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.
Since the nineteenth century, consideration of the etiology of Lesbian choice has been emotionally charged by its close association with ignorance and injustice.10 The subject is suspect on political grounds, and abhorrent on personal grounds to many women of Lesbian orientation. Social scientists have been warned off reconsideration of etiology by their encounter with Radical Gay Liberation. Without new theoretical clarity, well-meaning liberal psychoanalysts also take flight. They resist debate and prejudge discussion of etiology as “stale,” warn against its being “political,” or settle the question with an evasive generality such as “we are all homosexuals.” It is from the individual Lesbian woman in search of roots or from the practicing therapist in search of guidance that renewed questioning of etiology emerges.
Freud perceived that in the course of our long infancy and childhood, arousal of love for the mothering person, usually of female gender, was natural to both sexes. Loving women, loving mother nature, is surely the “natural” state of loving.
Freud was then in the position of needing to account for the little girl's “unnatural” shift from mother to father and her genital arousal towards the male. For consistency with his libido theory (and patriarchal