[116] "Eugen Dühren" (Iwan Bloch) remarks, however (_Neue Forschungen über den Marquis de Sade und seine Zeit_, p. 436), that de Sade in his _Aline et Valcour_ seems to recognize that inversion is sometimes inborn, or at least natural, and apt to develop at a very early age, in spite of all provocations to the normal attitude. "And if this inclination were not natural," he makes Sarmiento say, "would the impression of it be received in childhood?...Let us study better this indulgent Nature before daring to fix her limits." Still earlier, in 1676 (as Schouten has pointed out, _Sexual-Probleme_, January, 1910, p. 66), an Italian priest called Carretto recognized that homosexual tendencies are innate.
[117] For some account of Ulrichs see _Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen_, Bd. i, 1899, p. 36.
[118] Horatio Brown, _John Addington Symonds, a Biography_, vol. ii, p. 344.
[119] Ulrichs scarcely went so far as to assert that both homosexual and heterosexual love are equally normal and healthy; this has, however, been argued more recently.
[120] Special mention may be made of _L'Inversion Sexuelle_, a copious and comprehensive, though sometimes uncritical book by Dr. J. Chevalier, published in 1893, and the _Perversion et Perversité Sexuelles_ of Dr. Saint-Paul, writing under the pseudonym of "Dr. Laupts," published in 1896 and republished in an enlarged form, under the title of _L'Homosexualité et les Types Homosexuels_, in 1910.
[121] Krafft-Ebing set forth his latest views in a paper read before the International Medical Congress, at Paris, in 1900 (_Comptes-rendus_, "Section de Psychiatrie," pp. 421, 462; also in contributions to the _Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen_, Bd. iii, 1901).
[123] A summary of the conclusion of this book, of which but few copies were printed, will be found in Hirschfeld's _Vierteljahrsberichte_, October, 1911, pp. 78-91.
CHAPTER III.
SEXUAL INVERSION IN MEN.
Relatively Undifferentiated State of the Sexual Impulse in Early Life--The Freudian View--Homosexuality in Schools--The Question of Acquired Homosexuality--Latent Inversion--Retarded Inversion--Bisexuality--The Question of the Invert's Truthfulness--Histories.
When the sexual instinct first appears in early youth, it is much less specialized than normally it becomes later. Not only is it, at the outset, less definitely directed to a specific sexual end, but even the sex of its object is sometimes uncertain.[124] This has always been so well recognized that those in authority over young men have sometimes forced women upon them to avoid the risk of possible unnatural offenses.[125] The institution which presents these phenomena to us in the most marked and the most important manner is, naturally, the school, in England especially the Public School. In France, where the same phenomena are noted, Tarde called attention to these relationships, "most usually Platonic in the primitive meaning of the word, which indicate a simple indecision of frontier between friendship and love, still undifferentiated in the dawn of the awakening heart," and he regretted that no one had studied them. In England we are very familiar with vague allusions to the vices of public schools. From time to time we read letters in the newspapers denouncing public schools as "hot-beds of vice" and one anonymous writer remarks that "some of our public schools almost provoke the punishment of the cities of the Plain."[126] But these allegations are rarely or never submitted to accurate investigation. The physicians and masters of public schools who are in a position to study the matter usually possess no psychological training, and appear to view homosexuality with too much disgust to care to pay any careful attention to it. What knowledge they possess they keep to themselves, for it is considered to be in the interests of public schools that these things should be hushed up. When anything very scandalous occurs one or two lads are expelled, to their own grave and, perhaps, lifelong injury, and without benefit to those who remain, whose awakening sexual life rarely receives intelligent sympathy.
In several of the Histories which follow in this chapter, as well as in Histories contained in other volumes of these _Studies_, details will be found concerning homosexuality as it occurs in English schools, public or private. (See also the study "Auto-erotism" in vol. i.) The prevalence of homosexual and erotic phenomena in schools varies greatly at different schools and at different times in the same school, while in small private schools such phenomena may be entirely unknown. As an English schoolboy I never myself saw or heard anything of such practices, and in Germany, Professor Gurlitt (_Die Neue Generation_, January, 1909), among others, testifies to similar absence of experience during his whole school life, although there was much talk and joking among the boys over sexual things. I have added some observations by a correspondent whose experiences of English public school life are still recent:-- "In the years I was a member of a public school, I saw and heard a good deal of homosexuality, though till my last two years I did not understand its meaning. As a prefect, I discussed with other prefects the methods of checking it, and of punishing it when detected. My own observations, supported by those of others, led me to think that the fault of the usual method of dealing with homosexuality in schools is that it regards all school homosexualists as being in one class together, and has only one way of dealing with them--the birch for a first offense, expulsion for a second. Now, I think we may distinguish _three_ classes of school homosexualists:-- "(a) A very small number who are probably radically inverted, and who do not scruple to sacrifice young and innocent boys to their passions. These, and these only, are a real moral danger to others, and I believe them to be rare.
