Freud’s unfashionable but potent view

46May 2015

OST people now see homo-

sexuality as ‘normal’, a big

improvement on the

recent past when to be gay

was a criminal oﬀence.

The Government’s proposal to hold a

Constitutional referendum aimed at

changing the law on equal marriage for

the homosexual community has, appar-

ently, been greeted so far with almost

universal approval.

This has been a long struggle. More

than one hundred years ago, in his

book ‘Leonardo da Vinci’, Freud wrote:

“Homosexual men who have started

in our times an energetic action

against the legal restrictions of their

sexual activity are fond of represent-

ing themselves through theoretical

spokesmen as evincing a sexual varia-

tion, which may be distinguished

from the very beginning, as an inter-

mediate stage of sex or as a ‘third sex’.

As much as one would wish to sub-

scribe to [the demands of

homosexuals to be considered as rep-

resenting a third sexuality] out of

humane [sic] considerations, one

must nevertheless exercise reserve

regarding their theories which were

formulated without regard for the

psychogenesis of homosexuality.

Deeper psychological discussions jus-

tify the assertion that the person who

becomes homosexual in this manner

remains ﬁxed in his unconscious on

the memory picture of his mother. By

repressing the love for his mother he

conserves the same in his uncon-

scious and henceforth remains

faithful to her. When as a lover he

seems to pursue boys, he really thus

runs away from women who could

cause him to become disloyal to his

mother”.

According to classical theory, the

human infant is polymorphously per-

verse, which means that any

conceivable object can serve sexual

gratiﬁcation. “Normal” sexuality which

grows out of the same tree as perver-

sions and other sexual choices is really

the end point of a long, often disrupted

pilgrimage and is a goal that many

never reach. It is a conceit of heterosex-

uals that their lived sexual orientation

alone is enough to classify them as

“normal”. In fact the mature sexual

drive is an achievement seldom

attained, according to Freud.

Sexuality begins at the earliest time

in the life of a human being. A more or

less hypothetical form of energy called

the libido by Freud, which occupies,

one by one, the erotogenic zones of the

body beginning with the mouth area

(the oral phase), progressing to the anal

and genital phases and indeed the mus-

culature and the whole body is the

precursor of later mature expression of

sexuality. The earliest of these phases

are subject to infant amnesia.

It may well be that ‘sexuality’ in the

sense of gender identiﬁcation, begins

long before the birth of individual

human beings and is in fact phylo-

genetic in origin. Phylogeny refers to

the development of the race and ontog-

eny to the development of the

individual. These terms belong more

correctly to biology but Freud bor-

rowed the idea for his foray into

anthropology in ‘Totem and Taboo’.

Freud was a Lamarckian (whose

theory was that characteristics

acquired by an individual can be inher-

ited by his descendants) even though

this theory does not ﬁt with the Dar-

winian view of evolution.

If there is a phylogenetic component

to sexual orientation this might help

explain why many homosexuals have

“always known” their sexual preference

and why most heterosexuals move

apparently seamlessly into the

‘straight’ world without a second

thought. Sexual orientation is seen as

innate, genetic and not a choice and

only sometimes caused by external

events. So, genetic determinism and

the domination of nature over nurture,

unacceptable in most other spheres, is

more and more popularly accepted in

the area of sexual orientation.

But this may not always be the case.

Indeed if it is the case it is not helpful to

gays since there is growing evidence

that hormonal inﬂuences from the

mother have a profound eﬀect on the

genetic system of the foetus, thus

aﬀecting which genetic traits will be

expressed in the child’s lifetime.

The stem-cell biologist and pioneer-

ing epigeneticist Bruce Lipton claims:

“Parents can …act as genetic engineers

for their children” and Norman Doidge,

in his book ‘The Brain That Changes

Itself’ writes that “thinking, learning,

and acting can turn our genes on or oﬀ,

thus shaping our brain anatomy and

our behaviour…..”.

Nevertheless, it seems churlish and

even dangerous to go against the ﬂow

of popular opinion that homosexuality

is anything other than one of the vari-

ants of ‘normal’ sexuality – especially

given that the concept of “normality” is

a cultural fantasy – and to inquire into

the nature of homosexuality and indeed

Freud’s unfashionable

but potent view

Homosexuality is often

derived from parental

inﬂuence not ‘nature’.

By Domhnall Casey

Too much love

from the mother

produced

or favoured

[an erotic

attachment

to her by the

future male

homosexual]

and this state

of aﬀairs was

furthered by the

retirement or

absence of the

father during

the childhood

“

POLITICS A psycho-analyst’s take on homosexuality

May 2015 47

of sexuality in general. The weight of

opinion seems to be overwhelmingly

that there is no question legitimately to

be asked and that we have gone beyond

the necessity for such considerations.

