How close the forbidden tendencies are to one another in such cases! Almost uniformly the same picture throughout: criminality, homosexuality and incest. After years of the compulsory yoke of a formal monosexuality the repression gives way and the underlying pansexuality and criminal tendencies manifest themselves in pathologic form. For all these case histories center around the “other,” the second, self,—the repressed component of human nature.
We know many persons who prove themselves victims of our monosexual culture. The race is paying for the development of monosexuality with neurotic homosexuality, with all the various neuroses, with alcoholism and paranoia!
But it would be erroneous for that reason to decry the course of cultural development or to look for the improvement of conditions to changes in law or in the formal code of morals. All lovers of mankind surely must fight for the abandonment of the moral opprobrium and legal persecution of homosexuals and for a greater freedom from bias in the perception of the problem of all paraphilias. But we must not fail to recognize that we are dealing here with tremendous social forces and with developmental tendencies striving, beyond all human range, for the attainment of unknown higher ideals. The development of the race is from bisexualism to monosexualism. Even the “genuine” homosexuality as we know it today everywhere is a proof in favor of this contention.
For if homosexuality were an inborn trait, as Hirschfeld and his pupils maintain, it would be the pattern-type of health and homosexuals would show no repressed heterosexuality; there would be no morphinists, no drinkers, and no dipsomaniacs[[22]] among them. Their number may not be large, but that is because the uranists’ homosexuality is already a compromise, an attempt on the part of nature, and of the psyche, to escape the insolvable bisexual conflict. The very fact that all neurotics represent retrogressions shows that the race is advancing towards monosexuality. The neurotic, as a bisexual being, might stand for an earlier developmental phase, if the cultural standards of morality would not hinder. When he attempts it (like, for instance, Oscar Wilde) he draws upon himself the deadly scorn of his fellowmen; he is ostracized as a citizen. Homosexuality leads but seldom to paranoia when associated with heterosexuality, as happens in the reverse instance,—heterosexuals trying to repress their homosexuality. That in itself shows homosexuality to be a neurosis,—the premonitory phase of the paranoiac psychosis. When paranoia breaks out, the homosexual holds to the delusion that he belongs to the opposite sex and may go so far as to disregard his genitalia and to acquire the feeling that he is physically changed. The paranoia attempts to round out physically the delusion of sexual transformation it has initiated psychically. The wish of the male homosexual: “I want to be a woman!” is fulfilled in paranoia. In that state he finds a thousand proofs that he is a woman. Many such cases have been described especially by Krafft-Ebing, who has called them “metamorphosis sexualis paranoica.” The subjects imagine that they have the monthly flow because they have the nose-bleed every four weeks (this happens also with nonparanoia urnings),—they have a flow from the lower parts for five days at every full moon. A patient of Krafft-Ebing’s relates (Obs. 134, p. 245): “Every four weeks at the full moon I have for 5 days the molimina, like any woman, physically and mentally, only I do not flow,—but I have a sensation of discharging fluid, a feeling of fulness about the genitals and the lower part of the body (within); a very pleasant time it is, especially later (in a couple of days) when the physiologic craving for procreation looms forth with its all-pervading womanly force.” Another paranoiac claims that he has always been woman, but when he was a child a French magician had miraculously endowed him with male organs and, with a certain salve, hindered the development of his breasts. A girl under my observation felt her penis, pointed to the hairs on her face, and thought she was a bewitched male. But she could feel her penis growing within and almost coming through.
The following statement by the highest expert on homosexuality shows that the repression of heterosexuality may have serious effects upon the homosexual,—it may drive him to drink, or into a delusion of persecution:
“I have seen, in the homosexual, states of precordial anxiety with strong vasomotor excitation as serious as such conditions could be. Next to anxiety neurosis, an occasional consequence of abstinence seems to me to be the occurrence of a sort of persecution mania which is rather difficult to determine whether it belongs to the compulsive neuroses or is actually a part of the picture of paranoia. Such persons imagine everybody suspects their homosexuality; they look at their hands and laugh sheepishly because they wear no engagement or marriage ring; at restaurants persons sitting at neighboring tables whisper and knowingly nod among themselves as they talk about the ‘eingefleischten Junggesellen’; porters and waiters at hotels ‘catch on’ to ‘what is up’ and treat them either more or less attentively than other customers; passers-by on the street comment on their tripping gait; in short, they feel that they are watched everywhere and are uncomfortably self-conscious; some blush continually, others become morbidly suspicious and timid, others again—and that is the worst—take to drink. Convinced of the truthfulness of their notions and refractory in their attitude towards the physician, patients of this type make up their minds late and only after considerable struggle, to consult a physician and even then they often do it under an assumed name. If the ideas of persecution have already persisted for a long time, the condition is hardly one that can be influenced by treatment,—in any case it requires the greatest skill and patience on the part of the physician as well as his whole therapeutic armamentarium, of which psychotherapy and hydrotherapy are most important means, while drugs, rather excessively favored nowadays, should be used but sparingly.” (Hirschfeld, loc. cit., p. 455.)
This observation of Hirschfeld’s discloses the homosexual’s deep feeling of self-reproach which must be ascribed to hidden criminality rather than to the homosexuality. Perhaps that fusion of homosexuality with criminality, of pathologic self-love and repressed hatred, that incapacity for true love, is the reason why men struggle against monosexuality and why innumerable victims fall in that struggle, their refined souls crushed by the conflict. Just as we no longer have the gods of antiquity—men with female bosoms and women with a tremendous phallus—just as we have accepted the division of God into three components (man, woman, and child) which unitedly represent but one force, so we must choose, in our day, our ideal. That is the monotheism of sexuality,—more unyielding and strict than religious monotheism. “To love means to find one’s God,” I stated. But there must be no other gods besides that one. This struggle for the single god of love sums up the erotic tragedies of our cultural development: the struggle for the true ideal and for monogamy which for the present appears the utmost sexual ideal of our current cultural level. Between the primitive man’s pansexualism and the monosexuality of modern man may be found all the developmental phases and inhibitions which manifest themselves as neuroses, paraphilias, drunkenness, psychoses, etc.
The analysis of jealousy has shown us clearly that with the outbreak of the repressed homosexuality criminality, too, comes to the surface. The patients whose histories we have recorded, fight, carry revolvers and threaten murder. Many a jealousy murder is due to the instinctive asocial cravings. We must bear in mind that the repression keeps down the homosexuality as well as the other paraphiliac instincts, including the criminal tendencies. When the repressed homosexuality breaks through the protecting covers and out of the unconscious, it carries along and brings to surface all the repressed antagonistic cravings. This mental mechanism explains the gruesome crimes which the paranoiacs commit who believe themselves pursued or threatened. They project to their surroundings not only the pursuit with homosexual intent but their subjective criminal tendencies as well. Someone is after them to kill them ... it really means: “I want to kill and therefore I assume, that others want to kill me.”
Looking upon homosexuality as an archaic symptom, a regressive manifestation, we may understand also that the incest, in all its forms, must play a greater rôle among homosexuals than among the normals. The urning, in point of psychic progression, is nearer the ancient Œdipus and the urlind is nearer ancient Elektra than the normal man. Their will to power also manifests itself through stronger tendencies. The very repression of his heterosexual component shows that the homosexual tries to achieve mastery over self, and is a proof of the one-sided emphasis of his stubborn will to self-control. The will to power breaks out in violent, affectively stressed jealousy deeds, which shows the intimate inner relations between homosexuality and sadism,—a subject to which we shall give more careful consideration in our next chapter.