"(b) Boys of various ages who, having been initiated into the passive part in their young days, continue practices of an active or passive kind; but only with boys already known to be homosexualists; they draw the line at corrupting fresh victims. This class realize more or less what they are about, but cannot be called a danger to the morals of pure boys.
"(c) Young boys who, whether in the development of their own physical nature, or by the instruction of older boys of the class (a), find out the pleasures of masturbation or intercrural connection. (I never heard of a case of _pedicatio_ at my school, and only once of _fellatio_, which was attempted on a quite young boy, who complained to his house master, and the offender was expelled). Boys in this class have probably little or no idea of what sexual morality means, and can hardly be accused of a _moral_ offense at all.
"I submit that these three classes should receive quite different treatment. Expulsion may occasionally be necessary for class (a), but the few who belong to this class are usually too cunning to get caught. It used to be notorious at school that it was almost always the wrong people who got dropped on. I do not think a boy in the other two classes should ever be expelled, and even when expulsion is unavoidable, it should, if possible, be deferred till the end of the term, so as to make it indistinguishable from an ordinary departure. After all, there is no reason to ruin a boy's prospects because he is a little beast at sixteen; there are very few hopeless incorrigibles at that age.
"As regards the other two classes, I should begin by giving boys very much fuller enlightenment on sexual subjects than is usually done, before they go to a public school at all. Either a boy is pitchforked into the place in utter innocence and ignorance, and yields to temptations to do things which he vaguely, if at all, realizes are wrong, and that only because a puzzling sort of instinct tells him so; or else he is given just enough information to whet his curiosity, usually in the shape of warnings against certain apparently harmless bodily acts, which he not unnaturally tries out of curiosity, and finds them very pleasant. It may be undesirable that a boy should have full knowledge, at the time he goes to school, but it is more undesirable that he should go with a burning curiosity, or a total ignorance on the subject. I am convinced that much might be done in the way of prevention if boys were told more, and allowed to be _open_. Much of the pleasure of sexual talk among boys I believe to be due to the spurious interest aroused by the fact that it is forbidden fruit, and involves risk if caught. It seems to me that frankness is far more moral than suggestion. I would not 'expurgate' school editions of great authors; the frank obscenity of parts of Shakespeare is far less immoral than the prurient prudishness which declines to print it, but numbers the lines in such a way that the boy can go home and look up the omitted passage in a complete edition, with a distinct sense of guilt, which is where the harm comes in."
It is probable that only a small proportion of homosexual boys in schools can properly be described as "vicious." A. Hoche, describing homosexuality in German schools ("Zür Frage der forensischen Beurteilung sexuellen Vergehen," _Neurologisches Centralblatt_, 1896, No. 2), and putting together communications received from various medical men regarding their own youthful experiences at school, finds relationships of the kind very common, usually between boys of different ages and school-classes. According to one observer, the feminine, or passive, part was always played by a boy of girlish form and complexion, and the relationships were somewhat like those of normal lovers, with kissing, poems, love-letters, scenes of jealousy, sometimes visits to each other in bed, but without masturbation, pederasty, or other grossly physical manifestations. From his own youthful experience Hoche records precisely similar observations, and remarks that the lovers were by no means recruited from the vicious elements in the school. (The elder scholars, of 21 or 22 years of age, formed regular sexual relationships with the servant-girls in the house.) It is probable that the homosexual relationships in English schools are, as a rule, not more vicious than those described by Hoche, but that the concealment in which they are wrapped leads to exaggeration. In the course of a discussion on this matter over thirty years ago, "Olim Etoniensis" wrote (_Journal of Education_, 1882, p. 85) that, on making a list of the vicious boys he had known at Eton, he found that "these very boys had become cabinet ministers, statesmen, officers, clergymen, country-gentlemen, etc., and that they are nearly all of them fathers of thriving families, respected and prosperous." But, as Marro has remarked, the question is not thus settled. Public distinction by no means necessarily implies any fine degree of private morality.
