Homosexual Acting Out1

Throughout my psychoanalytical experience I have found that homosexual acting out reveals several traits of its own: compulsion towards repetition, oral anxieties, a special way of choosing homosexual objects, certain transference factors and ritual. I will try to show briefly how each of these appears in the course of treatment.

In one of my patients this came out as a compulsive submission towards his idealized father, as he had experienced it when he was 7 years old and had a passive homosexual episode with his elder cousin. Compulsion also expressed his unconscious wish to deflect his aggressiveness from the analyst to homosexual intercourse, under the guise of self-punishment. He would say: "Yesterday I did something which disgusted me as never before. I had homosexual intercourse; I had a feeling of something useless, sterile, without any purpose or reason. I felt cold and as if I had escaped from myself and was watching from a window. I think I shall never again act as I did; it sickens me and makes me despise myself". Thus the death instinct and its partial expression, compulsion towards repetition, takes the dramatic shape of a self-inflicted vengeance (secondary masochism). Whenever he felt frustrated in psychoanalytic treatment, the patient would answer with homosexual acting out that had a special retaliatory character.

Primary Oral Anxieties

In homosexuality, and even more in homosexual acting out, there is a failure of genitality and a regression to pre-genital levels. In these patients the relationship with the breast and the mother has been greatly disturbed. External oral frustrations, an inability to work them out, impulses of hatred and a quick unstable turning to the paternal penis are clearly expressed. In one of my patients this relationship became dramatized in homosexual intercourse; later, when homosexual acting out disappeared, memories of lactation came to the fore. He acted and did not remember, but his spe