Wilhelm Stekel

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ With the homosexuals to find a boy who stands as symbol for self or for a sister is a common experience. Like all neurotics they do not possess the capacity to distinguish between the world of fancy and that of reality. I have called neurosis the tyranny of symbolisms. This is particularly true of the neurotic who becomes homosexual. All values are transformed, the object becomes subject and vice versa. In the midst of this transformation of all facts one thing remains fast and true: the infantile ideal which is yearned for with the persistence generated by the eternally ungratified craving. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The angry mother-in-law is always the mother who cannot live without her daughter and who wants to show her daughter that the husband is untrue and does not appreciate her and how much more she truly loves the daughter.... I have also often seen the daughter, after a timorous attempt at married life, return penitently back to the mother. I have seen mothers who fight for their daughters with a lover’s passion and with their tremendous jealousy putting all sorts of difficulties in the way of any pretenders to the daughter’s hand. ”

“ The most important prerequisite for psychoanalysis—as for every scientific investigator—is to approach the subject without any preconceptions, to look upon every patient as a new problem and not to be surprised if one’s case does not fit in with one’s ready-made systems or if it disproves one’s favorite notion. For even the physician with years of experience is startled to meet so many new forms under which neurosis manifests itself. ”

“ I am of the opinion that under certain conditions the extreme polar tension between man and woman will always drive to homosexuality certain individuals possessing the requisite bisexual predisposition and that the number of homosexuals will increase. Since I look upon homosexuality as a neurosis, a morbid condition, if one insists on the term, I am decidedly opposed to the policy of penalizing the homosexual, and against those legal proscriptions which have been and are the cause of much misery. ”

“ The solitary Ibsen, as road builder, undertakes to construct a new highway which shall lead up to solitary heights and does not observe that the road leads really straight back to the realm of his youth. Somewhere in the vast expanse of his soul the ‘dead child’ is floating around and staring with wide open eyes into infinity. A child is killed in this drama. It stands for the miscarried regression back to infantilism. Childhood is finally subdued and forgetfulness once more drowns in the soul’s vast expanse all gnawing and biting reproaches. ”

“ For I could not think that my supreme passion intimately and indissolubly linked to the nature, the appearance and form of boyhood and charming old age would ever be overcome. Springtide and autumn, boyhood and old age, evoke in me the wonders of development and suggest the soft quiet stealing in of blissful eternal peace. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The last case given above is particularly convincing and the friend’s behavior very characteristic.
Our subject feels impelled to think of the woman’s lovers driven thereto by his homosexual longing. He thinks of them in a roundabout way, so to speak, through and around the woman. Jealousy enables him to dwell on the picture of the naked man; he thinks of the phallus of his rival, compares it with his own; he drinks in the bliss which his beloved must have tasted through another man; he places himself entirely in the woman’s rôle, so that, in his fancy, he is the woman. ”

“ He protects himself against the love for his mother because he would be lost and subordinate to women if he yielded. The gruesome quarrels which he witnessed during his childhood showed him a father who ruined himself on account of women, a man unable to achieve the full expression of his high ideal because he squandered his energies on numerous love adventures. Homosexuality serves him as a protection against all womanhood. ”

“ We have seen with what powerful hatred the homosexual encounters his environment. Whether he turns his hatred towards the other sex, his own, or, under certain circumstances, against himself, he remains the inveterate hater vainly trying to reconcile the feeling of man’s aboriginal nature with the ethical requirements of later culture. The question rises whether he is at all capable of loving. One may point out that in a certain sense he does love his mother, father, some friend or that perhaps he even has a “sweetheart.” ”

“ When the man declares that he would have been happy if he could have met this woman in her virgin purity, he is mistaken. He will always seek the street walker, the disreputable woman. She is the more charming because she is older than he. For he is longing for the mother Imago and therefore he is most happy, too, when she mothers him. Like most homosexuals he is strongly attached to the mother. But unlike the overt homosexuals he has not carried out his flight all the way to the male, but has fled, instead, to the puella publica, the dishonored woman.... ”

“ When I found that the neurotics represent regressive stages of development, I conceived jealousy to be a primitive feeling of hatred, characteristic of man in his primordial state. Paranoia discloses the primary tendencies which are glossed over by our cultural development. One’s true character betrays itself in one’s emotions. Jealousy shows us the true inner man in all his passionate cravings and his hidden desires. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This inability to split his self, the root of all homosexuality, forms the background of the whole drama. Rita cannot divide her personality any more than Almers can do it; he must give his whole personality self. Almers cannot divide wife and sister. He embraces his wife and thinks of the sister (That sister, whom he calls his little and his big Eyolf. The sister in trousers, who embodied his ideal, a woman in male clothes, a bisexual being which need not be split up at all) . “Love of brothers and sisters is the only relationship not subject to the law of transformation.” ”

“ Since that time he has been keeping up a close acquaintance with that woman and she is very jealous; she would like to get him away from her and to have him entirely to herself. She cannot bear to see a child familiar with other persons and is wild even when the servant girl receives a letter or a show post card through the mail. It is the perseverance of the instinct of possession on account of diminished sexual gratification. She is reduced, so to speak, to small rations and therefore wants to accumulate and reserve for herself everything the environment yields in the form of love. ”

“ We see that the jealousy of the husband also has the rôle of legitimizing a hatred which has its roots in other causes. For she confesses that during her fits of jealousy, when she thinks that her husband is unfaithful, she feels a bitter hatred against him and could murder him.... The husband is in the way, her hatred corresponds to the idea that he is a hindrance. During the night the hatred breaks forth but during the waking hours it is rationalized as due to jealousy. For she admits that she has really never fully loved her husband. Her affection goes to her father. ”

“ You are undoubtedly aware that neurotics and normal persons are fond of finding resemblances when they formulate identifications. The lover finds that the beloved walks like mother, or that she talks like the latter, and if physically no resemblance can be established he finds the same mental characteristics, the same soul, perhaps the same shortcomings. ”

“ Experience proves that the homosexual flees from the heterosexual love to save himself. The latter looms up in his mind as a test of power, in which he is anxious to come out the winner, even at the cost of doing away with his heterosexual partner. He must accept the subjection to woman implied in love and recognize that in true love both lovers rule and both obey. He must also learn to recognize the essential unity of erotism and sexuality. ”

“ We recall Shylock, the pound of flesh, and the various sadistic determinants of his neurosis.
We now approach the kernel of his homosexual neurosis which turns out to consist of a powerful protective wall against his criminal self. His attitude towards woman is characterized by a tremendous hatred. He is a Lustmörder, the wild bear who attacks women, who strangles them and would drink their blood. The bear represents his own image and a terrible warning.
Beware of the women! It will turn you into a murderer. Better remain a child, enjoy whatever brings gratification to a child. ”

“ He does not care to be like others. Against the notion that God had ordained man to have offspring he wants to oppose all teleology and, in spite of God, maintain a purposeless, meaningless love, contrary to nature, a love for its own sake. Conceivably women manifest even more clearly the corresponding revulsion against the motherly instinct.
Who will deny that fear of children, of motherhood, is an important social manifestation? Can it be that this fear is characteristic only of women and is not shared also by men? ”

“ Through Freud we have learned that fear, like disgust, is a repressed form of libido. Though this view is correct, it is not always adequate. My own researches have shown that every fear represents in the first place fear of self.
But why should the homosexual entertain any fear of himself during intercourse with woman? What he fears is his excessive sexuality when it is commingled with criminal tendencies.
The frequency with which fear of one’s own criminal aggressiveness stands back of impotence and homosexuality can hardly be overestimated. ”