The Meaning of Homosexual Trends in Therapy

The incidence of homosexuality and homosexual trends in heterosexuals has increased very much in the last few years. This, in itself, is a phenomenon of basic significance with regard to the understanding and evaluating of homosexual trends. More is involved here than mere sexual or biological or individual psychological forces. Rather, we are faced with the effects of a combination of developmental, psychological, and socio-cultural changes.

What is required is an integrated holistic approach which includes biological, psychological and socio-cultural considerations. Change in psychosexual trends and the behavior of a great number of individuals cannot be based on an instinctual nature of man because instincts, and particularly the libidinal instinct, (which Freud in accordance with the biology of his time considered basic in human and particularly in sexual behavior) are characterized by their relative constancy.

Freud's Position

Thanks to Freud, homosexuality is no longer seen as an anatomical-psychological phenomenon. Only a few decades before Freud, Mantegazza had explained homosexuality as congenital malformation caused by the sensory nerves, normally originating in the penis, being displaced to the rectum and causing a corresponding shift in the erogenous zone. As late as 1914, Magnus Hirschfeld stated: “Homosexuality always is an inborn state conditioned by a specific homosexual constitution of the brain.” Neither these two assumptions, nor the more recent hypothesis of a persistently changed androgen-estrogen hormone level could be verified.

Freud reevaluated the anatomical concepts and, while fully aware of many unsolved aspects, as early as 1905 made the pioneering statement: “The substitution of the anatomical for the psychological is as frivolous as it is unjustified,”1 and he outlined the factors which fostered the development of homosexual trends. Five years later he expressed his view in Leonardo da Vinci in the following mann