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Quotations/Comments678-666678 Consistently, psychosexual confusion and underlying homoerotic impulses are apparent. On Rorschach Card III he cannot decide whether to attribute male or female gender characteristics to ambiguous figures, and passive floral imagery abounds - an apparent polar opposite to his father. In more heavily identifying with his mother he apparently perceived her as consistently the more powerful parent - symbolically castrating both himself and his father. Her control, perhaps in part resulting in a resentful paternal aloofness and covert competition toward the son, has left Mr. Koffend with fears of a male attack. But the strength of his castration fears seems in direct proportion to his driven need to deny all negative or aggressive feelings towards men. He attempts to diminish the frightening power of other males in an almost hysterical counterphobic manner. - A Letter To My Wife, by John Kofend, Saturday Review Press, New York, 1972, p. (xxvii) The individual described in the above-quoted psychological analysis is very obviously a person afflicted with severe bisexual conflict and gender confusion and is one who has described himself as "schizoid, though not schizophrenic" and suffering at various times from alcoholism, intense depressions and suicidal thoughts. Furthermore, he is very fortunate to have gained just enough ego strength from various positive masculine life experiences to keep him from slipping into outright schizophrenic symptomatology from his self-described "schizoid" state. There is a very fine line, however, to be drawn in this case between the one and the other, and that "schizoid" balance could very easily be upset by any further negative life influences impinging upon his male/female self-image, or his "bearded lady" self.
677 If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. Dr. Thomas Szasz, psychiatrist. What is the difference, really? If hearing voices is one of the common symptoms of schizophrenia (see, for example, the case of Joan of Arc), then answering or initiating a discourse with the source of that voice, be it God or otherwise, would also be a mark of schizophrenic behavior.
676 I am tired of being sad; I had a beautiful giggle, now my heart is split in two. It will take time to heal. I am clean now, I don't want to be dirty; it's like being gay. I drove tanks at Ft. Knox and loved the discipline of the Army. I loved being clean, perfect, with my brass shined; I shined all my bars until they glowed. - Solving Psychiatric Puzzles, How Sad and Bad and Mad It Was, V. Sagar Sethi, MD, PhD, with George W. Jacobs, AuthorHouse, Bloomington, IN, 2004, p.155. My mind began to unravel. The only thing I could focus on was killing myself. If I tried to concentrate, thoughts would bind me to the sadness of childhood. I was finally under a psychiatrist's care. I began to tell him things that had haunted me for years - my desire to be...I still refuse to bear the thought of being gay or bisexual. I just want to be a mother, take care of others, or give a hug to a person with cancer. It felt right. Being gay is not me, being a woman would make the thoughts and desires normal. (Ibid, p.162) At his third visit, three weeks later, Lee was doing better. He was seeing a new therapist, his business was doing well, and he was considering reconciliation with his wife. However, this stage in his recovery was brief. When Lee came the following month he recounted many problems: suffering from diarrhea and back pain, was irritable and depressed, and was having problems with the phone at work. At this session, he recounted an issue that obviously brought him severe stress. Lee was quite confused with his sexual identity. Unsure if he was gay or bisexual, he practiced cross-dressing. He enjoyed shaving his legs, wearing pantyhose and women's clothing. His therapist encouraged him to discuss this issue with me. Lee was specific in relating that he was not happy in his own body as a man. He denied being suicidal. I increased his Remeron to 60 mg, and recommended him to a therapist who specialized in sexual issues. (Ibid, p.166-167) His sexual therapy was going well. He was able to masturbate. He liked women's clothing, and had been purchasing panties, sweaters, and bras. (Ibid, p. 169) At his August visit, Lee spoke about telling his story during an AA meeting, and at his church. He feels very proud of his accomplishments in business and his relationship with his sons, who are working with him. Lee has wanted to be a girl all his life. He received laser treatment to remove hair from his face, arms, and legs. He is wearing pantyhose, bras and makeup. He also has found a jeweler who has made him rings and a necklace. He is planning to take estrogen, and has located a surgeon who specializes in removing male sexual organs and reconstructing them to resemble female organs. Lee says he has not had sexual relations with anyone for three years and denies being homosexual. While this may appear rather contradictory, becoming a woman for Lee allows him to feel feminine, have relationships with men, and not consider himself homosexual. (Ibid, p. 170-171) Lee, the name of the above patient, had been obviously suffering from schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease, before taking the ultimate step of having himself