However, I believe that Freud and his

later interpreters provide a commen-

tary that remains of interest.

Sigmund Freud’s view of homosexu-

ality was open and liberal, as would be

expected – though it is important to

note it is not seen as the mainstream

view now. He pointed out that in the

male homosexual there was an inten-

sive erotic attachment to a “feminine

person” (mother) which was “later

entirely forgotten” by the individ-

ual……Too much love from the mother

produced or favoured this attachment”

and this state of aﬀairs was “furthered

by the retirement or absence of the

father during the childhood period”.

He went on: “Following this primary

stage, a transformation takes place

whose mechanisms we know but whose

motive forces we have not yet grasped.

The love of the mother…..merges into

repression. The boy represses the love

for the mother by putting himself in her

place, by identifying himself with her

and by taking his own person as a

model through the similarity of which

he is guided in the selection of his love

object. He thus becomes homosexual;

as a matter of fact, he returns to the

stage of autoerotism, for the boys

whom the growing adult now loves are

only substitutive persons or revivals of

his own childish person, whom he loves

in the same way as his mother loved

him. We say that he ﬁnds his love object

on the road to narcissism, for the Greek

legend called a boy Narcissus to whom

nothing was more pleasing than his

own mirrored image, and who became

transformed into a beautiful ﬂower of

this name”.

Freud was well aware that human

beings cannot be categorised deﬁni-

tively as hetero- or homo-sexual, a

distinction that seems to date back to

 and Richard von Kraﬀt –Ebing.

His dependent relationship with his

mentor Wilhelm Fliess had a homosex-

ual/erotic component (though not in

the physical sexual sense) and he was

aware of the unanalysed homosexual

element in his relationship later with

his protégé Carl Jung, mostly coming

from Jung whose “devotion” to Freud,

he admitted, had a “religious-enthusi-

astic” quality with an “undeniable

erotic undertone”.

The psycho-analytical consensus

seems to agree that all humans are psy-

chosexually bisexual, an idea that was

originally based on biology and anat-

omy which noted that males and

females possess vestigial traces of the

others’ organs (which makes gender

re-classiﬁcation possible, surgically).

Nowadays this idea relies less on anat-

omy and biology, though still

recognising the similarities, and more

on our knowledge of the process of

bonding and identiﬁcation with both

parents (though not usually in equal

measure or at the same time).

Freud wrote a famous letter to the

mother of a homosexual, who had writ-

ten to him for help:

“I gather from your letter that your

son is a homosexual. I am most

impressed by the fact that you do not

mention this term yourself in your

information about him. May I ques-

tion you, why you avoid it?

Homosexuality is assuredly no advan-

tage, but it is nothing to be ashamed

of , no vice, no degradation, it cannot

be classiﬁed as an illness; we consider

it to be a variation of the sexual func-

tion produced by a certain arrest of

sexual development (my emphasis).

Many highly respectable individuals

of ancient and modern times have

been homosexuals, several of the

greatest men among them (Plato,

Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci,

etc). It is a great injustice to persecute

homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty

too. If you do not believe me, read the

48May 2015

young child against the source of love

that betrayed it”.

Freud’s analysis of love and hate in

the paranoid is, says Moberly, “an

entirely intrapsychic construct”. His

well-known formula leaves no room for

an early interpersonal pathogenic situ-

ation. In his formula, the emotion of

love, expressed as “I, (a man) love him

(a man)” is denied and instead the love

is replaced by hate and it becomes “no,

I do not love him, I hate him”. The para-

noid’s hate is then projected onto the

other and becomes “he hates me” and

as a ﬁnal reﬁnement, a justiﬁcation is

added: “I hate him because he hates

me”.

Moberly rewrites this thus: “I (a

small boy), need to love and receive love

from my father. However, he (my

father), is behaving persecutorily to

me. Therefore, I hate him, on account

of his hateful behaviour. Likewise, my

need to love and receive love from him

is blocked because, the love source, is

behaving so hatefully”.

There is a paranoid element there

and it is a good description of the phe-

nomenon of paranoia, utilising the

mechanisms of denial and projection.

But more important is the “disidentiﬁ-

cation” of the ‘small boy’ (or girl) from

the parent of the same sex. This disi-

dentiﬁcation from a same-sex love

source, so the argument goes, can lead

to homosexuality later and the more

radical the rift the more radical the

type of homosexuality that follows. In

cases of very radical disidentiﬁcation,

there is a sense of gender dislocation

and a man or woman may insist on

being de-classiﬁed from his or her own

anatomic sex and radical surgery is

sought.

The ﬁrst love object for a boy and girl

is the mother. Later, the girl must aban-

don her attachment and cross over to

the father while the boy has the appar-

ently easier task of maintaining the

original love-object and later marrying

a ‘version’ of it in the form of a wife.

