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THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL

OF

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

VOLUME I 1920 NUMBER 2

THE PSYCHOGENESIS OF A CASE OF FEMALE
HOMOSEXUALITY

by
SIGM. FREUD, M.D., LL.D., Vienna.

I.

Homosexuality in women, which is certainly not less common
than in men, although much less perturbing, has not only been
ignored by the law, but has also been neglected by psycho-
analytic research. The narration of a single case, not too pronoun-
ced in type, in which it was possible to trace with certainty
and completeness the history of its psychical development,
may, therefore, have a certain claim on our attention. If the
presentation sets forth only the most general outlines of the various
events concerned and the conclusions reached from study of the
case, suppressing all the characteristic details on which the inter-
pretation is founded, this limitation is easily to be explained by
the medical discretion called for in discussing a recent case.

A beautiful and clever girl of eighteen, belonging to a family
of good standing, had aroused displeasure and concern on the part
of her parents by the tender passion with which she pursued a
certain lady, about ten years older than herself. The parents
asserted that this lady, in spite of her distinguished name, was no
better than a cocotte. It was said to be a well-known fact that
she lived with a married woman--friend, having intimate relations
with her, while at the same time she carried on promiscuously with

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a number of men. The girl did not contradict these evil reports,
but she continued to be none the less enamoured of the lady in
question, although she herself was by no means lacking in a sense
of decency and propriety. No prohibitions and no supervision
hindered the girl from seizing every one of the rare opportunities
of being together with her beloved friend, of ascertaining all her
habits, of waiting for her for hours outside her door or at a tram
halt, of sending her gifts of flowers, and so on. It was evident
that this one interest had swallowed up all others. The girl did
not concern herself with any further educational studies, placed
no value on social functions or girlish pleasures, and kept up
relations only with those friends who could help her in the matter
or serve as confidantes. The parents could not say to what lengths
their daughter had gone in her relations to the questionable lady,
or whether the limits of devoted admiration had already been
exceeded. They had never remarked in their daughter any interest
in young men, nor any pleasure at their attentions, and, on the
other hand, they were quite sure that her present attachment for
a woman was only a continuation in a marked degree of the
feeling she had displayed of recent years for other members of
her own sex, which had already aroused her father’s suspicion
and severity.

Two aspects of her behaviour, in apparent contrast with each
other, her parents took especially badly. On the one hand, that
she did not scruple to appear in the most frequented streets in
the company of her questionable friend, being thus quite neglect-
ful of her own reputation; while, on the other hand, she disdained
no means of deception, no excuses, and no lies that would make
meetings with her possible and cover them. She was thus as brazen
in the one respect as deceitful in the other. One day it happened,
as, indeed, was sooner or later inevitable in the circumstances,
that the father met his daughter in the company of the lady. He
passed them by with an angry glance which boded no good.
Immediately after the girl rushed off and flung herself over a
neighbouring wall on to the railway line. She paid for this undoub-
tedly serious attempt at suicide with a long stay in bed, though
fortunately little permanent damage was done. After her recovery
she found it easier to get her own way than before. The parents
did not dare to oppose her so vigorously, and the lady, who up
till then had coldly declined her advances, was moved by such

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an unmistakable proof of serious passion and began to treat her
in a more friendly manner.

About six months after this occurrence the parents sought
medical advice and entrusted the doctor with the task of bringing
their daughter back to the normal. The girl’s attempted suicide
had shown them that all the means of discipline at their disposal
were powerless to overcome her mental disorder. Before going
further it will be desirable to deal with the attitudes of the father
and mother separately. The father was an earnest and worthy man,
at bottom very tender-hearted, but by the sternness he had adopted
his children. His treatment of his
only daughter was too much influenced by consideration for his
wife. When he first came to know of his daughter’s homosexual
tendencies he boiled over with anger and tried to suppress them
by threats; at that time he perhaps hesitated between different,
though equally painful, views, whether to regard her as vicious,
as degenerate, or as mentally afflicted. Even after the attempted
suicide he did not achieve the lofty resignation shown by one of
our medical colleagues who remarked of a similar case in his own
family, “It is just a misfortune like any other”. There was some
thing about his daughter’s homosexuality that aroused the deepest
bitterness in him, and he was determined to combat it with all the
means in his power; the depreciation of psycho-
analysis so wide-
spread in Vienna did not prevent him from turning to it for help.
If this way failed he still had in reserve the strongest counter-
measure; a speedy marriage was to awaken the natural instincts
of the girl and stifle her unnatural tendencies.

The mother’s attitude towards the girl was not so perspicuous.
She was still a youngish woman, who was evidently unwilling to
relinquish her claims to charm by her beauty. All that was clear
was that she did not take her daughter’s passion so tragically as
did the father, nor was she so incensed at it. She had even for
a long time enjoyed her daughter’s confidence concerning the love
affair, and her opposition to it seemed to have been aroused
mainly by the harmful openness with which the girl publicly dis-
played her feelings. She had suffered for some years from neurotic
troubles and enjoyed great consideration from her husband; she
was very erratic in her treatment of her children, rather hard
towards her daughter and over-indulgent to her three sons, the
youngest of whom had been born after a long interval and was

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not yet three years old. It was not easy to ascertain anything
more definite as to her character, for, owing to motives that will
only later become intelligible, the patient was always reserved in
the accounts she gave of her mother, in contradistinction to those
relating to her father.

