At this point I conclude the analysis of the psychology of sexual inversion as it presents itself to me.  I have sought only to bring out the more salient points, neglecting minor points, neglecting also those groups of inverts who may be regarded as of secondary importance.  The average invert, moving in ordinary society, is a person of average general health, though very frequently with hereditary relationships that are markedly neurotic.  He is usually the subject of a congenital predisposing abnormality, or complexus of minor abnormalities, making it difficult or impossible for him to feel sexual attraction to the opposite sex, and easy to feel sexual attraction to his own sex.  This abnormality either appears spontaneously from the first, by development or arrest of development, or it is called into activity by some accidental circumstance.

FOOTNOTES: 

[225] See passim, Jahrbuch fuer Psychoanalytische Forschungen, Zentralblatt fuer Psychoanalyse, and Internationale Zeitschrift fuer Aerztliche Psychoanalyse; also Sadger, “Zur Aetiologie der Kontraeren Sexualempfindung,” Medizinische Klinik, 1909, No. 2.

[226] For an exposition of this by an able English representative of Freudian doctrines, see Ernest Jones, “The Oedipus Complex As An Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery,” American Journal of Psychology, January, 1910.

[227] The love of relations may be tinctured by all degrees of sexual love, some of which are so faint and vague that they cannot be considered unnatural or abnormal; it is misleading to term them incestuous.  The Russian novelist, Artzibascheff, in his Sanine described a brother’s affection for his sister as thus touched with a perception of her sexual charm (I refer to the French translation), and the book has consequently been much abused as “incestuous,” though the attitude described is very pale and conventional compared to the romantic passion sung in Shelley’s Laon and Cythna, or the tragic exaltation of the same passion in Ford’s great play, “’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.”

[228] Thus Numa Praetorius, a sagacious observer with, a very wide and thorough knowledge of homosexuality, finds himself quite unable to accept the “Oedipus Complex” explanation of inversion (Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, July, 1914, p. 362).

[229] It cannot be maintained that the frequency of inversion among the near relatives of inverts is a chance coincidence, for it must be remembered that few estimates of the prevalence of inversion yield a higher proportion than 3 per cent.

[230] See also a discussion of the Freudian view by Hirschfeld, who concludes (Die Homosexualitaet, p. 344) that we can only accept the Freudian mechanism as rare, and in all cases subordinate to organic predisposition.