In order to acquire a psychologic insight into every case as it presents itself, and to judge of its significance, it is necessary to answer the question: what does the homosexual aim to accomplish with his actions? What does the homosexual act represent in the subject’s fancy. In most cases of this character reality does not enter into consideration.
Some obscure and baffling paraphilias lose their extraordinary character once we get at the specific act which the subject repeats vicariously through his overt action. For Nietzsche’s law of the eternal return of sameness applies to the neurotic.
The acts which the neurotic carries out are either something experienced or something wished, some unreached yearning. It is part of human nature that the unattained experience exercises a stronger driving power than what has been experienced. Experience acts as a retrospective tendency, craving is prospective. (One might say, therefore: the most severe traumas are those which have never been experienced.) The unsatisfied craving is the motive power of most neuroses. The “world pain” of all those who are weary of life and who struggle in vain to accomplish the impossible is due to the eternal craving, the eternally Lost, the perennially Unreachable. All the dream fancies of the neurotic are shattered in contact with reality. For that reason the neurotic overlooks the world’s standards and builds a world of his own, wherein he is master and attains all his wishes as dreams. The unattained experiences furnish the material for perennial dreams.
The formation of man’s character traits begins during the first years of life. He tests his powers upon the surroundings and his environment furnish him the picture of life. In the eyes of children who are not self-reliant the father must be a giant because he overawes them with his genial appearance and his image generates in their soul a feeling of inferiority which marks them for life. Every child has an ambition: to excel his father. This wish may express itself first in the desire to attain father’s size, to be as strong and big as he. But later the wish shows itself in that quiet but determined competitive struggle which has always existed between father and son, or mother and daughter. The strong son takes after the powerful father. But suppose the father is weak and the mother is the one who dominates the house? What sort of picture of life becomes imprinted upon the child’s mind under the circumstances? Can it help believing that women dominate the world, can he escape taking the attitude either of wishing to be a woman and rule, or of fleeing from woman when she clashes with his “will to power” as man?
In the conflict that follows, sexuality becomes mixed up with erotism, the soul of the child is bewildered, a definite outcome is delayed and meanwhile the child’s soul is filled with anxiety and doubt.
Alfred Adler, who has followed this line of inquiry with great keenness, has conceived it an important factor in the dynamics of the neuroses and he has described this picture as “the male protest.” All reactions and protective constructions or fictions of the neurotic, according to him, lead back to the desire to be “a complete man.” Homosexuality displays this protest under a peculiarly cryptic form. The homosexual cries out: I want to be a woman! He may even go so far as to dress himself like a woman and become a transvestite. Adler here gives a far fetched explanation, saying: this is a male protest under the use of female means! He holds that the homosexual attempts to heighten by this means his feeling of personality; the latter turns away from woman because he fears his inferiority, he avoids decisions. That is true of some aspects but not of the whole picture. The problem of homosexuality as a whole shows Adler’s position to be untenable.
The important thing is that there arises in the child’s soul a wish which gravitates in the direction of the parallelogram of forces exhibited within the family circle. If the mother plays the upper rôle, the wish becomes: I should like to be like mother! I should like to dominate and rule as she does! Love for the mother increases this tendency to become identified with her and turns it into a directive ideal. The child begins at a tender age to imitate its mother, acts womanly, wants to play with dolls and cook, wears gladly girls’ clothes. The child may overcome these tendencies or it may grow up with them or return to them later and become a pronounced homosexual. (Late Homosexuality.)
For the sake of simplicity I am now speaking of boys. The same effect may be brought about when a brutal father trods down the mother, the child sees its mother suffer and comes to look upon his father as an abhorrent example. Under such circumstances the child’s “will to power” may turn into “ethical will.” The child’s wish then is: I would not rule and be like father; I would rather be like mother! If the child loves his tyrannical father he may become homosexual and passive: a woman and a strong man.
These are a few examples taken at random from life. I have brought them out, because one often hears that homosexuals have had an energetic mother, and a father who played a submissive rôle. Of course, the contrary may also be the case. Frequently we hear that the mother was strongly neurotic.... There are no definite rules in the psychogenesis of homosexuality. Each case requires an individual solution. That is why Sadger’s statements on the subject cannot be taken as absolute axioms. Every third case or so disproves his notions.