I offered at first no advice and no help. To begin with, I allowed the love-sick fellow to speak out everything that was on his mind and that in itself lightened his burden. Then I undertook to obtain an insight into his mental life before the advent of his boy love.

It turned out that he had really loved and still loves but one person in the wide world: his sister. The affection for the bride was but a substitute for his love of the sister. His bride was also homosexual and loved in him but the brother of her best girl friend. As the girl friend (his sister) cooled off during their engagement, preferring another friendship (obviously led thereto by unconscious jealousy of the brother), her own affection for the young man cooled off and she promptly made use of the opportunity to break off with him. The opportunity arose conveniently enough and the severing of the engagement reacted most painfully upon the school teacher who had reasons of his own for reproaching himself most bitterly.

The more his bride kept away from his sister the greater was his indifference to the bride. But the boy resembled his sister very closely.

He never thought of this similarity before. They had the same eyes, the same color of hair, and the same voice, and these played a strong rôle with him. During that critical period his sister was interested in a certain physician. He felt he was about to lose her affection and sought a substitute for her and that he found in his pupil....

Now he was in a position to come to an understanding with his sister. She had the requisite psychologic insight to understand him fully and to lend him intelligent assistance towards his recovery.

His whole tremendous excitation simmered down. The love for the boy calmed down to an attitude of kindly interest which no longer troubled him. He took his walks only with his sister who often called for him at the school. Months later I heard that he was very quiet and had no reason to complain. He succeeded in sublimating his affection for the sister into joint intellectual interests, insofar as that is possible. But frank relations create a healthy atmosphere in which it is easier to overcome incestuous phantasies than in the byways and hidden bypaths of repression and transference.

I have given a detailed account of this case because it is typical and because the transference of affection from the sister to a boy is more common than would be recognized a priori in the light of our current contributions on homosexuality. We must also bear in mind that the sister represents a younger likeness of the mother Imago.[[10]]

But father, mother and sister do not exhaust the ideal of the homosexual. I also know cases—one I have described in a previous chapter—in which the love of an older brother plays a tremendous rôle.[[11]] We are thus led to the conclusion that fixation on the family plays a determinative rôle in the genesis of homosexuality, that homosexuality often may represent a flight from incest. True, we have also seen cases in which these roots are not traceable, particularly cases of late homosexuality. But why may not other psychic forces, manifesting themselves as hatred, disgust, fear and shame, likewise lead to homosexuality?

Love of the family is a form of narcissism. Every member of the family is a mirrored image of one’s own personality. One may love one’s self in one’s parents or other members of the intimate family circle more readily than through strangers. Leo Berg was the first to express this truth and he has done it very clearly. In his inspiring work, Geschlechter (Kulturprobleme der Gegenwart, 2nd ser., Vol. II, Berlin, 1906), he states:

“What does the homosexual substitute for procreation? In the first place self-seeking, the love of like (die Liebe zum Gleichen), plays a greater rôle in his case than with the heterosexual who is responsive to the unlike, and that is why the instinct of procreation is as a rule very much weaker in the former though not entirely absent. A young physician who confessed to me that he was homosexual, told me of a colleague who was passionately attached to a child. It was a powerful motherly instinct in him, a sign of his female sensitiveness in a male body; he is wholly womanly, a submissive being, and loves like a woman cursed only because he cannot bear a child for the man of his heart.”