Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis can scarcely have much force now that the published histories are so extremely varied and numerous that they cannot possibly produce any uniform impression on the most sensitively receptive mind.  As a matter of fact, there is no doubt that inverts have frequently been stimulated to set down the narrative of their own experiences through reading those written by others.  But the stimulation has, as often as not, lain in the fact that their own experiences have seemed different, not that they have seemed identical.  The histories that they read only serve as models in the sense that they indicate the points on which information is desired.  I have often been able to verify this influence, which would in any case seem to be fairly obvious.

Psycho-analysis is, in theory, an ideal method of exploring many psychic conditions, such as hysteria and obsessions, which are obscure and largely concealed beneath the psychic surface.  In most homosexual cases the main facts are, with the patient’s good-will and the investigator’s tact, not difficult to ascertain.  Any difficulties which psychoanalysis may help to elucidate mainly concern the early history of the case in childhood, and, regarding these, psychoanalysis may sometimes raise questions which it cannot definitely settle.  Psycho-analysis reveals an immense mass of small details, any of which may or may not possess significance, and in determining which are significant the individuality of the psychoanalyst cannot fail to come into play.  He will necessarily tend to arrange them according to a system.  If, for instance, he regards infantile incestuous emotions or early Narcissism as an essential feature of the mechanism of homosexuality, a conscientious investigator will not rest until he has discovered traces of them, as he very probably will. (See, e.g., Sadger, “Fragment der Psychoanalyse eines Homosexuellen,” Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, Bd. ix, 1908; and cf.  Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualitaet, p. 164).  But the exact weight and significance of these traces may still be doubtful, and, even if considerable in one case, may be inconsiderable in another.  Freud, who sets forth one type of homosexual mechanism, admits that there may be others.  Moreover, it must be added that the psychoanalytic method by no means excludes unconscious deception by the subject, as Freud found, and so was compelled to admit the patient’s tendency to “fantasy,” as Adler has to “fictions,” as a fundamental psychic tendency of the “unconscious.”

The force of these considerations is now beginning to be generally recognized.  Thus Moll (art.  “Homosexualitaet,” in 4th ed. of Eulenburg’s Realencyclopaedie der gesamten Heilkunde, 1909, p. 611) rightly says that while the invert may occasionally embroider his story, “the expert can usually distinguish between the truth and the poetry, though it is unnecessary to add that complete confidence on