I am grateful for the opportunity to discuss a paper which approaches constructively one of the most important problems of psychoanalysis. With Dr. Gershman, I reject the concept of a constitutional bisexuality and I agree with his emphasis on early emotional experience, character structure and psychodynamics.

We owe it to Freud that homosexuality today is no longer seen as an anatomical-physiological phenomenon. Only a few decades earlier, Mantegazza had explained homosexuality as a congenital malformation caused by the fact that sensory nerves normally originating in the penis are displaced to the rectum and the erogenous zone is shifted correspondingly. As late as 1914, Magnus Hirschfeld stated: “Homosexuality