Sometimes the manifestations thus appearing in schools or wherever youths are congregated together are not truly homosexual, but exhibit a more or less brutal or even sadistic perversion of the immature sexual instinct. This may be illustrated by the following narrative concerning a large London city warehouse: "A youth left my class at the age of 16½," writes a correspondent, "to take up an apprenticeship in a large wholesale firm in G---- Street. Fortunately he went on probation of three weeks before articling. He came to me at the end of the first week asking me to intercede with his mother (he had no father) not to let him return. He told me that almost nightly, and especially when new fellows came, the youths in his dormitory (eleven in number) would waylay him, hold him down, and rub his parts to the tune of some comic song or dance-music. The boy who could choose the fastest time had the privilege of performing the operation, and most had to be the victim in turn unless new boys entered, when they would sometimes be subjected to this for a week. This boy, having been brought up strictly, was shocked, dazed, and alarmed; but they stopped him from calling out, and he dared not report it. Most boys entered direct on their apprenticeship without probation, and had no chance to get out. I procured the boy's release from the place and gave the manager to understand what went on." In such a case as this it has usually happened that a strong boy of brutal and perverse instincts and some force of character initiates proceedings which the others either fall into with complacency or are too weak to resist.
Max Dessoir[127] came to the conclusion that "an undifferentiated sexual feeling is normal, on the average, during the first years of puberty,--i.e., from 13 to 15 in boys and from 12 to 14 in girls,--while in later years it must be regarded as pathological." He added very truly that in this early period the sexual emotion has not become centered in the sexual organs. This latter fact is certainly far too often forgotten by grown-up persons who suspect the idealized passion of boys and girls of a physical side which children have often no suspicion of, and would view with repulsion and horror. How far the sexual instinct may be said to be undifferentiated in early puberty as regards sex is a little doubtful. It is comparatively undifferentiated, but except in rare cases it is not absolutely undifferentiated.
We have to admit, however, that, in the opinion of the latest physiologists of sex, such as Castle, Heape, and Marshall, each sex contains the latent characters of the other or recessive sex. Each sex is latent in the other, and each, as it contains the characters of both sexes (and can transmit those of the recessive sex) is latently hermaphrodite. A homosexual tendency may thus be regarded as simply the psychical manifestation of special characters of the recessive sex, susceptible of being evolved under changed circumstances, such as may occur near puberty, and associated with changed metabolism.[128] William James (_Principles of Psychology_, vol. ii, p. 439) considered inversion "a kind of sexual appetite of which very likely most men possess the germinal possibility." Conolly Norman (Article "Sexual Perversion," Tuke's _Dictionary of Psychological Medicine_) also stated that "the sexual passion, at its first appearance, is always indefinite, and is very easily turned in a wrong direction," and he apparently accounted for inversion by this fact, and by the precocity of neurotics. Obici and Marchesini (_Le 'Amicizie' di collegio_, p. 126) refer to the indeterminate character of the sexual feelings when they first begin to develop. A correspondent believes that sexual feelings are undifferentiated in the early years about puberty, but at the same time considers that school life is to some extent responsible; "the holidays," he adds, "are sufficiently long to counteract it, however, provided the boy has sisters and they have friends; the change from school fare and work to home naturally results in a greater surplus of nerve-force, and I think most boys 'fool about' with servants or their sisters' friends." Moll (_Konträre Sexualempfindung_, 1889, pp. 6 and 356) does not think it proved that a stage of undifferentiated sexual feeling always occurs, although we have to recognize that it is of frequent occurrence. In his later work (1909, _Das Sexualleben des Kindes_, English translation, _The Sexual Life of the Child_, ch. iv), Moll remains of the same opinion that a homosexual tendency is very frequent in normal children, whose later development is quite normal; it begins between the ages of 7 and 10 (or even at 5) and may last to 20.