surgically transformed into a female. He had previously been an alcoholic, a drug addict, suicidally depressed, and hospitalized numerous times in psychiatric institutions. Being unable to tolerate the thought he was a homosexual, he took refuge in the illusion that he had been born into the wrong body as a male rather than a female. Finally he took the steps to right what his considered this grievous wrong done him by mother nature by having himself "reborn" as a female. Thus his long, tortuous journey through all the painful vicissitudes of being severely mentally ill had led him to this ultimate destination, one where hopefully at last he would experience a modicum of happiness and contentment, so long absent from his previous life. Lee would certainly be in agreement with that famous psychiatric patient, Daniel Paul Schreber, who wrote in his seminal autobiography, "Memoirs of My Nervous Illness,” that "I would like to meet the man who, faced with the choice of either being a demented human being in male habitus or a spirited woman, would not prefer the latter. Such and only such is the issue for me." Lee had lived his own life as a "demented human being" before having himself transformed into a "spirited woman" by the marvels of modern medicine. Daniel Paul Schreber was instead forced to utilize the powers of his own delusional, psychotic imagination to self-transform his body into that of a female. In the words of Dr. Ida Macalpine and Dr. Richard A. Hunter, editors of the Wm. Dawson & Sons Ltd., London, l955, edition of Schreber's monumental treatise describing his own case of "nervous illness" - "Schreber's name is legion." What they meant by this description is that all cases of paranoia/schizophrenia invariably have as their common denominator this factor of bisexual conflict/gender confusion. In other words, Schreber, Lee and brethren are afflicted, one and all, with the bearded lady disease - schizophrenia.
675 A patient just released from a mental hospital feels, whether correctly or incorrectly, that he is being watched with some degree of doubt and suspicion and even with hostility. He is paralyzed by the fear of doing or saying anything, because it may seem strange and be misinterpreted. Whether his feelings about how others are reacting to him may be only in his mind, nevertheless he feels keenly that others are sizing him up and perhaps discussing him (and what is more, some of them really are doing just that). He is compelled continuously to prove himself in some way - to pass some kind of test and jump through hoops - in order to be readmitted to the society of "normal" people. He becomes so anxious to prove that he is normal that he often does do and say strange things that make him appear "different" and unlike himself. There is bound to be at first a strained atmosphere, and the ex-patient becomes bewildered and feels rejected and frightened. The questions this resident asked caused resentment and loss of faith in myself again and generated old doubts and fears. I said nothing at the time to him, but I hated myself for being so passive, and decided to have it out with him. I felt a lot better after I had talked to him. I told him, "Please try never to be unaware about a former mental patient's feelings. He is already so troubled about physical and mental stability and emotional health that the attitude with which he is approached can cause grave doubts in his mind about himself, withdrawal, and a relapse." Ibid, p. 143 The fear of losing me, or my identity, again is still with me. The fear of "going back" remains the worst of all. I say to myself, even if I did have to "go back," and I don't think I will, I made it once, and I can make it again, and it will be easier next time because I know more about the kind of treatment I need. I don't always believe I could make it again, though. Ibid. p. 145 Without first knowing the identity of the author of the above quotations, the average person reading them would undoubtedly be very surprised to learn that it is a woman rather than a man, since all references to mental patients in them are presented in the masculine gender, whereas in reality their author is a female mental patient. This very clearly demonstrates the very powerful, unconscious identification of the patient with the male sex rather than with her own sex, thus highlighting her severe bisexual conflict/gender confusion and its consequent role in being the root cause of her mental illness, as it invariably is all mental illness. The fear of losing her "identity", which she mentions in the last quotation, is really her fear of once again losing her gender identity as a female, which loss had originally precipitated her descent into mental illness. . Before she had succumbed to her mental breakdown she had been a typical "daddy's girl,” or tomboy, who had strongly identified unconsciously as a male with her father, having engaged in many childhood hunting and fishing expeditions with him and then later in life participating actively in highly competitive sports. This is a common formula which leads to the development of severe bisexual conflict and gender identity confusion in women, resulting inexorably in schizophrenic, or bearded lady disease symptomatology when the consequent bisexual, or homosexual, interests and cravings are deeply repressed by the concerned individual.
