The Freudians—­alike of the orthodox and the heterodox schools—­have sometimes contributed, unintentionally or not, to revive the now antiquated conception of homosexuality as an acquired phenomenon, and that by insisting that its mechanism is a purely psychic though unconscious process which may be readjusted to the normal order by psychoanalytic methods.  Freud first put forth a comprehensive statement of his view of homosexuality in the original and pregnant little book, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905), and has elsewhere frequently touched on the subject, as have many other psychoanalysts, including Alfred Adler 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