Freud - Complete Works (641 page)

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3853

   In the case of our patient, it
was not doubt but the affective factor of revenge against her
father that made her cool reserve possible, that divided the
analysis into two distinct phases, and rendered the results of the
first phase so complete and perspicuous. It seemed, further, as
though nothing resembling a transference to the physician had been
effected. That, however, is of course absurd, or, at least, is a
loose way of expressing things. For some kind of relation to the
analyst must come into being, and this relation is almost always
transferred from an infantile one. In reality she transferred to me
the sweeping repudiation of men which had dominated her ever since
the disappointment she had suffered from her father. Bitterness
against men is as a rule easy to gratify upon the physician; it
need not evoke any violent emotional manifestations, it simply
expresses itself by rendering futile all his endeavours and - by
clinging to the illness. I know from experience how difficult it is
to make a patient understand just precisely this mute kind of
symptomatic behaviour and to make him aware of this latent, and
often exceedingly strong, hostility without endangering the
treatment. As soon, therefore, as I recognized the girl’s
attitude to her father, I broke off the treatment and advised her
parents that if they set store by the therapeutic procedure it
should be continued by a woman doctor. The girl had in the
meanwhile promised her father that at any rate she would give up
seeing the ‘lady’, and I do not know whether my advice,
the reasons for which are obvious, will be followed.

   There was a single piece of
material in the course of this analysis which I could regard as a
positive transference, as a greatly weakened revival of the
girl’s original passionate love for her father. Even this
manifestation was not quite free from other motives, but I mention
it because it brings up, in another direction, an interesting
problem of analytic technique. At a certain period, not long after
the treatment had begun, the girl brought a series of dreams which,
distorted according to rule and couched in the usual
dream-language, could nevertheless be easily translated with
certainty. Their content, when interpreted, was, however,
remarkable. They anticipated the cure of the inversion through the
treatment, expressed her joy over the prospects in life that would
then be opened before her, confessed her longing for a man’s
love and for children, and so might have been welcomed as a
gratifying preparation for the desired change. The contradiction
between them and the girl’s utterances in waking life at the
time was very great. She did not conceal from me that she meant to
marry, but only in order to escape from her father’s tyranny
and to follow her true inclinations undisturbed. As for the
husband, she remarked rather contemptuously, she would easily deal
with him, and besides, one could have sexual relations with a man
and a woman at one and the same time, as the example of the adored
lady showed. Warned through some slight impression or other, I told
her one day that I did not believe these dreams, that I regarded
them as false or hypocritical, and that she intended to deceive me
just as she habitually deceived her father. I was right; after I
had made this clear, this kind of dream ceased. But I still believe
that, beside the intention to mislead me, the dreams partly
expressed the wish to win my favour; they were also an attempt to
gain my interest and my good opinion - perhaps in order to
disappoint me all the more thoroughly later on.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3854

   I can imagine that to point out
the existence of lying dreams of this kind, ‘obliging’
dreams, will arouse a positive storm of helpless indignation in
some readers who call themselves analysts. ‘What!’ they
will exclaim, ‘the unconscious, the real centre of our mental
life, the part of us that is so much nearer the divine than our
poor consciousness - it too can lie! Then how can we still build on
the interpretations of analysis and the accuracy of our
findings?’ To which one must reply that the recognition of
these lying dreams does not constitute any shattering novelty. I
know, indeed, that the craving of mankind for mysticism is
ineradicable, and that it makes ceaseless efforts to win back for
mysticism the territory it has been deprived of by
The
Interpretation of Dreams
, but surely in the case under
consideration everything is simple enough. A dream is not the
‘unconscious’; it is the form into which a thought left
over from preconscious, or even from conscious, waking life, can,
thanks to the favouring state of sleep, be recast. In the state of
sleep this thought has been reinforced by unconscious wishful
impulses and has thus experienced distortion through the
dream-work, which is determined by the mechanisms prevailing in the
unconscious. With our dreamer, the intention to mislead me, just as
she did her father, certainly emanated from the preconscious, and
may indeed have been conscious; it could come to expression by
entering into connection with the unconscious wishful impulse to
please her father (or father-substitute), and in this way it
created a lying dream. The two intentions, to betray and to please
her father, originated in the same complex; the former resulted
from the repression of the latter, and the later one was brought
back by the dream-work to the earlier one. There can therefore be
no question of any devaluation of the unconscious, nor of a
shattering of our confidence in the results of analysis.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3855

   I cannot neglect this opportunity
of expressing for once my astonishment that human beings can go
through such great and important moments of their erotic life
without noticing them much, sometimes even, indeed, without having
the faintest suspicion of their existence, or else, having become
aware of those moments, deceive themselves so thoroughly in their
judgement of them. This happens not only under neurotic conditions,
where we are familiar with the phenomenon, but seems also to be
common enough in ordinary life. In the present case, for example, a
girl develops a sentimental adoration for women, which her parents
at first find merely vexatious and hardly take seriously; she
herself knows quite well that she is very much occupied with these
relationships, but still she experiences few of the sensations of
intense love until a particular frustration is followed by a quite
excessive reaction, which shows everyone concerned that they have
to do with a consuming passion of elemental strength. Nor had the
girl ever perceived anything of the state of affairs which was a
necessary preliminary to the outbreak of this mental storm. In
other cases, too, we come across girls or women in a state of
severe depression, who on being asked for a possible cause of their
condition tell us that they have, it is true, had a slight feeling
for a certain person, but that it was nothing deep and that they
soon got over it when they had to give it up. And yet it was this
renunciation, apparently so easily borne, that became the cause of
serious mental disturbance. Again, we come across men who have
passed through casual love-affairs and realize only from the
subsequent effects that they had been passionately in love with the
person whom they had apparently regarded lightly. One is also
amazed at the unexpected results that may follow an artificial
abortion, the killing of an unborn child, which had been decided
upon without remorse and without hesitation. It must be admitted
that poets are right in liking to portray people who are in love
without knowing it, or uncertain whether they do love, or who think
that they hate when in reality they love. It would seem that the
information received by our consciousness about our erotic life is
especially liable to be incomplete, full of gaps, or falsified.
Needless to say, in this discussion I have not omitted to allow for
the part played by subsequent forgetting.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3856

