Prevention of Inversion.—­One of the tasks imposed in the object selection consists in not missing the opposite sex.  This, as we know, is not solved without some difficulty.  The first feelings after puberty often enough go astray, though not with any permanent injury.  Dessoir has called attention to the normality of the enthusiastic friendships formed by boys and girls with their own sex.  The greatest force which guards against a permanent inversion of the sexual object is surely the attraction exerted by the opposite sex characters on each other.  For this we can give no explanation in connection with this discussion.  This factor, however, does not in itself suffice to exclude the inversion; besides this there are surely many other supporting factors.  Above all, there is the authoritative inhibition of society; experience shows that where the inversion is not considered a crime it fully corresponds to the sexual inclinations of many persons.  Moreover, it may be assumed that in the man the infantile memories of the mother’s tenderness, as well as that of other females who cared for him as a child, energetically assist in directing his selection to the woman, while the early sexual intimidation experienced through the father and the attitude of rivalry existing between them deflects the boy from the same sex.  Both factors also hold true in the case of the girl whose sexual activity is under the special care of the mother.  This results in a hostile relation to the same sex which decisively influences the object selection in the normal sense.  The bringing up of boys by male persons (slaves in the ancient times) seems to favor homosexuality; the frequency of inversion in the present day nobility is probably explained by their employment of male servants, and by the scant care that mothers of that class give to their children.  It happens in some hysterics that one of the parents has disappeared (through death, divorce, or estrangement), thus permitting the remaining parent to absorb all the love of the child, and in this way establishing the determinations for the sex of the person to be selected later as the sexual object; thus a permanent inversion is made possible.

SUMMARY

It is now time to attempt a summing-up.  We have started from the aberrations of the sexual impulse in reference to its object and aim and have encountered the question whether these originate from a congenital predisposition, or whether they are acquired in consequence of influences from life.  The answer to this question was reached through an examination of the relations of the sexual life of psychoneurotics, a numerous group not very remote from the normal.  This examination has been made through psychoanalytic investigations.  We have thus found that a tendency to all perversions might be demonstrated in these persons in the form of unconscious forces revealing themselves as symptom creators and we could say that the neurosis is, as