In recent years Freud has accepted and developed the conception of the homosexual strain; as normal in early life. Thus, in 1905, in his "Bruchstück einer Hysterie-Analyse" (reprinted in the second series of _Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre_, 1909), Freud regards it as a well-known fact that boys and girls at puberty normally show plain signs of the existence of a homosexual tendency. Under favorable circumstances this tendency is overcome, but when a happy heterosexual love is not established it remains liable to reappear under the influence of an appropriate stimulus. In the neurotic these homosexual germs are more highly developed. "I have never carried through any psychoanalysis of a man or a woman," Freud states, "without discovering a very significant homosexual tendency." Ferenczi, again (_Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische Forschungen_, Bd. iii, 1911, p. 119), without reference to any physical basis of the impulse, accepts "the psychic capacity of the child to direct his originally objectless eroticism to one or both sexes," and terms this disposition _ambisexuality_. The normality of a homosexual element in early life may be said to be accepted by most psychoanalysts, even of the schools that are separated from Freud. Stekel would go farther, and regards various psychic sexual anomalies as signs of a concealed bisexual tendency; psychic impotence, the admiration of men for masculine women and of women for feminine men, various forms of fetichism,--they are all masks of homosexuality (Stekel, _Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse_, vol. ii, April, 1912).
These schoolboy affections and passions arise, to a large extent, spontaneously, with the evolution of the sexual emotions, though the method of manifestation may be a matter of example or suggestion. As the sexual emotions become stronger, and as the lad leaves school or college to mix with men and women in the world, the instinct usually turns into the normal channel, in which channel the instincts of the majority of boys have been directed from the earliest appearance of puberty, if not earlier. But a certain proportion remain insensitive to the influence of women, and these may be regarded as true sexual inverts. Some of them are probably individuals of somewhat undeveloped sexual instincts. The members of this group are of some interest psychologically, although from the comparative quiescence of their sexual emotions they have received little attention. The following communication which I have received from a well-accredited source is noteworthy from this point of view:-- "The following facts may possibly be of interest to you, though my statement of them is necessarily general and vague. I happen to know intimately three cases of men whose affections have chiefly been directed exclusively to persons of their own sex. The first, having practised masturbation as a boy, and then for some ten years ceased to practise it (to such an extent that he even inhibited his erotic dreams), has since recurred to it deliberately (at about fortnightly intervals) as a substitute for copulation, for which he has never felt the least desire. But occasionally, when sleeping with a male friend, he has emissions in the act of embracing. The second is constantly and to an abnormal extent (I should say) troubled with erotic dreams and emissions, and takes drugs, by doctor's advice, to reduce this activity. He has recently developed a sexual interest in women, but for ethical and other reasons does not copulate with them. Of the third I can say little, as he has not talked to me on the subject; but I know that he has never had intercourse with women, and has always had a natural and instinctive repulsion to the idea. In all these, I imagine, the physical impulse of sex is less imperative than in the average man. The emotional impulse, on the other hand, is very strong. It has given birth to friendships of which I find no adequate description anywhere but in the dialogues of Plato; and, beyond a certain feeling of strangeness at the gradual discovery of a temperament apparently different to that of most men, it has provoked no kind of self-reproach or shame. On the contrary, the feeling has been rather one of elation in the consciousness of a capacity of affection which appears to be finer and more spiritual than that which commonly subsists between persons of different sexes. These men are all of intellectual capacity above the average; and one is actively engaged in the world, where he is both respected for his capacity and admired for his character. I mention this particularly, because it appears to be the habit, in books upon this subject, to regard the relation in question as pathological, and to select cases where those who are concerned in it are tormented with shame and remorse. In the cases to which I am referring nothing of the kind subsists.
"In all these cases a physical sexual attraction is recognized as the basis of the relation, but as a matter of feeling, and partly also of theory, the ascetic ideal is adopted.
"These are the only cases with which I am personally and intimately acquainted. But no one can have passed through a public-school and college life without constantly observing indications of the phenomenon in question. It is clear to me that in a large number of instances there is no fixed line between what is called distinctively 'friendship' and love; and it is probably the influence of custom and public opinion that in most cases finally specializes the physical passion in the direction of the opposite sex."
