Freud - Complete Works (639 page)

   The course of the present
patient’s analysis followed this two-phased pattern, but it
was not continued beyond the beginning of the second phase. A
special constellation of the resistance made it possible,
nevertheless, to gain full confirmation of my constructions, and to
obtain an adequate insight on broad lines into the way in which her
inversion had developed. But before relating the findings of the
analysis I must deal with a few points which have either been
touched upon already by myself or which will have roused special
interest in the reader.

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   I had made the prognosis partly
dependent on how far the girl had succeeded in satisfying her
passion. The information I obtained during the analysis seemed
favourable in this respect. With none of the objects of her
adoration had the patient enjoyed anything beyond a few kisses and
embraces; her genital chastity, if one may use such a phrase, had
remained intact. As for the
demi-mondaine
who had roused her
most recent and by far her strongest emotions, she had always been
treated coldly by her and never been allowed any greater favour
than to kiss her hand. She was probably making a virtue of
necessity when she kept insisting on the purity of her love and her
physical repulsion against the idea of any sexual intercourse. But
perhaps she was not altogether wrong when she boasted of her
wonderful beloved that, being of good birth as she was, and forced
into her present position only by adverse family circumstances, she
had preserved, in spite of her situation, much nobility of
character. For the lady used to recommend the girl every time they
met to withdraw her affection from herself and from women in
general, and she had persistently rejected the girl’s
advances up to the time of the attempted suicide.

   A second point, which I at once
tried to investigate, concerned any possible motives in the girl
herself which might serve as a support for psycho-analytic
treatment. She did not try to deceive me by saying that she felt
any urgent need to be freed from her homosexuality. On the
contrary, she said she could not conceive of any other way of being
in love, but she added that for her parents’ sake she would
honestly help in the therapeutic attempt, for it pained her very
much to be the cause of so much grief to them. To begin with, I
could not but take this, too, as a propitious sign; for I could not
guess the unconscious affective attitude that lay concealed behind
it. What came to light later in this connection decisively
influenced the course taken by the analysis and determined its
premature conclusion.

   Readers unversed in
psycho-analysis will long have been awaiting an answer to two other
questions. Did this homosexual girl show physical characteristics
plainly belonging to the opposite sex, and did the case prove to be
one of congenital or acquired (later-developed) homosexuality?

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   I am aware of the importance
attaching to the first of these questions. But one should not
exaggerate it and allow it to overshadow the fact that sporadic
secondary characteristics of the opposite sex are very often
present in normal individuals, and that well-marked physical
characteristics of the opposite sex may be found in persons whose
choice of object has undergone no change in the direction of
inversion; in other words, that in both sexes
the degree of
physical hermaphroditism is to a great extent independent of
psychical hermaphroditism
. In modification of these statements
it must be added that this independence is more evident in men than
women, where bodily and mental traits belonging to the opposite sex
are apt to coincide. Still I am not in a position to give a
satisfactory answer to the first of our questions about my patient.
The psycho-analyst customarily forgoes a thorough physical
examination of his patients in certain cases. Certainly there was
no obvious deviation from the feminine physical type, nor any
menstrual disturbance. The beautiful and well-made girl had, it is
true, her father’s tall figure, and her facial features were
sharp rather than soft and girlish, traits which might be regarded
as indicating a physical masculinity. Some of her intellectual
attributes also could be connected with masculinity: for instance,
her acuteness of comprehension and her lucid objectivity, in so far
as she was not dominated by her passion. But these distinctions are
conventional rather than scientific. What is certainly of greater
importance is that in her behaviour towards her love-object she had
throughout assumed the masculine part: that is to say, she
displayed the humility and the sublime overvaluation of the sexual
object so characteristic of the male lover, the renunciation of all
narcissistic satisfaction, and the preference for being the lover
rather than the beloved. She had thus not only chosen a feminine
love-object, but had also developed a masculine attitude towards
that object.

   The second question, whether this
was a case of congenital or acquired homosexuality, will be
answered by the whole history of the patient’s abnormality
and its development. The study of this will show how far this
question is a fruitless and inapposite one.

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II

   After this highly discursive
introduction I am only able to present a very concise summary of
the sexual history of the case under consideration. In childhood
the girl had passed through the normal attitude characteristic of
the feminine Oedipus complex¹ in a way that was not at all
remarkable, and had later also begun to substitute for her father a
brother slightly older than herself. She did not remember any
sexual traumas in early life, nor were any discovered by the
analysis. Comparison of her brother’s genital organs and her
own, which took place about the beginning of the latency period (at
five years old or perhaps a little earlier), left a strong
impression on her and had far-reaching after-effects. There were
very few signs pointing to infantile masturbation, or else the
analysis did not go far enough to throw light on this point. The
birth of a second brother when she was between five and six years
old exercised no special influence upon her development. During the
pre-pubertal years at school she gradually became acquainted with
the facts of sex, and she received this knowledge with mixed
feelings of lasciviousness and frightened aversion, in a way which
may be called normal and was not exaggerated in degree. This amount
of information about her seems meagre enough, nor can I guarantee
that it is complete. It may be that the history of her youth was
much richer in experiences; I do not know. As I have already said,
the analysis was broken off after a short time, and therefore
yielded an anamnesis not much more reliable than the other
anamneses of homosexuals, which there is good cause to question.
Further, the girl had never been neurotic, and came to the analysis
without even one hysterical symptom, so that opportunities for
investigating the history of her childhood did not present
themselves so readily as usual.

