The Homosexual Neurosis

by Wilhelm Stekel

All my inquiries into the psychogenesis of these disorders have led me back to the manifestations of hatred. Already in my work, Die Sprache Des Traumes (the Language of Dreams), I have pointed out that antagonism (or hatred) is man’s primary feeling responsible for the development of neuroses in those ethical-minded persons who still preserve strongly their aboriginal instinctive cravings. “The neurosis is the endopsychic perception of hatred in terms of a guilty conscience” (The Language of Dreams, page 563 of the 1st German edition; English version of the latter edition is now in preparation by the translator of the present volume.)

I believe I have proven successfully that the homosexual is a neurotic, that he represents a type of regression to man’s primordial instincts; and that homosexuality is a sort of compromise healing process in the mental conflict between the abnormal, raw cravings, and the cultural need for their suppression.

But we must not think that, like the average neurotic, the homosexual is incapable of love. Only, all his love is a love centered exclusively on self. Yet all cultural progress consists of the sublimation of self-love into social love. That is the meaning of the majestic injunction: love thy neighbor as thyself!

Since the homosexual loves only himself he seeks only himself in others. That, however, is a feature of all love. What appears to be the most extreme manifestation of altruistic feeling is at bottom but the outcome of egoistic cravings. Love is but egoism potentialized. Every neurotic suffers of narcissism. He is a slave to self and cannot escape that bondage. The homosexual loves, or appears to love, his own sex, but even superficial examination shows this to be but part of his narcissism. In truth he loves neither man nor woman. He has to overcome a hatred stronger than the corresponding feeling in the normal. That hatred is the theme of his childhood. As perpetual infant, he fails to sublimate sufficiently that hatred, or to fix it upon objectives considered proper in our current cultural development.

All who investigate homosexuality find an early awakening of the sexual instinct. It is perhaps the greatest social function of sexual instinct, next to reproduction, to provide for the conquest of hatred. Though the selfish child becomes a loving person, the child’s love is still entirely self-centered. The child loves the persons who serve it. In vain one tries to point out that it ought to love also the teachers who are severe but mean well, that parents must punish in order to teach! This view belongs to the adult mind and is what enables the adult to forget the childish notions of revenge which he entertained as a child whenever he suffered punishment which he looked upon as unjust before his higher sense of responsibility had asserted itself. But in the neurotics, including homosexuals, sexual precocity brings early to surface cravings which involve the love of others; they are therefore inclined to renounce or modify their hatred. The proportionate share of hatred against some beloved person is withdrawn and turned against the others. These infantile feeling-attitudes may undergo a second transformation in later years. A boy may love the father and hate the mother, because she is his rival in the father’s affection. At the same time the sisters may be hated because they draw to themselves a certain quantum of the father’s love, which the self-centered jealous boy wishes to secure exclusively for himself. Later the mother and sisters are loved, and the father recedes to the background.

Jealousy is an infantile feeling. Its appearance in later years always signifies a regression to infantile attitudes. The homosexual spreads his hatred from one persons to the whole sex under the form of jealousy. Let us assume that he loves the father insofar as he is at all capable of loving. The mother is looked upon as a rival. With the formulation of that attitude, all other women become likewise potential rivals, capable of robbing him of his father’s affection. Therefore he hates all women,—the subject is on the road to homosexual neurosis. At the onset of homosexuality stands jealousy and the latter, therefore, preserves its infantile value throughout life.

I have already mentioned that it is the function of sexuality to conquer hatred. But that task is never completely carried out. An eternal rivalry persists between the two sexes giving rise to the so-called “struggle between the sexes.” I have no doubt that man’s capacity for loving has increased in the course of our racial evolution. What subtle refinements our erotism has undergone! How complicated the psychic processes displayed by the man and the woman in love! But the antagonism or hatred which divides the two sexes has grown apace. Modern love owes its profuse affectivity to this conquest of hatred, this periodic regression back to the feeling-attitude of hatred and its renewed subdual.

The question arises: Have we in fact any proof that the polar tension between man and woman has diminished? He who fails to see a proof of this in the improvement of woman’s social position and her acquisition of equal rights may turn to biologic facts. These biologic data prove that the sexual differentiation between man and woman has increased with growth of culture. In primitive times woman was not so womanly, the man less manly, than the man and woman of civilization. Fehlinger[^[46]] compares the primitive peoples with the Europeans and shows that the secondary sexual characters are much more pronounced among the civilized peoples than among the savages. Subtler stimuli are required to excite the domesticated sexual instinct.

That sexual differentiation is more pronounced among Europeans is shown also by the fact that the period from the onset of sexual adolescence to the attainment of complete physical growth is more prolonged among civilized peoples than among the colored races. The primitive races show a great similarity between male and female types and that is most pronounced among the various pygmean races. The latter are characterized by an infantile physique, which, as is well known, is sexually but little differentiated.

Since the homosexual represents retrogressively a stage of racial development during which the bisexual character of the organism was more pronounced, he carries ab ovo the inclination to project himself unto both sexes. He passes into the world of sexual differentiation as into some strange, inimical, and, to his mind, incomprehensible realm of existence. He belongs to the primordial period in which a man, if necessary, could have replaced the woman. His engrams perceive the homosexual feeling as something as natural as if he had come a few hundreds of thousands of years sooner into the world. But into the cultural age in which love plays such a tremendous rôle he brings with him also the antagonism of bygone ages. That feeling of hatred becomes a powerful lever in the struggle between the sexes. Physically he stands between man and woman but he is not suited for the rôle of mediator because he has not learned to subdue the eternal struggle between male and female within his breast. The love-attitude which is a mixture of love and hatred, he splits into its two components directing one separately towards each of the two sexes. Towards woman he turns his primordial hatred, while man he loves as a representative of culture. When he is grown up that deadly hatred is repressed and stands a hidden stumblingblock between himself and woman. Unable to be a complete man, unable to extricate himself from that infantile feeling-attitude, he also hates the woman in him. He overvalues manliness and in his excessive appraisal of it turns to it with his whole love. The hatred of all women corresponds to his scorn of the woman in himself,—a reaction due to his personal inability to overcome the woman in his own make up and to become a complete man. Finally in the course of the continuous struggle between the man and the woman within his breast he reaches the curious compromise of accepting the feeling that he is a woman. That is: he excepts a single woman from his hatred ... himself. In that manner he becomes a transvestite. He may be active heterosexually, he may, apparently, have overcome his homosexuality, yet, as penance for his hatred, he puts on the clothes which had seemed once so hateful to him. The latent homosexual becomes a transvestite only on account of his guilty conscience.