674 For example, on one or two occasions in my years-long work with a physically attractive and often very seductive paranoid schizophrenic woman, I have felt hard put to it to keep from going crazy when she was simultaneously (a) engaging me in some politico-philosophical debate (in which she was expressing herself with a virile kind of forceful, businesslike vigour while I, though not being given a chance to say much, felt quite strongly urged to argue some of these points with her, and did so); and (b) strolling about the room or posing herself on her bed in an extremely short-skirted dancing costume, in a sexually inflaming way. She made no verbal reference to sex, except for charging me, early in the hour, with having 'lustful', 'erotic' desires; from there on, all the verbal interaction was this debate about theology, philosophy, and international politics, and it seemed to me that the non-verbal interaction was blatantly sexual. But - and here is, I think, the crucial point - I felt no consensual validation (at a conscious level) from her about this more covert interaction; this non-verbal sexual interaction tended to appear as simply a 'crazy' product of my own imagination. - Collected Papers on Schizophrenia and Related Subjects, Harold F. Searles, M.D., International Universities Press, New York, l965, P. 258. It is very obvious from a reading of the above quotation that this deeply disturbed, paranoid schizophrenic woman is mightily conflicted between her male and female sides, or her bearded lady self. Displaying them both so forcefully yet simultaneously is what makes her 'craziness' readily apparent, while concurrently demonstrating the very unsettling effect her deep-rooted bisexual conflict/gender confusion state of mind has on Dr. Searles’ own mental equilibrium, just as it would effect anyone engaged in any manner of personal interaction with her, be it a male or a female.
673 Mr. Rogov, a professor at City College of New York, argues in his book "A Fatal Friendship: Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr" (Hill and Wang, 1998) that Hamilton became obsessed with his hatred of Burr and that this obsession ultimately prompted him to force the situation that led to his death in their duel. Hamilton, more than Burr, was thus responsible for Hamilton's death, Mr. Rogow argued..........Mr. Rogov used his psychoanalytic knowledge to diagnose Hamilton as a manic depressive who, in effect, committed suicide by agreeing to fight a duel with Burr. Mr. Rogov argued that Hamilton was pulled down by recurring illnesses and was depressed by Washington's unexpected death in 1799. Hamilton's decision not to fire, as well as his serenity in the days before the duel, contributed to Mr. Rogov's diagnosis. - Douglas Smith, The New York Times, March 2, 2006, P. C23. Alexander Hamilton's obsessive hatred of Aaron Burr was based on a powerful, unconscious homosexual attraction to him, as is always the case in such examples of paranoid and obsessive behavior. The fact that Hamilton was known by his peers to be suffering from "recurring illnesses", i.e. manic-depression, which name is interchangeable with the term schizophrenia, adds further proof to this diagnosis. As Sigmund Freud so brilliantly explained the working of the paranoid mechanism, the schizophrenic's thinking invariably follows the following pattern: "I love him." Then immediately comes the denial, "No, I don't love him, I hate him." Next appears the so-called paranoid projective shift, "No, I don't hate him, he hates me and wants to kill me, so I have to kill him first in self defense." (This same paranoid mechanism holds equally true for schizophrenic women, obviously.) Note here that it was Hamilton who forced the fateful (and fatal) duel, not Burr. Furthermore, there was clearly a passive, feminine homosexual undertone in Hamilton's actions at the duel, as he presented himself in a totally helpless physical posture to Burr and waited for the latter to shoot him with a gun, symbolically representing being penetrated by the issue of Burr's penis, i.e. gun. Basically what Hamilton's actions were telling Burr was "Here, take me, and do what you will with my body." As Burr was later quoted as having remarked following the duel, "My friend Hamilton, whom I shot." This is proof that Burr held no great animosity towards Hamilton and that all the hate and anger were emanating from Hamilton's side as the direct result of his psychotic paranoia. Currently, almost everyday, we are confronted with similar cases wherein a psychotic male will set up a situation where police officers are forced to fire at him in order to protect their own lives. We call this "Suicide by cop." In Hamilton's case it was "Suicide by Aaron Burr." It is true that Burr didn't have to kill Hamilton after Hamilton refused to fire, but in Burr's defense Hamilton may later have insisted on another duel at which time he could have fired and killed Burr. Thus we see that schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease, claimed yet another of its countless victims, the esteemed but psychotic Alexander Hamilton. (Professor Arnold A. Rogov, the author of the above quoted book on Hamilton and Burr, who recently died, was a great psychoanalyst/political scientist and will be sorely missed by all in the intellectual and rational world.)
