Beware of the women! It will turn you into a murderer. Better remain a child, enjoy whatever brings gratification to a child. Woe to you if your life’s journey should lead you through the open road where all wild passions lurk which have already filled you as a child! Oh, better if you had never been born, or if you could begin life all over....
Blood is his true requirement. Spermatic fluid, urine, fæces,—all these are substitutions representing blood.[[42]]
Now we begin to understand why he must not be a man and why he wants to be a woman. His great aggressive trend is linked with the notion of maleness. The passive attitude, suffering, patience, is identified with femaleness.
After these revelations, which were supported by a large mass of memories, the patient stayed away for a few days. Then he reappeared and told me that he had successful intercourse with a puella publica. He thought he might be able to overcome his homosexuality. But he received a telegram recalling him to Denmark.
I have not heard anything about his subsequent history. Did he become bisexual? Did he overcome his infantilism? Did the torn portion of the road become passable at last?
I am unable to state anything definite. But we have obtained here a clear insight into the psychogenesis of homosexuality and we have seen that many determinants are at work shaping the original predisposition.
Let us briefly mention the most important data in this clinical history. It must be looked upon really as but a fragment of an analysis. But it leads us to the core of the neurosis and shows us the subject’s inner predisposition, so sharply contrasting with his conscious attitude.
This man carries within himself the aboriginal instincts of mankind. His dreams carry him back to the paternal body and back to the prehistoric phase of his existence not without reason. He carries within himself the engrams of thousands of years, the remnants of the wildest instinct of primordial man. The phylogenesis of his being corresponds with his ontogenesis. What does he lack for a typical primordial being? In his dreams and phantasies he shows the terrible blood lust, the imperativeness of wishes, the brutal egoism of the periods of long past. Even man’s primordial toleration of filth is not absent; this subject’s history discloses urolagnistic and coprophagic tendencies.
Consider the contrast between his instinctive and his cultural self. He is a man of refinement and a marked personality, a genuine artist, a man who appreciates the beautiful, a man who is transfixed before a representation of Tristan, or before a statue and whom the beauties of nature plunge into ecstasy; a man who seems capable of adding some day to the world’s art possessions a worthy contribution.
This case proves most decidedly that my view that homosexuality represents a regression is correct. Other physicians will prefer to speak of degeneration. Indeed,—but this subject has no sign of physical degeneration, there is no pathologic family history such as might be regarded as predisposing to degeneration. One might as well consider all artists degenerates inasmuch as all artists show the primordial cravings which we find in our patients. The very fact that all human progress is brought about through individuals who represent regressions should teach us more carefully the term degeneration and to apply it only to the cases in which the conjunction of physical signs of degeneration with moral inferiority leaves no doubt.