Anxiety and the Restitutional Function of Homosexual Cruising

Psychoanalytical exploration of latent homosexuality, of homosexual cruising and the related fantasies indicates that it is (among other things) an act of restitution, an effort to resurrect the father, to contradict the ambivalent wishes to rob and murder him, to make sure that he is alive and well and not the victim of the cruiser's competitiveness and destructiveness, to idealize him and render him into an object of love; thus to avoid anxiety and to preclude the father's wrath and retaliation. That such restitutional attempts fail and instead reflect the murderous (both the anal and the genital) intent is no surprise for the psychoanalyst who regularly witnesses contradictory aims in the manifestations of all the neuroses and psychoses including the obsessional. The observations (as well as a host of other clinical phenomena) indicate the intimate relation of anxiety to the aggressive strivings (despite the fact that anxiety instigates repression of the sexual wishes). Anxiety serves as a precipitant of repression and symptom formation while guilt, both conscious and unconscious manifestations, is a product of the oedipal sexual wishes.