   At the age of thirteen to
fourteen she displayed a tender and, according to general opinion,
exaggeratedly strong affection for a small boy, not quite three
years old, whom she used to see regularly in a children’s
playground. She took to the child so warmly that in consequence a
lasting friendship grew up between herself and his parents. One may
infer from this episode that at that time she was possessed of a
strong desire to be a mother herself and to have a child. However,
after a short time she grew indifferent to the boy, and began to
take an interest in mature, but still youthful, women. The
manifestations of this interest soon brought upon her a severe
chastisement at the hands of her father.

  
¹
I do not see any advance or gain in the
introduction of the term ‘Electra complex’, and do not
advocate its use.

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   It was established beyond all
doubt that this change occurred simultaneously with a certain event
in the family, and one may therefore look to this for some
explanation of the change. Before it happened, her libido was
concentrated on a maternal attitude, while afterwards she became a
homosexual attracted to mature women, and remained so ever since.
The event which is so significant for our understanding of the case
was a new pregnancy of her mother’s, and the birth of a third
brother when she was about sixteen.

   The position of affairs which I
shall now proceed to lay bare is not a product of my inventive
powers; it is based on such trustworthy analytic evidence that I
can claim objective validity for it. It was in particular a series
of dreams, interrelated and easy to interpret, that decided me in
favour of its reality.

   The analysis revealed beyond all
shadow of doubt that the lady-love was a substitute for - her
mother. It is true that the lady herself was not a mother, but then
she was not the girl’s first love. The first objects of her
affection after the birth of her youngest brother were really
mothers, women between thirty and thirty-five whom she had met with
their children during summer holidays or in the family circle of
acquaintances in town. Motherhood as a
sine qua non
in her
love-object was later on given up, because that precondition was
difficult to combine in real life with another one, which grew more
and more important. The specially intense bond with her latest love
had still another basis which the girl discovered quite easily one
day. Her lady’s slender figure, severe beauty, and downright
manner reminded her of the brother who was a little older than
herself. Her latest choice corresponded, therefore, not only to her
feminine but also to her masculine ideal; it combined satisfaction
of the homosexual tendency with that of the heterosexual one. It is
well known that analysis of male homosexuals has in numerous cases
revealed the same combination, which should warn us not to form too
simple a conception of the nature and genesis of inversion, and to
keep in mind the universal bisexuality of human beings.¹

  
¹
Cf. Sadger (1914).

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   But how are we to understand the
fact that it was precisely the birth of a child who came late in
the family (at a time when the girl herself was already mature and
had strong wishes of her own) that moved her to bestow her
passionate tenderness upon the woman who gave birth to this child,
i. e. her own mother, and to express that feeling towards a
substitute for her mother? From all that we know we should have
expected just the opposite. In such circumstances mothers with
daughters of nearly a marriageable age usually feel embarrassed in
regard to them, while the daughters are apt to feel for their
mothers a mixture of compassion, contempt and envy which does
nothing to increase their tenderness for them. The girl we are
considering had in any case altogether little cause to feel
affection for her mother. The latter, still youthful herself, saw
in her rapidly developing daughter an inconvenient competitor; she
favoured the sons at her expense, limited her independence as much
as possible, and kept an especially strict watch against any close
relation between the girl and her father. A yearning from the
beginning for a kinder mother would, therefore, have been quite
intelligible, but why it should have flared up just then, and in
the form of a consuming passion, is hard to understand.

   The explanation is as follows. It
was just when the girl was experiencing the revival of her
infantile Oedipus complex at puberty that she suffered her great
disappointment. She became keenly conscious of the wish to have a
child, and a male one; that what she desired was her
father
’
s
child and an image of
him
, her
consciousness was not allowed to know. And what happened next? It
was not
she
who bore the child, but her unconsciously hated
rival, her mother. Furiously resentful and embittered, she turned
away from her father and from men altogether. After this first
great reverse she forswore her womanhood and sought another goal
for her libido.

   In doing so she behaved just as
many men do who after a first distressing experience turn their
backs forever upon the faithless female sex and become
woman-haters. It is related of one of the most attractive and
unfortunate princely figures of our time that he became a
homosexual because the lady he was engaged to marry betrayed him
with another man. I do not know whether this is true historically,
but an element of psychological truth lies behind the rumour. In
all of us, throughout life, the libido normally oscillates between
male and female objects; the bachelor gives up his men friends when
he marries, and returns to club-life when married life has lost its
savour. Naturally, when the swing-over is fundamental and final, we
suspect the presence of some special factor which definitely
favours one side or the other, and which perhaps has only waited
for the appropriate moment in order to turn the choice of object in
its direction.

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   After her disappointment,
therefore, this girl had entirely repudiated her wish for a child,
her love of men, and the feminine role in general. It is evident
that at this point a number of very different things might have
happened. What actually happened was the most extreme case. She
changed into a man and took her mother in place of her father as
the object of her love.¹  Her relation to her mother had
certainly been ambivalent from the beginning, and it proved easy to
revive her earlier love for her mother and with its help to bring
about an overcompensation for her current hostility towards her.
Since there was little to be done with the real mother, there arose
from this transformation of feeling the search for a substitute
mother to whom she could become passionately attached.²