[122] Kiernan, Detroit Lancet, 1884, Alienist and Neurologist, April, 1891; Lydston, Philadelphia Medical and Surgical Reporter, September 7, 1889, and Addresses and Essays, 1892.

[123] A summary of the conclusion of this book, of which but few copies were printed, will be found in Hirschfeld’s Vierteljahrsberichte, October, 1911, pp. 78-91.

CHAPTER III.

SEXUAL INVERSION IN MEN.

Relatively Undifferentiated State of the Sexual Impulse in Early Life—­The Freudian View—­Homosexuality in Schools—­The Question of Acquired Homosexuality—­Latent Inversion—­Retarded Inversion—­Bisexuality—­The Question of the Invert’s Truthfulness—­Histories.

When the sexual instinct first appears in early youth, it is much less specialized than normally it becomes later.  Not only is it, at the outset, less definitely directed to a specific sexual end, but even the sex of its object is sometimes uncertain.[124] This has always been so well recognized that those in authority over young men have sometimes forced women upon them to avoid the risk of possible unnatural offenses.[125]

The institution which presents these phenomena to us in the most marked and the most important manner is, naturally, the school, in England especially the Public School.  In France, where the same phenomena are noted, Tarde called attention to these relationships, “most usually Platonic in the primitive meaning of the word, which indicate a simple indecision of frontier between friendship and love, still undifferentiated in the dawn of the awakening heart,” and he regretted that no one had studied them.  In England we are very familiar with vague allusions to the vices of public schools.  From time to time we read letters in the newspapers denouncing public schools as “hot-beds of vice” and one anonymous writer remarks that “some of our public schools almost provoke the punishment of the cities of the Plain."[126] But these allegations are rarely or never submitted to accurate investigation.  The physicians and masters of public schools who are in a position to study the matter usually possess no psychological training, and appear to view homosexuality with too much disgust to care to pay any careful attention to it.  What knowledge they possess they keep to themselves, for it is considered to be in the interests of public schools that these things should be hushed up.  When anything very scandalous occurs one or two lads are expelled, to their own grave and, perhaps, lifelong injury, and without benefit to those who remain, whose awakening sexual life rarely receives intelligent sympathy.