as normal in early life.  Thus, in 1905, in his “Bruchstueck einer Hysterie-Analyse” (reprinted in the second series of Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, 1909), Freud regards it as a well-known fact that boys and girls at puberty normally show plain signs of the existence of a homosexual tendency.  Under favorable circumstances this tendency is overcome, but when a happy heterosexual love is not established it remains liable to reappear under the influence of an appropriate stimulus.  In the neurotic these homosexual germs are more highly developed.  “I have never carried through any psychoanalysis of a man or a woman,” Freud states, “without discovering a very significant homosexual tendency.”  Ferenczi, again (Jahrbuch fuer Psychoanalytische Forschungen, Bd. iii, 1911, p. 119), without reference to any physical basis of the impulse, accepts “the psychic capacity of the child to direct his originally objectless eroticism to one or both sexes,” and terms this disposition ambisexuality.  The normality of a homosexual element in early life may be said to be accepted by most psychoanalysts, even of the schools that are separated from Freud.  Stekel would go farther, and regards various psychic sexual anomalies as signs of a concealed bisexual tendency; psychic impotence, the admiration of men for masculine women and of women for feminine men, various forms of fetichism,—­they are all masks of homosexuality (Stekel, Zentralblatt fuer Psychoanalyse, vol. ii, April, 1912).

These schoolboy affections and passions arise, to a large extent, spontaneously, with the evolution of the sexual emotions, though the method of manifestation may be a matter of example or suggestion.  As the sexual emotions become stronger, and as the lad leaves school or college to mix with men and women in the world, the instinct usually turns into the normal channel, in which channel the instincts of the majority of boys have been directed from the earliest appearance of puberty, if not earlier.  But a certain proportion remain insensitive to the influence of women, and these may be regarded as true sexual inverts.  Some of them are probably individuals of somewhat undeveloped sexual instincts.  The members of this group are of some interest psychologically, although from the comparative quiescence of their sexual emotions they have received little attention.  The following communication which I have received from a well-accredited source is noteworthy from this point of view:—­

“The following facts may possibly be of interest to you, though my statement of them is necessarily general and vague.  I happen to know intimately three cases of men whose affections have chiefly been directed exclusively to persons of their own sex.  The first, having practised masturbation as a boy, and then for some ten years ceased to practise it (to such an extent that he even inhibited his erotic dreams), has since recurred to