But this isn’t how Moberly sees it. For

the girl the abandonment of her ﬁrst

love-object (mother) is pathological.

Likewise if a boy does not change, to

the father, then this is pathological.

Same-sex attachment is essential for

the attainment of same-sex identity.

Disidentiﬁcation implies regression

(from the father) to the ﬁrst love object

(mother) in the boy and in the girl it

implies a loss of the ﬁrst love object

(mother). The loss of the mother may be

compounded, if we follow classical

theory, by the female’s sense of having

already lost a penis which may be

blamed on the mother.

So, the normal course for the girl is

to retain the ﬁrst love object and for the

boy to change to the same-sex parent.

In other words, the path towards

individuality and selood is more com-

plex for the boy. Further, to behave

heterosexually in adulthood one “must

have become heteros – truly other than

the love-object one relates to. To

become other psychologically as well as

physically from the love-object one has

to identify in the early, crucial years,

with the same-sex parent. True hetero-

sexuality is based on the fulﬁlment of

‘homos-sexual’ needs. The homos-sex-

ual phase is precisely the one that

homosexuals missed for one reason or

another.

For males, the father and son bond

that might be expected did not exist in

the experience of homosexual men.

Their fathers tended to be absent either

psychologically or physically at impor-

tant times in the child’s development.

As a consequence, the son-mother

relationship may assume more impor-

tance than it would otherwise have or

ought to have. Eﬀeminate characteris-

tics and other traits may follow

naturally from this. But these males

have not forsaken their maleness,

because they had never fully arrived at

that point in the ﬁrst place.

The male homosexual attempts to

repair the wounds of attachment to his

father through homosexual relation-

ships but for various reasons these

relationships are prone to failure. First,

both partners are looking for the same

thing and they have similar needs and

are trying to have them met through

another who also lacks the means to

supply them. But, more important, the

negative side of the ambivalence

towards the earlier love-object may

emerge in the relationship, and indeed

since the point of the relationship is to

facilitate a renewed (but crucially

unconscious) attempt at attachment,

the re-emergence of the hostile aspect

of the repressed ambivalence is almost

assured.

In Moberly’s view, the genuine heter-

osexual is an ex-homosexual in the

sense that the need to identify with the

parent of the same sex has been met. It

follows that homosexual behaviour in

books of Havelock Ellis.

By asking me if I can help, you

mean, I suppose, if I can abolish

homosexuality and make normal het-

erosexuality take its place. The

answer is, in a general way, we cannot

promise to achieve it. In a certain

number of cases we succeed in devel-

oping the blighted germs of

heterosexual tendencies which are

present in every homosexual, in the

majority of cases it is no more possi-

ble. It is a question of the quality and

the age of the individual. The result of

treatment cannot be predicted.

What analysis can do for your son

runs in a diﬀerent line. If he is

unhappy, neurotic, torn by conﬂicts,

inhibited in his social life, analysis

may bring him harmony, peace of

mind, full eﬃciency whether he

remains a homosexual or gets

changed”.

The complex process of attachment

to parents or rather the failure in this

area, put forward by Freud, is echoed

and ampliﬁed by Elizabeth Moberly in

her book ‘Psychogenesis’.

The loss of a mother or mother-ﬁgure

when a child is between six months and

three or four years is an event of high

pathogenic potential. There are three

phases of grief in reaction to this loss

(according to John Bowlby) and these

are: protest, despair and detachment,

the latter being an important concept

as we shall see later. All of this may be

resolved after a period of mourning but

the mourning may not be worked

through and if this is so, the result is

either repressed yearning or repressed

reproaches against the love-object. A

tendency towards pathological mourn-

ing in the adult may be the result.

If both repressed yearning for the

love-object and repressed reproaches

against it survive into adulthood

together and become reactivated, what

is the result? An intense need for love

and an intense anger against the same

love-object. In other words paranoia.

She hypothesises that paranoia is the

reactivation, in adult life, of unresolved

infant trauma resulting in ambivalence

towards the same-sex parent.

The trauma referred to may be

caused by separation but it may be

other than that and it aﬀects the child’s

libidinal capacity, that is, his capacity

to love and to receive love. The para-

noia that follows “not only involves, but

is itself the repressed reproaches to the

The American

Psychological

Association

point out that

“gay marriages”

and any children

arising out of

these marriages

“largely

resemble those

of heterosexual

partnerships”

“

POLITICS A psycho-analyst’s take on homosexuality

May 2015 49

adults can be seen in this light, that is,

in the sense that it is reparative at least

in intention, although probably uncon-

scious. The call to introduce longed-for

marriage may also indicate a desire to

regularise homosexual unions and the

desire among some sections of the gay

community to attempt to move away

from the perception of sexual promis-

cuity (perhaps inaccurately) associated

with male homosexual behaviour.