The doctor who was to undertake the psycho-analytic treatment
of the girl had several reasons for feeling uncomfortable. The
situation he had to deal with was not one such as analysis demands
and where alone it can demonstrate its effectiveness. As is well
known, the ideal situation for analysis is when someone, otherwise
master of himself, is suffering from an inner conflict which he is
unable to resolve alone, so that he brings his trouble to the
analyst and begs for his help. The doctor then works hand in
hand with one part of the dissociated personality against the other
partner in the conflict. Situations other than these are more or less
unfavourable for psycho-analysis; they add other difficulties to
those already present. Situations such as those of the proprietor
who orders an architect to build him a villa according to his own
tastes and desires, or of the pious donor who gets the artist to
paint a picture of saints in the corner of which is to be a por-
trait of himself worshipping, are fundamentally incompatible with
the conditions of psycho-analysis. It constantly happens that a
husband informs the doctor, “My wife suffers from nerves, so
that she gets on badly with me; please cure her, so that we may
lead a happy married life again”. But often enough it turns out
that such a request is impossible to fulfil, i. e. that the doctor
cannot bring about the result for which the husband sought the
treatment. The moment the wife is freed from her neurotic
inhibitions she insists on dissolving the marriage, for the main-
tainance of which the neurosis was essential. Or, to take another
case, parents demand that their nervous and unruly child be cured.
By a healthy child they mean one who gives his parents no
difficulties, but only pleasure. The doctor may succeed in curing
the child, but after that it goes its own way all the more decid-
edly, and the parents are now more dissatisfied than even before.
In short, it is not a matter of indifference whether someone comes
to analysis of his own accord or because he is brought to it,
whether he himself desires to be changed or only his relatives
who love him (or who might be expected to love him) desire
this for him.

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Further unfavourable features in the present case were the
facts that the girl was not exactly a “patient” – her suffering
had no inner source, nor did she complain of her condition –
and that the task to be carried out did not consist in resolving
a neurotic conflict but in converting the one variety of the genital
organisation of sexuality into the other. The removal of genital
inversion, or homosexuality, is in my experience never an easy
matter. I have rather found that success is possible only under
specially favourable circumstances, and even then that it essentially
consists in being able to open to the restricted homosexuals the
way to the opposite sex, till then barred, thus restoring their
full bisexual functions. After that it lay with themselves to choose
whether they wished to abandon the other way, banned by society,
and in individual cases they have done so. One must remember
that in normal sexuality also there is a limitation in the choice
of object; in general to undertake to convert a fully developed
homosexual into a heterosexual is not much more promising than
to do the reverse, only that for good practical reasons the latter
is never attempted.

In actual numbers the successes achieved by psycho-
analytic treatment of the manifold forms of homosexuality are not specially
striking. As a rule the homosexual is not able to give up his
pleasure-object, and one cannot convince him that if he changed
to the other object he would find again the pleasure he has
renounced. If he comes at all to be treated it is mostly through
the pressure of external motives, such as the social disadvantages
and dangers attaching to his choice of object, and such components
of the instinct for self-preservation prove to be too weak in the
struggle against the sexual impulses. One then soon discovers his
secret plan, namely, to obtain from the striking failure of his
attempt the feeling of satisfaction that he has done everything
possible against his abnormality, to which he can now resign
himself with an easy conscience. The case is somewhat different
when consideration for beloved parents and relatives has been the
motive for his attempt to be cured. Then there really are libidinous
tendencies present which may develop energies opposed to the
homosexual choice of object, though their strength is rarely
sufficient. It is only where the homosexual fixation has not yet
become strong enough, or where there are considerable rudiments
and remains of the heterosexual choice of object, i. e. in a still

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oscillating or in a definitely bisexual organisation, that one may
make a more favourable prognosis for the psycho-analytic therapy.

For these reasons I altogether refrained from holding out to
the parents a prospect of their wish being fulfilled. I merely said
I was prepared to study the girl carefully for a few weeks or months
so as to be able then to pronounce how far a continuation of the
analysis might influence her. In a considerable number of cases,
indeed, the analysis divides itself into two clearly separated stages:
in the first one the doctor procures from the patient the necessary
information, makes him familiar with the premises and postulates
of psycho-analysis, and unfolds to him the rendering of the
genesis of his disorder, as deduced from the material brought up
in the analysis. In the second stage the patient himself lays hold
of the analytic material, works on it, recollects what he can from
the apparently repressed memories, and tries to live over again
the rest. In this way he can confirm, supplement, and correct the
inferences made by the doctor. It is only during this work that
he experiences, through overcoming resistances, the inner change
aimed at, and acquires for himself the convictions that make him
independent of the doctor’s authority. These two stages in the
course of the analytic treatment are not always sharply divided
from each other; it only happens when the resistance keeps to
certain conditions. But when this is so, one may institute a com-
parison with two corresponding stages of a journey. The first
comprises all the necessary preparations, to-day so complicated
and hard to effect, till at last, ticket in hand, one goes on to the
platform and secures a seat in the train. One has now the right,
and the possibility, to travel into the distant country, but after
all these preliminary exertions one is not yet there – indeed,
one is not a single kilometer nearer one’s goal. For this to happen
one has to make the journey itself from one station to another,
and this part of the travel may well be compared with the second
stage in the analysis.