672 Current nosology lists schizophrenia, affective disorders, and paranoia as "functional" psychoses. These psychoses normally can be readily distinguished from organic psychoses. Evidence of organic brain disease is absent and intellectual deterioration does not occur. Sexual disturbances are multifaceted and common. With affective disorders, the sexual drive frequently increases with mood elevation and decreases with mood depression. Homosexual aspirations and concerns may be associated with all psychoses, but are most common with paranoia. Doubt about sexual identity, altered sexual performance, exaggerated sexual needs, and especially intimacy fears predominate in schizophrenia. - Patrick T. Donlon, M.D., Assoc. Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, University of California School of Medicine (Davis), in Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality, November 1976. Dr. Donlon here provides further corroboration of the fact that severe bisexual conflict/gender confusion lies at the root of all functional mental illness. He says that "homosexual aspirations and concerns may be associated with all psychoses, but are most common with paranoia." In actuality they are equally common to all the psychoneuroses as well, but become clinically most apparent in the delusional behavior associated with paranoid schizophrenic symptomatology.
671 Boston, Feb. 6 - The note was short, scrawled by hand and not very detailed. But to investigators in New Bedford, Mass., where 18-year-old Jacob D. Robida used a hatchet and a gun to attack three patrons in a gay bar last Thursday, the note Mr. Robida apparently wrote that same night was a portent there was more violence to come. This is a classic case of a schizophrenic young man in a so-called "homosexual panic", one brought on by his own powerful and long repressed homosexual longings which are suddenly threatening to break through to conscious awareness. This factor is invariably the trigger in all these cases where men (and less often women) suddenly run amok, trying to kill all within their reach and then finally, in most instances, themselves also, either by their own hand or by forcing others in self-defense to destroy them, as in this particular case. District attorney Walsh, in commenting on Jacob Robida's note, stated that "My gut early on, in kicking it around with the investigators, was that he will go down in a blaze of bullets, that this is a suicidal rampage, and our fear was that he would kill five cops." (Ibid, New York Times, p. A-13, see above.) Mr. Walsh was certainly prescient, as Robida finally ended his "suicidal rampage" after killing one police officer and then a woman friend riding with him in his car, until he was finally shot to death by the police. Robida had been driven to suicide, always the most serious symptom of schizophrenia, by his fulminating schizophrenic delusions fueled by his repressed bisexual conflict/gender confusion. Tragically, in all too many cases the schizophrenic person will kill others before he himself is either killed or commits suicide. This case has all the elements of a "suicide by cop" situation, wherein the schizophrenic person transfers responsibility for his act of self-destruction over to the police. That "trigger" Mr. Walsh was searching for is always the homosexual panic situation which drives the afflicted person literally insane. Previously there had been "no suggestion that he was antigay", said Mr. Walsh, speaking of Mr. Robida, so it was puzzling to the investigators why Robida would suddenly go into a gay bar and attack the patrons within. Actually what Robida was really attacking was the enormous temptation the patrons of the gay bar represented to his own deeply repressed and denied homosexual feelings, feelings which were so powerful they both terrified him while concurrently tempting him to act upon them. It was this terrible inner conflict, finally surfacing from his unconscious mind where it had long been repressed, that drove him mad and was the immediate trigger leading to his psychotic and lethal rampage, as it is in every such case of sudden and terrible mayhem. Finally, the district attorney's comment that "This kid's awful young to be that hateful" can readily be explained by the fact that schizophrenia most often strikes at young persons during their pubertal period, or closely thereafter. The original name for this devastating illness was "dementia praecox", because it was observed that it most often developed for the first time during this critical period of adolescence when new, powerful sexual feelings, fueled by the pubertal hormonal surges, become all-important in the individual's psychic and physical development. And if there have been prior deviations in this development, such as bisexual conflict and gender identity confusion in the individual, then the conflict caused by the onset of these powerful new forces of sexuality can lead to psychotic, or schizophrenic behavior in the afflicted individual of either sex, exactly as happened in this case. Mr. Robida's puzzling and psychotic "hate" was the direct result of the complete frustration of his homosexual drives through their repression. Frustrated sexuality always converts into hate. This is a basic law of nature. The energy of the denied sexual urge is what fuels the hate, and the stronger the denied sexual urge is, the more powerful the hate, as in this case of the unfortunate Mr. Robida and his unfortunate, innocent victims. Schizophrenia, the bearded lady disease, has once again reaped death and destruction upon the world we live in, as it will do again and again ad infinitum into the future, like it has always done in the past, until we can understand it's mechanism, thus enabling us to deconstruct it before greater damage and tragedy can ensue.
