We trace here the operation of that primordial hatred which threatens to smother the mind’s safety valve as it presses for expression. A portion of this hatred may turn into love and lead the subject into the pathway which makes prophets, religious reformers, philanthropists or champions of the people. Another part of it persists and strengthens infantile trends.
What is Sigma’s conscious attitude? Love for men, indifference towards women, hatred of the father, a bipolar vacillation towards his mother,—love and hate![[43]] But unconsciously he loves his father and hates all women,—perhaps because he must love them. His ordinary attitude requires the projection of his love feeling in its bipolar form upon all the objectives of his affection. One loves and hates at the same time. But he hates only the women. How has this primordial hatred been attained by the subject? Why is he incapable of assuming the usual bipolar attitude towards women?
If we go far back into his childhood we find that he was in love with his father and jealous of his mother. At that time all women were possible rivals in love for the father. He himself wanted to be a woman, the woman to love his father. This father Imago he seeks to this day in all his teachers, older friends, in his superiors. He must necessarily stand in a homosexual relationship towards them so long as he is unable to overcome his infantile constellations. Everything peculiar about his attachment to the mother is traceable back to his identification with the father. From the latter he has derived his quiet, timid, patient temperament,—that attitude of passivity which really masks a tremendous aggressivity. That infantile attitude determines the survival of all infantile excitations in his vita sexualis.
How may the cure be effected? The subject must be made to understand that he will never really carry out the crimes which contact with women suggest to his unconscious. He must learn to apply love in its bipolar form alike to men and women. His plethora of cravings should enable him to awaken within himself the hitherto badly neglected love for woman. Before the analysis all his erotic trends were directed towards male friends. The cure leads through approach of woman as friend. First she is a friend, and subsequently—after much struggle and searching—the beloved. He must learn to play the rôle of father to some strange woman.
Is analysis the proper means? Who, in the present state of our knowledge, knows another? What can we accomplish through commands, punishment, formal training, or hypnosis? Primordial love achieves supremacy only through the exacting process of self-knowledge and through the recognition of the primordial instincts, including the primordial hatred. The subject has concentrated his primordial love feeling wholly upon his own person.
Like all homosexuals he loves only himself. This peculiarity, too, he shares with all primordial beings. Does primordial man know any other love than love of self?[[44]]
I have already pointed out that urnings always seek themselves first and assume subsequently the rôle of another person; or else they seek in the male different variants of their own childhood. The same is true pari passu also of the urlinds. To be in love always means to find one’s self in another. But why do urnings not find themselves in the female Imago? This question cannot be covered with a generalization that will hold good for all cases. In the two last cases the fact that the subjects regarded themselves as the reverse of handsome played an important rôle. They had a sense of inferiority with regard to woman and a feeling of envy. Self-love induced fear of defeat by woman on account of lack of attractiveness. How could they feel confident of conquering woman in view of their ugliness? How could they play the rôle of a Don Juan to which their latent homosexuality might otherwise have driven them? Among men physical beauty does not matter. What is important is the size of the genitalia.
If love capacity be measured by the size of one’s genitalia, the patient Delta (Case 83) could measure himself against any one. He took ridiculous pride in his great penis,—a pride shown by many men. His whole sexuality was centered upon the symbol of masculinity. With Sigma, with whom the penis played but a secondary rôle, the case was different. Sadger who sees in narcissism the love of one’s genitalia would find his view corroborated by the history of the first case but not by the second, the subject in the latter instance showing not the least interest in his penis.
The first of these cases portrays the mechanisms described by Adler, the second barely a trace. This shows how easy it is to build certain assumptions through a one-sided selection of cases. It is obvious that every earnest investigator must come upon certain aspects of the truth. What we obtain always are mere sectional views of homosexuality. A cross section yields merely a corresponding view of the picture. Only the apposition of the various sectional views can furnish us the proper perspective for reconstructing the whole picture of homosexuality.
Infantile reminiscences in both cases were partial determinants which lead to a lasting fear of women and to withdrawal from heterosexual love. Delta had witnessed an unhappy marriage as a child, Sigma heard a great deal about faithlessness and about woman’s lack of loyalty. Both shared also a strong sadism, a feature which we have observed in all cases of homosexuality thus far analyzed.