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It is not my present purpose to attempt an exposition of the problem of homosexuality in its entirety. This problem, as you are aware, is an extremely complicated one, for the solution of which, as Freud himself has said, psycho-analysis cannot be invoked, since homosexuality is rooted in an organic substratum. This is by no means to say, however, that psycho-analysis has nothing to contribute to the elucidation of the psychology of the homosexual. On the contrary, everything of importance that we know concerning the play of instinctual forces and the course they follow in the homosexual we have derived from psycho-analysis.
Thus we have learned from Freud that the factors which produce homosexuality in the male are very numerous. I will instance only the most familiar of these, such as mother fixation, identification with the mother, the tendency to a narcissistic type of object choice (including herewith the overvaluation of the male genital), and fear of the father or, in other words, castration anxiety. Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, homosexuality is favoured by a passive-anal attitude towards the love object.
From this very multiplicity of ætiological factors the purely theoretical expectation would arise that there must exist a number of different types of homosexual, and experience confirms this expectation. There is the type, for example, which takes flight from the woman to the