You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Lagache introduces his topic by reasoning that since jealousy is a recognized defense against a homosexual interest in the rival, it follows that rejection of a conscious, no longer latent homosexual wish might give rise to jealousy.
Theoretically, jealousy and homosexuality may function as defenses one against the other. In practice this is only partially true. Homosexual behavior is rarely seen in jealous people but homosexuals are proverbially jealous. This contradiction is explained by the fact that jealousy has other functions besides that of a defense against homosexuality. For instance, jealousy in an apparently active homosexual may serve as a defense against the underlying passive homosexuality.
Lagache describes a male homosexual, age thirty-two, whose homosexual activity had started at puberty after unsuccessful attempts to interest himself in girls and after he found himself impotent with prostitutes. In the course of his analysis the patient decided to renew his acquaintance with a cousin and childhood sweetheart, with the thought of marriage. The author then describes how the patient brings about a meeting of the girl and the analyst. This meeting is the significant point of the clinical part of the paper in that the patient uses the meeting to express fantasies of jealousy toward the therapist. Lagache concludes from the material that the project of marriage was a defense against his homosexual transference. The visit 'signifies the need for a corporal and emotional contact with the psychoanalyst, for his affection and approbation'.
In his discussion of this episode of jealousy, the author poses the question of whether it represents both progress and resistance—progress, because in turning toward heterosexuality this jealousy was 'normal' in the sense that the object was a woman and the rival a man; resistance, because it represented an obstacle to the analysis of one aspect of homosexuality against which the patient needed to defend himself, na