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The moving story of Mr. B, with his incredible energy and strength, his profound and inextinguishable thirst for finding a way out of his difficulties, despite so many adverse circumstances, leads me to express some theories about the very controversial topic of homosexuality. I am well aware that homosexuality is a difficult topic, which demands long and extensive research. I consider the following lines as merely a series of scattered free associations to Dr. Keable's presentation.
Psychoanalysts in France have not until now found it impossible to raise doubts about the existence of “normal” homosexuality. Of course, nobody is silly enough to consider a heterosexual as being, per se, more “normal” than a homosexual. However, it is permissible to think that each homosexual individual presents, as Mr. B does, but not always to the same extent, with a deficiency in his sexual identity, i.e., in his identity as a whole. This does not imply that such a deficiency is never present in heterosexual individuals, but it might have been covered up differently. A homosexual individual shows, through his object choice, that there is something amiss in his identification processes. The building up of a personality mainly depends on identifications. An analyst cannot circumvent such an important problem without rejecting psychoanalysis as a whole.
In his article “On the Sexual Theories of Children” (1908), Freud says: “If we could divest ourselves of our corporeal existence, and could view the things of this earth with a fresh eye … nothing perhaps would strike our attention more forcibly than the existence of two sexes among human beings …” (pp. 211-212). Yet we know