at all points sensitive to human emotions, and, sexuality being the most intellectually undetermined of the appetites after hunger, the actor might discover in himself a sort of sexual indifference, out of which a sexual aberration could easily arise.  A man devoid of this imaginative flexibility could not be a successful actor.  The man who possesses it would be exposed to divagations of the sexual instinct under esthetical or merely wanton influences.  Something of the same kind is applicable to musicians and artists, in whom sexual inversion prevails beyond the average.  They are conditioned by their esthetical faculty, and encouraged by the circumstances of their life to feel and express the whole gamut of emotional experience.  Thus they get an environment which (unless they are sharply otherwise differentiated) leads easily to experiments in passion.  All this joins on to what you call the ‘variational diathesis’ of men of genius.  But I should seek the explanation of the phenomenon less in the original sexual constitution than in the exercise of sympathetic, assimilative emotional qualities, powerfully stimulated and acted on by the conditions of the individual’s life.  The artist, the singer, the actor, the painter, are more exposed to the influences out of which sexual differentiation in an abnormal direction may arise.  Some persons are certainly made abnormal by nature, others, of this sympathetic artistic temperament, may become so through their sympathies plus their conditions of life.”  It is possible there may be some element of truth in this view, which my correspondent regarded as purely hypothetical.

In this connection I may, perhaps, mention a moral quality which is very often associated with dramatic aptitude, and also with minor degrees of nervous degeneration, and that is vanity and the love of applause.  While among a considerable section of inverts it is not more marked than among the non-inverted, if not, indeed, less marked, among another section it is found in an exaggerated degree.  In at least one of my cases vanity and delight in admiration, both as regards personal qualities and artistic productions, reach an almost morbid extent.  And the quotations from letters written by various others of my subjects show a curious complacency in the description of their personal physical characters, markedly absent in other cases.  It is suggested by Alexander Schmid, on the basis of Adler’s views, that this vanity, which sometimes in the inverted artist becomes an exalted pride, as of a guardian of sacred mysteries, may be regarded as an effort to secure a compensation for the consciousness of feminine defect.[222]