With marriage usually come children

and many homosexual couples wish to

adopt. Indeed, many high-proﬁle gays

already have. Debate has focused on the

children of such unions and whether

being brought up by parents of the

same sex has any adverse eﬀect on the

children. The answer, at this stage, has

to be that it is too soon to tell, though

there has been much ill-informed

debate.

It should be noted that the American

Psychological Association and other

such organisations are careful to point

out that not only has their research

shown that prejudice and discrimina-

tion against homosexuals have

“negative psychological eﬀects” but

that “gay marriages” and any children

arising out of these marriages “largely

resemble those of heterosexual part-

nerships”. The outcome for any such

children must surely depend not only

on the sexual orientation of the parents

but on the kind of people the parents

are. However, something of an answer

to this question is alluded to in the ﬁnal

paragraph of Moberly’s book.

Her plea – which will understandably

be perceived as patronising by homo-

sexuals – is that homosexuality should

not be condemned or punished, no

more than one would think of “punish-

ing an orphan”. This analogy, she goes

on: “...proves to be particularly close,

since the homosexual has suﬀered from

some deﬁcit in the parent-child rela-

tionship (whether or not this was wilful

on the part of the parent). The homo-

sexual may thus be understood as a

kind of psychological orphan. In the

case of radical dis-identiﬁcation, this

state of orphanhood is particularly

severe. The question to be asked here

(and to a lesser degree in lesser states of

dis-identiﬁcation) is this: should a boy

of two or three be permanently

deprived of his father? Should a girl of

two or three be permanently deprived

of her mother? (my italics). If your

answer to this is no, you may not

condemn the homosexual response,

since this is itself the solution to pre-

cisely this kind of problem”.

Of course many will wonder why

Moberly refers to “his” father and “her”

mother (instead of “a” father and “a”

mother) when gay marriage and adop-

tion, one of the issues of our times,

evokes not the removal of children from

their natural parents but rather their

adoption when one or both of those

parents cannot or will not act as

parent.

In common with the rest of humanity

only perhaps more so, at least in the

area of sexuality and choice of same-

sex partner, homosexual men and

women are often in thrall to uncon-

scious coping mechanisms. It takes

men and women of understanding and

awareness to make such same-sex

unions work though it would seem,

very anecdotally, that female homosex-

uals are more successful than males.

Nevertheless, even if some psycholo-

gists use the language of deﬁciency

they are of course not taking a moralis-

tic stance. Looked at another way

homosexuality may be a bonus for soci-

ety. Writing in the Guardian, Julie

Bindel asks: “Why do the majority of

the gay rights lobby get so nervous

when some of us speak of being gay as a

positive alternative to heterosexuality?

Is our sexuality really something

genetically imposed on us that we have

no control over? Why is so much eﬀort

put into locating a gay gene and not a

paedophile gene? Are we seen as even

more dangerous than child abusers, or

is it that it some of us have so little

pride in who we are that we behave as

though we are born with a kink in our

nature? If we have been led to believe

that we are powerless to determine our

sexual orientation does that protect us

from the bigots? How does it explain

bisexuality? What about the “late

bloomers”, the Hasbians and

Yestergays?”.

Matthew Parris, writing in the Spec-

tator, is even more radical. He rejects

the view that homosexuals are “inher-

ently hedonistic, seeking sex only the

sake of sex” and that they would

become “degenerates in more that the

physical sense, and live only for today

and for pleasure” (he is quoting a col-

league of his, Paul Johnson). On the

contrary, he writes: “Gays would be

drawn from the values of constancy and

love, and duty to elders and

successors”.

Parris, himself a homosexual, looks

to Plato’s view that heterosexual repro-

duction was more likely to distract men

from wider social obligations. “Same

sex couples” says Parris, interpreting

and expanding on Plato’s notion,

“would make ideas and values their

‘children’: the public good would be

‘family’ to them’ and they would not be

distracted from public duty by the

desire to spawn, endow and promote

copies of themselves for the next gener-

ation. Gay men would prove more

selﬂess politicians”.

While intriguing, most would agree

this view is an unrealistic misrepresen-

tation of present reality and a wildly

over-optimistic expectation for any

sector.

We are undoubtedly still very far

from liberation and while sentiments

and ideas have thankfully changed very

much since Moberly’s book was ﬁrst

published in  and even more since

Freud’s time, her insights and ques-

tions, built on and arising from the

insights of Freud and others may

demand patience but give historical

perspective should not fall victim to the

oﬀensive of blind and unquestioning

political correctness.

In some cases there may be reasons

in nurture rather than nature for homo-

sexuality. Provided it does not lead to

prejudice or moralism it may be useful

to recognise that. •

Domhnall Casey is a

psycho-analyst and

psychologist. This is

part of a much longer

paper.