The Homosexual Neurosis

by Wilhelm Stekel

His peculiar manner of masturbating (squeezing flies to death against the penis) discloses his specific onanistic fancy. He squeezes a woman to death, he strangles her, while cohabiting with her. A short time after the first analysis he had sexual intercourse with a servant girl. He described her to me: “a gigantic girl, and so powerful that she could have overpowered me with one hand!” With such a girl he felt safe. But he never dared to have sexual intercourse with weak persons, even though they exerted a stronger sexual attraction on him. He had every reason to flee from woman, because he feared the transposition of his excessive love passion into a deadly aggressive hatred. He claims he could have intercourse now only with a woman addicted to all sorts of perversities. Only such a woman could rouse his passion and could offer him something. He has never tried this out. It looks as if he feared the involvement of his heart, but that could use woman merely as a vehicle for his lust. A perverse woman would drown the urgings of his strongest paraphilia: the impulse to kill a woman.

Now we may understand through his family history how this attitude must have arisen.

He belonged to a family where both parents had very pronounced individualities of their own. The father was a self-made man, who rose through his own efforts and became a millionaire. He was strict, energetic, always preoccupied with his business, and never had any spare time for his family. With the children he was tender while they were small and pretty playthings. Later he changed completely his attitude and the patient was required and expected to show a good record of his conduct at school. He continued to be tender with the girls, so that the boy must have unconsciously envied his sisters. This change from tenderness to severity on the part of parents is very common and is responsible for many instances of stubborn contrariness on the part of children, especially towards the father. The child always longs for the early childhood when the father was so loving and tender. Perhaps this longing for early childhood is the reason why so many homosexuals are of a decidedly infantile type.[^[33]] The kindly old gentleman sought by so many homosexuals is perhaps merely the affectionate father of their youth, who never punished severely....

Our patient’s mother was a remarkably intelligent and very beautiful woman, who all her life contended with her husband for rulership over the house. I had an opportunity to obtain a deep insight into that marriage situation. I know of no other marriage where the struggle for supremacy was so bitter between the two personalities. There were constantly quarrels in the house, often on the point of breaking out in violence. Each one avoided showing any affection for the other. To do so would have meant acknowledging the other’s superiority. They did everything they could to each other. They bore themselves with aloofness and appeared indifferent towards one another, though keeping up a continuous quarrel. If the husband noticed some other man courting his handsome wife, he smiled indulgently and accorded his rival a free field, as if to prove to his wife that he was not jealous in the least, and was willing to accord her every freedom. She also seemed to overlook the seamy side, in her husband’s conduct. Nevertheless they were ready to jump at each other on the slightest provocation. Once the situation reached a crisis and the woman pointed a revolver at her husband threatening to end everything in a terrible tragedy.

The children divided between the contesting parents, taking sides. The son was entirely with his mother. He was unhappy because she had to put up with so much and he goaded her on all the time, urging her to carry the fight to a successful issue and even advising her to seek separation from her husband. He had nothing good to say about his father, outside the latter’s business ability. He described the father as a cold-blooded fellow without a heart, a mere adding machine, etc.... On a superficial examination it looked as if he loved his mother and hated his father. But back of that hatred there stood the carefully preserved love of his earlier years. That love, however, he was unwilling to acknowledge. That was the critical point in the analysis. He always recoiled whenever the analysis led to his fondness of the father, or various signs pointed out his aboriginal attitude towards the father. Any analysis leads sooner or later to a similar experience. Nothing is more difficult than to dissolve the father hatred and reduce it back to its infantile components,—love.

But in his homosexual acts he played the rôle of the father who is tender with the child. We also perceive now why he felt himself suddenly attracted to that elderly gentleman with the energetic face. He was an image of his own strict father.

Having witnessed in his childhood a terrific struggle between man and woman, and having himself taken a part in that merciless struggle for supremacy, he was bound to conceive the problem of love as a struggle for supremacy, a competitive struggle in the will to power. His supreme question always was: “Who is the stronger one?” This case shows us with remarkable clearness the mechanisms on which Alfred Adler lays such great stress. But it also shows the incestuous love for the sister, a tendency of which he was aware. In the young men he sought the reproductions of his sister’s picture. He also showed a fixation upon the mother, with whom he was seldom on agreeable pleasant terms. Nevertheless he has not forgotten the early tendernesses of his father. In the wish to be squeezed to death, his masochistic fancies revolve around the masked image of his severe father standing like a shadow. To be master, to be slave—his whole system of thinking revolved around these two notions. He has social intercourse only with men towards whom he feels himself superior. Already as a child he chose his comrades among the children of the poor, because he could domineer them. He abandoned one friendship because his friend made jokes at his expense. He was not a handsome child. That drove him into the path of hatred and envy. He hated all women because they were his rivals with the father. He thought he would have been liked better if he had been a handsomer fellow.

He was a slave to his family and unable to wean himself away. He moved to another city in order to free himself of the family ties. That made him homesick. His mother had to visit him. He was proud when they went on walks together and were taken for a pair of lovers. But secretly he really yearned for his father, and never forgives himself that he did not interrupt that vacation journey to go to his father.

In reality he continued the struggle between his parents. Within him struggled man and wife. Possibly also the child, though acting more in the rôle of a bystander, and ready to give the stereotypic answer “both” to the question, “whom do you like better?” He thinks he has overcome the man in him. I consider his homosexuality a passing phase. He will achieve health only after complete emotional detachment from the family circle.

We often note that the neurotic gets well only after the death of one of the parents or of both. But in many cases, the parents even after they are dead continue to hold their sway over the infantile soul and their dominion ends only with the death of their child who, in that devotion to them, loved but himself and loved himself unto death....