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This paper, in the tradition of the search for psychical origins, puts forth a theory based on the intensive study, research, and individual analyses of homosexual patients for the past twelve years. It is restricted to my findings as to the origin of overt male homosexuality of the obligatory type, not due to situational or variational motivations, where non-engagement in homosexual practices would induce intolerable anxiety. There may well be homosexuals in whom these very early disturbances play either no role or only a subsidiary one. Such cases have been widely reported in the literature and it is usually accepted that they do not have as their determining nuclear psychopathology a psychic organization which is fixated in the earliest years of life.
The preoedipal theory rests on two pillars. The first is the presence of a fixation in the undifferentiated phase of development, a concept originally introduced by Fleischmann in 1959. The second is the utilization and application of the Hans Sachs (1923) mechanism of sexual perversion. The aim of this paper is to emphasize that according to my observations the genesis of homosexuality may well be the result of disturbances which occur earlier than has been generally assumed—in the so-called "undifferentiated phase" (Fleischmann). This phase is not truly undifferentiated but is already manifesting important beginnings of structure formation (Arlow and Brenner, 1964); (Hartmann, Kris and Loewenstein, 1946). Fixation to the mother and the characteristically narcissistic object choice of the homosexual may be traced back to the undifferentiated phase of the mother-child unity. It may be assumed that relations as they develop out of the original unity in the undifferentiated phase are the forerunners of later object relations. Qualitative and quantitative factors, specifically the divergent tendencies in the separation processes beginning at birth—one leading to separateness and differentiation and the other t