Discussion

This is obviously a most interesting case, and interestingly presented. Instead of recapitulating all of the very important detail that Dr. Holmes gave us I think I might make some more general remarks about my reaction to the case. I don't know that they will necessarily solve the problems. First of all I was impressed throughout by this man's terrible background. His father was perverted in a way that we can objectively say borders on criminal. He seduced his own young son and continued with the sexual activity for seven years into his son's adolescence. At the same time, and this is almost like fiction, in his position as a church deacon he quietly watches as his son informs on the assistant minister for the same kind of criminal behavior! In all of this interestingly his son cooperated. The son did not say that he found his father a defective man. He focuses instead on the behavior of the assistant pastor. The son spares the father any criticism. Yet nowhere in this presentation does the son as the patient make evident any constructive role played by his father in his development. His father encouraged the patient's abuse of small animals while deriding his carpentry. It is a striking fact, and a little bit puzzling—because one would not expect this, I think, in the average person—that the patient seems to have been more affected by the fact that his father was untrue to him and continued to have sexual relations with mother than by the fact that his father had seduced him and treated him in a negligent way from very early on. And this abuse apparently began at age 6 when he entered school and continued without cessation. There is one bright spot that I recall from the presentation: the happy times with his grandparents—the paternal grandparents—when he visited them on the farm. But nevertheless, even with the positive influence of the grandparents, the patient began his homosexual play in the early preteen years and continued