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Negative or latent homosexuality enters so universally into the repression that underlies neurotic disorders as to be practically synonymous with a neurosis. Positive or manifest homosexuality, on the other hand, may exist quite apart from a neurosis. Here the homosexuality, being applied, attains completion in its object. For in manifest homosexuality the libido is released, free and un-trammeled. In the present study, however, we shall regard quite indifferently the homosexuality which is entirely latent and the homosexuality which is in part manifest, but devote ourselves for the most part to the phenomenon of repressed, unconscious homosexuality and its subsequent implications as regards the neuroses.
In considering the subject of negative or latent homosexuality let us from the outset not forget that we have to do with a psychological situation. It may seem superfluous to remind an audience of psychoanalysts of the need of adhering to a strictly psychological interpretation of the problem at issue, and yet from the very nature of life, such is our enforced adaptation to external and objective criteria, that even we, whose sphere is so essentially psychological, incline too often toward an external, mechanical method, and so are prone to bring objective bias to the solution of even the most subtly subjective of problems.
We are all familiar with the basic mechanism of homosexuality as described by Freud in his “Drei Abhandtungen” and with the similar descriptions of Sadger. We are also indebted to Dr. Brill's excellent paper on “The Conception of Homosexuality,”2 for a very complete resume of the general interpretation of the homosexual complex as described by these authors, in terms of Freudian mechanisms.