SUGGESTION AND OTHER EXCITING CAUSES OF INVERSION.—­In 18 of my cases it is possible that some event, or special environment, in early life had more or less influence in turning the sexual instinct into homosexual channels, or in calling out a latent inversion.  In 3 cases a disappointment in normal love seems to have produced a profound nervous and emotional shock, acting, as we seem bound to admit, on a predisposed organism, and developing a fairly permanent tendency to inversion.  In 8 cases there was seduction by an older person, but in at least 4 or 5 of these there was already a well-marked predisposition.  In at least 8 other cases, example, usually at school, may probably be regarded as having exerted some influence.  It is noteworthy that in very few of my cases can we trace the influence of any definite “suggestion,” as asserted by Schrenck-Notzing, who believes that, in the causation of sexual inversion (as undoubtedly in the causation of erotic fetichism), we must give the first place to “accidental factors of education and external influence.”  He records the case of a little boy who innocently gazed in curiosity at the penis of his father who was urinating, and had his ears boxed, whence arose a train of thought and feeling which resulted in complete sexual inversion.  In two of the cases I have reported we have parallel incidents, and here we see clearly that the homosexual tendency already existed.  I do not question the occurrence of such incidents, but I refuse to accept them as supplying the causation of inversion, and in so doing I am supported by all the evidence I am able to obtain.  I am in agreement with a correspondent who wrote:—­

“Considering that all boys are exposed to the same order of suggestions (sight of a man’s naked organs, sleeping with a man, being handled by a man), and that only a few of them become sexually perverted, I think it reasonable to conclude that those few were previously constituted to receive the suggestion.  In fact, suggestion seems to play exactly the same part in the normal and abnormal awakening of sex.”

I would go so far as to assert that for normal boys and girls the developed sexual organs of the adult man or woman—­from their size, hairiness, and the mystery which envelops them—­nearly always exert a certain fascination, whether of attraction or horror.[187] But this has no connection with homosexuality, and scarcely with sexuality at all.  Thus, in one case known to me, a boy of 6 or 7 took pleasure in caressing the organs of another boy, twice his own age, who remained passive and indifferent; yet this child grew up without ever manifesting any homosexual instinct.  The seed of suggestion can only develop when it falls on a suitable soil.  If it is to act on a fairly normal nature the perverted suggestion must be very powerful or iterated, and even then its influence will probably only be temporary, disappearing in the presence of the normal stimulus.[188]