The analysis of the patient referred to took the course of this
two-stage schedule, but it was not continued beyond the beginning
of the second stage. A special constellation of the resistance, made
it possible, nevertheless, to gain full confirmation of my inferences,
and to obtain a fairly adequate insight into the way in which her
inversion had developed. But before narrating the findings of the
analysis I have to deal with a few points which have either been

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THE PSYCHOGENESIS OF A CASE OF FEMALE HOMOSEXUALITY

touched upon already by myself or which will have at once struck
the reader as interesting.

I had made the prognosis partly dependent on how far the
girl had got in the satisfaction of her passion. The information
I gleaned during the analysis seemed favourable in this respect.
With none of the objects of her passion had the patient enjoyed
anything beyond a few kisses and embraces; her genital chastity,
if one may use such a phrase, had remained intact. As for the
demi-mondaine who had aroused the girl’s most recent, and by
far her strongest, emotions, she had always treated her coldly and
had never allowed any greater favour than the kissing of her
hand. Probably the girl was making a virtue of necessity when she
kept insisting on the purity of her love and her physical repulsion
against the idea of sexual intercourse. But perhaps she was not
altogether wrong when she boasted of her wonderful beloved that,
by adverse family circumstances, she had preserved, even in such a
situation, a great deal of dignity. For the lady used to recommend
the girl, every time they met, to withdraw her affection from herself
and from women in general, and she had persistently rejected
the girl’s advances up to the time of the attempted suicide.
A second point, which I next tried to clear up, concerned the
girl’s own motives on which the psycho-analytic treatment might
be based. She did not try to deceive me by saying that she felt
any urgent need to be freed of her homosexuality. On the contrary,
she said she could not conceive of any other way of being in
love, but she added that for her parents’ sake she would honestly
help in the therapeutic endeavour, for it pained her very much
to be the cause of so much grief to them. I had to take this
also as a propitious sign to begin with, as I could not suspect
what unconscious affective attitude lay behind it. What came to
light later in this connection decisively influenced the course taken
by the analysis and determined its premature conclusion.

Readers unversed in psycho-analysis will long have been
impatiently awaiting an answer to two other questions. Did this
homosexual girl show somatic characteristics plainly belonging to
the opposite sex, and did the case prove to be one of congenital
or of acquired (later developed) homosexuality?

I am aware of the importance attaching to the first of these
questions. Only one should not exaggerate it, and obscure in its

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favour the facts that sporadic secondary characteristics of the
opposite sex are very often present in normal individuals, and
that well-marked somatic characteristics of the opposite sex
may be found in persons whose choice of object has
undergone no change in the direction of inversion; in other words,
that in both sexes the degree of physical hermaphrodism is to a
great extent independent of the psychical hermaphrodism. In modifi-
cation of this statement it must be added that this independence
is more evident in men than in women, where bodily and mental
traits belonging to the opposite sex are apt to coincide in their
incidence. Still I am not in a position to give a satisfactory answer
in the case of my patient to the first of our questions; the psycho-
analyst often foregoes a thorough bodily examination of his patients
in certain cases. Certainly there was no obvious deviation from
the feminine physical type, nor any menstrual disturbance. The
beautiful and well-developed girl had, it is true, her father’s tall
figure, and her facial features were sharp rather than soft and
girlish, traits which might be regarded as indicating a physical
masculinity. Some of her intellectual attributes also could be
connected with masculinity: for instance, her acuteness of compre-
hension and her lucid objectivity, in so far as she was not
dominated by her passion; though these distinctions are conven-
tional rather than scientific. What is certainly of greater import
is that in her behaviour towards her love-object she had approxi-
mated throughout to the masculine type: that is to say, she mani-
fested the humility and the tremendous over-estimation of the
sexual object so characteristic of the male lover, she renounced
all narcissistic satisfaction, and she preferred to be the lover rather than
the beloved. She had thus not only chosen a feminine love object,
but had also developed a masculine attitude towards this object.
The second question, whether this was a case of inherited or
acquired homosexuality will be answered by the whole history
of the patient’s trouble and its development. The study of this
will show how far this very question is fruitless and inappropriate.

II.

After such a digressive introduction the sexual history of the
case under consideration can be presented quite concisely. In
childhood the girl had quietly passed through the normal stage