670 Mais, dans des cas pareils, c'est toujours la chose ģenitale, toujours! toujurs! toujours! — Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) The renowned French neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot, one of whose students for a brief period was Sigmund Freud, is here stating the fact that in every case of mental illness he had investigated at his famous Parisian clinic, the underlying cause of the illness was invariably related to sexual (genital) disturbances in the individual so afflicted, be it male or female - "always! always! always!" Charcot's teaching had a profound influence on the development of Freud's later theories, which up to that time had not stressed the overwhelming importance of repressed sexual factors in the development of mental illness. The second greatest influence on Freud's thinking in this field was Dr. Wilhelm Fliess, an otorhinolaryngologist from Berlin, who was the first person ever to broach to him the subject of the innate bisexuality of all humans. Freud was skeptical of this insight in the beginning but as he progressed further into his psycho-analytic practice, he began to see how this bisexual factor appeared sooner or later in the reports of all his patients, albeit in most cases only after very severe resistance to its recognition on their part. Freud eventually began to accept the fact that everyone is a "bearded lady", some more than others, and that is was the repression of this conflict between the two sides of the person, the male and the female, that lay at the root of all the neuroses and also of the psychosis he called paranoia, now called paranoid schizophrenia. Unfortunately, Freud believed paranoia and schizophrenia were two different illnesses with different early fixation points, and therefore that investigators must look elsewhere for the cause of schizophrenia. Because of this critical error in judgment on his part the vast majority of investigators who followed in his wake has ever since been conducting a fruitless search for the supposedly elusive cause of this devastating illness. The fact that schizophrenia, originally called dementia praecox (precocious dementia), begins most often in individuals at or shortly thereafter the onset of puberty, should certainly have alerted investigators to the fact it must be closely connected to sexuality in some manner, even though its bisexual conflict/gender confusion component was not so clear at first and required some serious psychological digging to uncover. Through the brilliant pioneering work of Charcot to Fliess to Freud lay the path of discovery allowing future generations of investigators finally to uncover the ultimate secrets of mental illness.
669 Sex is messy, passionate, unclear, tentative, anxious, liberating, frightening, embarrassing, consoling, and cerebral. It's contradictory, different for different people and different for the same person at different times. It operates at three or four levels simultaneously. And all that covers only masturbation. — Pepper Schwartz, professor of sociology, University of Washington, USA.
In this brilliant analysis, Professor Schwartz treats the universal phenomenon of masturbation with the profound wisdom, depth of insight and respect that the subject deserves. We are all intimately connected with it and what he has to say about it, whether we acknowledge it or not.
668 Hysterical symptoms hardly ever appear so long as children are masturbating, but only afterwards, when a period of abstinence has set in; they form a substitute for masturbatory satisfaction, the desire for which continues to persist in the unconscious until another more normal kind of satisfaction appears when that is still obtainable. — “A Case of Hysteria”, Sigmund Freud, p.79, Vol.7, The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Hogarth Press, London.
What Freud is basically postulating here is that all hysterical symptoms are fueled by, and have their genesis in, old masturbatory fantasies once enjoyed by the patient but now long repressed. Obviously, then, the cure for these present day hysterical symptoms requires a return to those old masturbatory fantasies and the orgasmic satisfactions connected therewith. This results in the diminution and eventual eradication of the hysterical symptoms to the point that the patient is no longer bothered by them and can then proceed to change these archaic orgasmic satisfactions into "more normal kind of satisfaction" if hopefully that outcome "is still obtainable." But as long as these fantasies remain repressed in the unconscious, no real psychosexual growth for the individual so afflicted is possible. Thus we can see that one of the primary goals in any person's psycho-analysis is to uncover these archaic and predominantly "perverse", or bisexual/gender confused, masturbatory fantasies which are still clinging tenaciously to life in the patient's unconscious psyche, where they assert such a powerful, regressive effect on the person's overall striving towards psychosexual health and maturity, and then abreact them by orgasmically discharging them as many times as needed until they finally lose for good their sexual power to disturb the psychic equilibrium. Only in this manner will these heretofore repressed masturbatory fantasies at last be robbed of their power to wreak havoc on the individual’s psychic health, and the hysterical symptoms will be eradicated, a beneficial result much to be desired in all cases of mental illness.
