and
Stekel, who no longer belong to the orthodox Freudian school. When inverts
are psycho-analytically studied, Freud believes, it is found that in early
childhood they go through a phase of intense but brief fixation on a
woman, usually the mother, or perhaps sister. Then, an internal censure
inhibiting this incestuous impulse, they overcome it by identifying
themselves with women and taking refuge in Narcissism, the self becoming
the sexual object. Finally they look for youthful males resembling
themselves, whom they love as their mothers loved them. Their pursuit of
men is thus determined by their flight from women. This view has been set
forth not only by Freud but by Sadger, Stekel, and many others.[225] Freud
himself, however, is careful to state that this process only represents
one type of stunted sexual activity, and that the problem of inversion is
complex and diversified.

This view may be said to assume a bisexual constitution as
normal, and homosexuality arises by the suppression, owing to
some accident, of the heterosexual component, and the path
through an autoerotic process of Narcissism to homosexuality. On
this general Freudian conception of homosexuality numerous
variations have been based, and separate features specially
emphasized, by individual psychoanalysts. Thus Sadger considers
that, beneath the male individual loved by the invert, a female
is concealed, and that this fact may be revealed by
psychoanalysis which removes the upper layer of the psychic
palimpsest; he believes that this disposition of the invert is
favored by a frequent mixture of male and female traits in his
near relatives; originally, "it is not man whom the homosexual
man loves and desires but man and woman together in one form";
the heterosexual element is later suppressed, and then pure
inversion is left. Further, developing Freud's view of the
importance of anal eroticism (Freud, _Sammlung Kleiner Schriften
zur Neurosenlehre_, vol. ii), Sadger thinks that it is even the
rule for a passive invert to have experienced anal eroticism in
childhood and been frequently subjected to enemas, which have led
to the desire for the anal intromission of the penis.
(_Medizinische Klinik_, 1909, No. 2.) Jekels pushes this doctrine
further and declares that all inverts are really passive; the
invert is, in his love, he states, both subject and