IV

   I now come back, after this
digression, to the consideration of my patient’s case. We
have made a survey of the forces which led the girl’s libido
from the normal Oedipus attitude into that of homosexuality, and of
the psychical paths traversed by it in the process. Most important
in this respect was the impression made by the birth of her little
brother, and we might from this be inclined to classify the case as
one of late-acquired inversion.

   But at this point we become aware
of a state of things which also confronts us in many other
instances in which light has been thrown by psycho-analysis on a
mental process. So long as we trace the development from its final
outcome backwards, the chain of events appears continuous, and we
feel we have gained an insight which is completely satisfactory or
even exhaustive. But if we proceed the reverse way, if we start
from the premises inferred from the analysis and try to follow
these up to the final result, then we no longer get the impression
of an inevitable sequence of events which could not have been
otherwise determined. We notice at once that there might have been
another result, and that we might have been just as well able to
understand and explain the latter. The synthesis is thus not so
satisfactory as the analysis; in other words, from a knowledge of
the premises we could not have foretold the nature of the
result.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3857

   It is very easy to account for
this disturbing state of affairs. Even supposing that we have a
complete knowledge of the aetiological factors that decide a given
result, nevertheless what we know about them is only their quality,
and not their relative strength. Some of them are suppressed by
others because they are too weak, and they therefore do not affect
the final result. But we never know beforehand which of the
determining factors will prove the weaker or the stronger. We only
say at the end that those which succeeded must have been the
stronger. Hence the chain of causation can always be recognized
with certainty if we follow the line of analysis, whereas to
predict it along the line of synthesis is impossible.

   We do not, therefore, mean to
maintain that every girl who experiences a disappointment such as
this of the longing for love that springs from the Oedipus attitude
at puberty will necessarily on that account fall a victim to
homosexuality. On the contrary, other kinds of reaction to this
trauma are undoubtedly commoner. If so, however, there must have
been present in this girl special factors that turned the scale,
factors outside the trauma, probably of an internal nature. Nor is
there any difficulty in pointing them out.

   It is well known that even in a
normal person it takes a certain time before the decision in regard
to the sex of the love object is finally made. Homosexual
enthusiasms, exaggeratedly strong friendships tinged with
sensuality, are common enough in both sexes during the first years
after puberty. This was also so with our patient, but in her these
tendencies undoubtedly showed themselves to be stronger, and lasted
longer, than with others. In addition, these presages of later
homosexuality had always occupied her
conscious
life, while
the attitude arising from the Oedipus complex had remained
unconscious
and had appeared only in such signs as her
tender behaviour to the little boy. As a school-girl she had been
for a long time in love with a strict and unapproachable mistress,
obviously a substitute mother. She had taken a specially lively
interest in a number of young mothers long before her
brother’s birth and therefore all the more certainly long
before the first reprimand from her father. From very early years,
therefore, her libido had flowed in two currents, the one on the
surface being one that we may unhesitatingly designate as
homosexual. This latter was probably a direct and unchanged
continuation of an infantile fixation on her mother. Possibly the
analysis described here actually revealed nothing more than the
process by which, on an appropriate occasion, the deeper
heterosexual current of libido, too, was deflected into the
manifest homosexual one.

The Psychogenesis Of A Case Of Homosexuality In A Woman

3858

   The analysis showed, further,
that the girl had brought along with her from her childhood a
strongly marked ‘masculinity complex’. A spirited girl,
always ready for romping and fighting, she was not at all prepared
to be second to her slightly older brother; after inspecting his
genital organs she had developed a pronounced envy for the penis,
and the thoughts derived from this envy still continued to fill her
mind. She was in fact a feminist; she felt it to be unjust that
girls should not enjoy the same freedom as boys, and rebelled
against the lot of woman in general. At the time of the analysis
the idea of pregnancy and child-birth was disagreeable to her,
partly, I surmise, on account of the bodily disfigurement connected
with them. Her girlish narcissism had fallen back on this
defence,¹ and ceased to express itself as pride in her good
looks. Various clues indicated that she must formerly have had
strong exhibitionist and scopophilic tendencies. Anyone who is
anxious that the claims of acquired as opposed to hereditary
factors should not be under-estimated in aetiology will call
attention to the fact that the girl’s behaviour, as described
above, was exactly what would follow from the combined effect in a
person with a strong mother-fixation of the two influences of her
mother’s neglect and her comparison of her genital organs
with her brother’s. It is possible here to attribute to the
impress of the operation of external influence in early life
something which one would have liked to regard as a constitutional
peculiarity. On the other hand, a part even of this acquired
disposition (if it
was
really acquired) has to be ascribed
to inborn constitution. So we see in practice a continual mingling
and blending of what in theory we should try to separate into a
pair of opposites - namely, inherited and acquired characters.