On Female Homosexuality8

This paper is based on the experience gained from the more or less profound analysis of eleven cases of female homosexuality. I should like, first of all, to stress the fact that none of these eleven women presented physical signs which might indicate that there had been a constitutional deviation, physiologically, in the direction of masculinity. The signs of accentuated bisexual disposition mentioned in this paper refer to forerunners of what, in later development, we usually call masculinity. These preliminary stages, however, appear to have no physical correlates, or at any rate none that can be determined, for the patients showed no physical signs of masculinity. There are, to be sure, certain homosexual types whose personality, mental and physical, including the secondary sexual characteristics, are of the type which is appropriate to the other sex; but none of my patients belonged to this type.

The first of the eleven cases of female homosexuality was analyzed twelve years ago. Although the patient was aware of her sexual inversion, she did not indulge in homosexual practices; she knew that her erotic potentialities and fantasies were directed towards members of her own sex, and she would unequivocally become sexually excited when she embraced and kissed certain women. Towards these women, she was faithful and monogamous; her relations with them were purely platonic and remained platonic even when she knew that the women had a perverse tendency like her own. There was no particular type of woman which especially attracted her. The women were not in any instance of a masculine type, and she herself was blond and feminine. She felt no hostility towards men, had a number of male friends,