The classification of the varieties of homosexuality is a matter of difficulty, and no classification is very fundamental. The early attempts of Krafft-Ebing and others at elaborate classification are no longer acceptable. Even the most elementary groupings become doubtful when we have definitely to fit our cases into them. The old distinction between congenital and acquired homosexuality has ceased to possess significance. When we have recognized that there is a tendency for homosexuality to arise in persons of usually normal tendency who are placed under conditions (as on board ship or in prison) where the exercise of normal sexuality is impossible, there is little further classification to be achieved along this line.[129] We have gone as far as is necessary by admitting a general undefined homosexuality,--a relationship of unspecified nature to persons of the same sex,--in addition to the more specific sexual inversion.[130] It may now be said to be recognized by all authorities, even by Freud who emphasizes a special psychological mechanism by which homosexuality may become established, that a congenital predisposition as well as an acquired tendency is necessary to constitute true inversion, apparent exceptions being too few to carry much weight. Krafft-Ebing, Näcke, Iwan Bloch, who at one time believed in the possibility of acquired inversion, all finally abandoned that view, and even Schrenck-Notzing, a vigorous champion of the doctrine of acquired inversion twenty years ago, admits the necessity of a favoring predisposition, an admission which renders the distinction between innate and acquired an unimportant, if not a merely verbal, distinction.[131] Supposing, indeed, that we are prepared to admit that true inversion may be purely acquired the decision in any particular case must be extremely difficult, and I have found very few cases which, even with imperfect knowledge, could fairly so be termed.
Even the cases (to which Schopenhauer long since referred) in which inversion is only established late in life, are no longer regarded as constituting a difficulty in accepting the doctrine of the congenital nature of inversion; in such cases the inversion is merely retarded. The conception of retarded inversion,--that is to say a latent congenital inversion becoming manifest at a late period in life,--was first brought forward by Thoinot in 1898 in his _Attentats aux Moeurs_, in order to supersede the unsatisfactory conception, as he considered it to be, of acquired inversion. Thoinot regarded retarded inversion as relatively rare and of no great importance but more accessible to therapeutic measures. Three years later, Krafft-Ebing, toward the close of his life, adopted the same conception; the cases to which he applied it were all, he considered, of bisexual disposition and usually, also, marked by sexual hyperesthesia. This way of looking at the matter was speedily championed by Näcke and may now be said to be widely accepted.[132] Moll, earlier than Thoinot, had pointed out that it is difficult to believe that homosexuality in late life can ever be produced without at least some inborn weakness of the heterosexual impulse, and that we must not deny the possibility of heredity even when homosexuality appears at the age of 50 or 60.[133] Moll believes it is very doubtful whether heterosexual satiety alone can ever suffice to produce homosexuality. Näcke was careful to set aside the cases, to which much significance was once attached, in which old men with failing sexual powers, or younger men exhausted by heterosexual debauchery, are attracted to boys. In such cases, which include the majority of those appearing late, Näcke regarded the inversion as merely spurious, the _faute de mieux_ of persons no longer apt for normal sexual activity.
Such cases no doubt need more careful psychological study than they usually receive. Féré once investigated a case of this kind in which a healthy young man (though with slightly neurotic heredity on one side) practised sexual intercourse excessively between the ages of 20 and 23--often impelled more by _amour propre_ (or what Adler would term the "masculine protest" of the organically inferior) than sexual desire--and then suddenly became impotent, at the same time losing all desire, but without any other loss of health. Six months later potency slowly returned, though never to the same extent, and he married. At the age of 35 symptoms of locomotor ataxia began to appear, and some years later he again became impotent, but without losing sexual desire. Suddenly one day, on sitting in close contact with a young man at a _table d'hôte_, he experienced a violent erection; he afterward found that the same thing occurred with other young men, and, though he had no psychic desire for men, he was constrained to seek such contact, and a repugnance for women and their sexuality arose. Five months later a complete paraplegic impotence set in; and then both the homosexual tendency and the aversion to women disappeared. (Féré, _L'Instinct Sexuel_, p. 184.) In such a case, under the influence of disease, excessive stimulation seems to result in more or less complete sexual anesthesia, just as temporarily we may be more or less blinded by excess of light; and functional power reasserts itself under the influence of a different and normally much weaker stimulus.
Leppmann, who has studied the homosexual manifestations of previously normal old men toward boys ("Greisenalter und Kriminalität," _Zeitschrift für Psychotherapie_, Bd. i, Heft 4, 1909), considers the chief factor to be a flaring up of the sexual impulse in a perverted direction in an early stage of morbid cerebral disturbance, not amounting to insanity and not involving complete irresponsibility. In such cases, Leppmann believes, the subject may, through his lack of power, be brought back to the beginning of his sexual life and to the perhaps unconsciously homosexual attractions of that age.