ven if considerable
in one case, may be inconsiderable in another. Freud, who sets
forth one type of homosexual mechanism, admits that there may be
others. Moreover, it must be added that the psychoanalytic method
by no means excludes unconscious deception by the subject, as
Freud found, and so was compelled to admit the patient's tendency
to "fantasy," as Adler has to "fictions," as a fundamental
psychic tendency of the "unconscious."

The force of these considerations is now beginning to be
generally recognized. Thus Moll (art. "Homosexualitaet," in 4th
ed. of Eulenburg's _Realencyclopaedie der gesamten Heilkunde_,
1909, p. 611) rightly says that while the invert may occasionally
embroider his story, "the expert can usually distinguish between
the truth and the poetry, though it is unnecessary to add that
complete confidence on the patient's part is necessary," Naecke,
again (_Sexual-Probleme_, September, 1911, p. 619), after quoting
with approval the remark of one of the chief German authorities,
Dr. Numa Praetorius, that "a great number of inverts' histories
are at the least as trustworthy as the attempts of
psychoanalysts, especially when they come from persons skillful
in self-analysis," adds that "even Freudian analysis gives no
absolute guarantee for truth. A healthy skepticism is
justifiable--but not an unhealthy skepticism!" Hirschfeld, also
(_Die Homosexualitaet_, p. 164), whose knowledge of such histories
is unrivalled, remarks that while we may now and then meet with a
case of _pseudo-logia fantastica_ in connection with psychic
debility on the basis of a psychopathic constitution, "taken all
in all any generalized assertion of the falsehood of inverts is
an empty fiction, and is merely a sign that the physicians who
make it have not been able to win the trust of the men and women
who consult them." My own experience has fully convinced me of
the truth of this, statement. I am assured that many of the
inverts I have met not only possess a rare power of intellectual
self-analysis (stimulated by the constant and inevitable contrast
between their own feelings and those of the world around them),
but an unsparing sincerity in that self-analysis not so very
often attained by normal people.

The histories which follow have been obtained in various ways,
and are