667 ...It has dawned on me that masturbation is the one major habit, the ‘primal addiction’, and that it is only as a substitute for it that the other addictions - for alcohol, morphine, tobacco, etc. - come into existence. — “Extracts from the Fliess Papers”, Sigmund Freud, Letter 79, p. 272, Vol 1, The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, the Hogarth Press, London.
In many ways this is the most profound insight uncovered by Freud during his lifetime. For truly, masturbation is mankind's "primal addiction", lasting a lifetime. And not only does this hold true for all humans, without exception, but for all other mammals as well, both the young and the old. Masturbation is not just mankind's "primal addiction", it is the universal one. Freud, far more than most, realized the immense importance of masturbation to the physical and mental wellbeing not only of his own patients but of everyone else as well. Fully one-and-a-half pages in the index to his 24 volumes of collected works have citations directly under the heading "Masturbation." In essence, what Freud was trying to explain in the above quotation is that the addictive cravings for alcohol, tobacco, drugs, gambling, etc. arise as substitutes for the powerful sexual satisfactions once provided by masturbatory fantasies, fantasies which have long been repressed and denied due to their ego--dystonic nature. By that is meant that these masturbatory fantasies eventually became threatening to the person's self-esteem and self-regard, in the great majority of cases because these now ego-dystonic masturbatory fantasies are fantasies of being of the opposite sex. These type of opposite-sex fantasies occur universally and naturally during the early, androgynous state of development common to the young of all cultures. Once repressed into the unconscious these early masturbatory fantasies can only grow in strength and urgency until later in life they are finally able to break out of their psychological/ physical confinement and find release by converting their frustrated sexual energy into the addictive cravings mentioned by Freud. Thus the cure for these later substitute addictions is for the addict to return consciously to those long-repressed, primal, now ego-dystonic masturbatory fantasies and de-repress and abreact them masturbatorily until they lose their power and ability to fuel the addictive, substitute cravings, cravings which can be so hugely destructive to the individual so afflicted. This de-repression and abreaction of long-repressed masturbatory fantasies is one of the primary goals to be reached in anyone's psychoanalysis, male or female. (See also Quotation 528 in the book, Schizophrenia-The Bearded Lady Disease, to gain an understanding of how this de-repression and abreaction mechanism can be accomplished, always to the great benefit of the individual concerned.)
666 She included a previously unknown Auden poem in the form of a letter written on Christmas Day 1941, in which the events of the Nativity are given outrageous counterparts in the relationship between Auden and Kallman. It reads, in part: ‘Because mothers have much to do with your queerness and mine, because we have both lost ours, and because Mary is a camp name: As this morning I think of Mary I think of you. '
— Douglas Martin, The New York Times, Obituary page, November 2, 2003, eulogizing the life of Dorothy J. Parnan, and referencing her book, Auden in Love, Simon & Schuster, 1984.
“The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, as the old saying goes.” The most profound psychological truth is contained in this observation. If the mother is emotionally mature and mentally stable (one and the same thing, really), her children will grow up to be likewise. If she is not, then her children will suffer accordingly. And only too often this suffering will result in the development of the warped sexual and emotional attitudes leading to homosexuality, or, if the latter is repressed and denied, to schizophrenia. Obviously, as we can see from the above poem and from other knowledge of their lives, the poet, W. H. Auden and his lover, Chester Kallman, were certainly not repressing their homosexual feelings, and thankfully so, for if they had tried, they would both have become insane. We can also see that both men had great insight into the all-important role their mothers had played in the development of their "queerness". The psychiatrist G.W. Socarides has referred to homosexuality as a "neurotic" adaptation that in males stems from emotionally-demanding, all-possessive mothers who are wed to emotionally and/or physically absent fathers. Still another way to describe these mothers of homosexual sons is that they are close, binding and intimate with them, as well as with their daughters, leading to the same result in both sexes – children who are conflicted and confused as to which sex they belong and to what sexual orientation most fits their neurotic needs. She is the classic masculine mother who rules the roost, or ‘wears the pants’ in the family, as she has steadily been described down through the ages, and who is married to the similarly classically-ineffective, effeminate man who often tries to disguise his feckless behavior behind a shield of disruptive, psychopathic behavior, such as alcoholism, drug addiction, satyriasis, etc. |
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