III. Attitude towards own sex (as erotically colored in the unconscious)
Instinctively inhibited and bashful in relation to boys.
Dreamy attachment to teacher or some school mate.
Greater bashfulness in the presence of girls.
Similarly attached in dreams to some female person—teacher or school mate.
The powerful influence of the mother in bringing up the child is illustrated by the following passage from one history:
“A young lieutenant relates: as soon as I was out of the school room I used to rush to my girl friends. My mother was fond of taking me along when she went shopping and always asked me how I liked this thing and that, before making a purchase. For every new hat which mother bought I served as a model, that is, every hat was tried on my head, and mother purchased for herself the hat that looked best when tried on me. ‘You look like a little girl,’ mother often would say to me while the hats were tried on, ‘too bad, that you are not a real girl!’” (Hirschfeld, l. c., p. 113.)
The expression, “too bad, you are not a real girl,” shows how the mother influenced the child’s soul at a time when it is so very plastic. But Hirschfeld maintains that the conditions were reversed; that the parents had suspected the child’s homosexual inclination and treated it accordingly:
“Often the disposition towards homosexuality is fostered in children by their elders who treat them according to that leaning. The fathers feel specially attracted to the urning daughters—the mothers fondly give their urning boys girlish tasks about the house. The feminine and the virile peculiarities are not brought out through training at first; the mother would not expect girlish tasks of a boy who was not in the first place inclined that way. When Krafft-Ebing relates in his description of the case of the Countess Sarolta Vay: ‘it was her father’s whim to bring up S. as a boy; he let her ride, drive, hunt, admired her virile energy, called her Sandor. On the other hand this foolish parent allowed his second son to be dressed like a girl and to be brought up very much like one’—we must credit the father with the intention of meeting deliberately an outspoken tendency on the part of his children.” (Hirschfeld, l. c., p. 112.)
Naturally when one explains everything so arbitrarily and tries to interpret in the parent’s favor, suggesting that the father displayed great psychic insight, anything may be proven.