the association hypothesis of Binet completely breaks down. We must bear in mind that the neurotics conceive many traumas which in reality did not occur and that their phantasy turns innocent incidents into alleged traumas whenever it suits the trend of their emotions to do so. The neurotic’s memory serves him poorly and that is also true of the homosexuals who construct a purely homosexual life history for themselves.
But are not first impressions of fundamental determinative value for future development? Jean Paul very appropriately declares: “All first impressions persist forever in the child!”
I wish to add here a couple of observations which we owe to Bloch and which illustrate very well the influence of first sexual impressions:
“I was about five years of age when during a walk accompanied by the nursemaid I saw at some distance a man in the act of masturbating; without knowing what it was, the picture persisted in my mind for years. In my dreams until my fourteenth year a playmate occupied the chief role. At thirteen years of age I fell in love with a school comrade who took but little interest in me; what roused my interest in him in particular was probably the fact that he was the one who brought to the class information about sexual matters. We removed to another City and I lost sight of the boy. Although I knew nothing specific about sex at the time I sought contact with those who roused my feelings.