THE PSYCHOSOCIAL GENESIS OF MALE [ AND FEMALE ] HOMOSEXUALITY
A.
Our study has helped us refine and extend certain concepts relevant to the etiology of male [and female] homosexuality. Certainly, the role of the parents emerged with great clarity in many detailed aspects. Severe psychopathology in the H-parent-child relationship was ubiquitous, and similar psychodynamics, attitudes, and behavioral constellations prevailed throughout most of the families of the homosexuals – which differed significantly from the C-sample. Among the H-patients who lived with a set of natural parents up to adulthood – and this was so for the entire H-sample except for fourteen cases – neither parent had a relationship with the H-son [H-daughter] one could reasonably construe as 'normal.' The triangular systems were characterized by disturbed and psychopathic interactions; all H-parents apparently had severe emotional problems. Unconscious mechanisms operating in the selection of mates may bring together this combination of parents. When, through unconscious determinants, or by chance, two such individuals marry, they tend to elicit and reinforce in each other those potentials which increase the likelihood that a homosexual son [daughter] will result from the union. The homosexual son [daughter] becomes entrapped in the parental conflict in a role determined by the parents' unresolved problems and transferences.
Each parent had a specific type of relationship with the homosexual son [daughter] which generally did not occur with other siblings. The H-son [H-daughter] emerged as the interactional focal point upon whom the most profound parental psychopathology was concentrated. Hypotheses for the choice of this particular child as 'victim' are offered later in this discussion.
[ Homosexuality, A Psychoanalytical Study of Male Homosexuals, Irving Bieber et al., Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 1962, p. 310. -- See also Quotation / Comment # 481 in the book "Schizophrenia: The Bearded Lady Disease". NOTE: All of the bracketed entries in the above quotation have been inserted there by writer / researcher J. Michael Mahoney. ]
B.
The problems presented by fathers who are passive adjuncts of their wives, or mothers who assume the prerogatives of fathers, lead to the topic of the importance of the parents' maintenance of gender-linked roles. The parental adherence to appropriate sex-linked roles not only serves as a guide for the achievement of reciprocal role relationships by parents but also plays a major part in guiding the child's development as a male or female. Of all factors entering into formation of personality characteristics, the sex of the child is the most decisive; and security of sexual identity is a cardinal factor in the achievement of a stable ego identity. Probably all schizophrenic patients are seriously confused in their sexual identity. Clear-cut role reversals in parents can obviously distort the child's development as when a parent is overtly homosexual or when they concern the division of major tasks between the parents. However, the inability of a mother to fill an affectional-expressive role, or of a father to provide instrumental leadership for the family also creates difficulties. Either a cold and unyielding mother or a weak and ineffectual father is apt to distort the family structure and a child's development. Failures to maintain gender-linked roles by parents as well as failures of one parent to support the spouse's gender role were very striking in these families – failures ranging from strong homosexual tendencies through assumptions of male roles by mothers and female roles by fathers to absence of effective parental leadership and maternal coldness and aloofness.
Although the various complications that arise from such deficiencies in parents' adherence to sex-linked roles deserve more discussion, we should note that if a mother is consciously or unconsciously rivalrous with men and denigrating of her husband, a son can readily learn that will evoke rebuff from her, and fear of engulfment or castration by the mother can outweigh fears of retaliatory castration by the father. The schizophrenic patients' faulty sexual identity, including homosexual tendencies and concerns, are related to the parents' confused gender roles and the resultant imbalances in the family's dynamic structure.
[ "Schizophrenia and the Family" -- Theodore Lidz, M.D., Stephen Fleck, M.D., and Alice R. Cornelison, M.S.S. International Universities Press, Inc. New York, 1965, pp. 370-71. ]
C.
Among those who prove incapable of achieving the biologically ordained heterosexual goal are a great many to whom the mother has continued to be of excessive significance, overshadowing or coloring strongly all prehensions of other women. This handicap is perhaps most vividly illustrated in the case of the woman who has married for spite a man whom she soon comes to loathe, yet with whom the peculiarities of her personality, or economic factors, or other cause, force her to live. When a son is born of such a union, he is generally sacrificed to the mother’s unsatisfied erotic tendencies, and he becomes tied to her by the sort of intimacy so remarkably symbolized by Von Stuck in his painting, Die Sphinx. Whether he comes finally to rebel, hates her, and goes through life destroying as much as he can of that which arouses the mother stereotype, or instead goes on being her child-lover, the result is most unfortunate as to his growth in personality. It is almost certain that he will not proceed in erotic development past interest in his own sex.
[ Harry Stack Sullivan, M.D., "Personal Psychopathology",
(Early Formulations). New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1972, p. 196. ]
D.
In all three cases, the mother's relationship to the daughter who became schizophrenic contained an erotic quality, including sensuous physical intimacies. None of the mothers had been able to provide good nurturant care to the patient as a child but, at the same time, did not establish clear boundaries between herself and the child. The vacillations between disinterested aloofness and inappropriate physical intimacies that continued into adolescence or even adult life perplexed these patients. The mothers confused their daughters' needs with their own, transferred their anxieties to their daughters, and seemed to need the daughter's dependence upon them. Still, they gained little pleasure or gratification from a daughter but related by being concerned – and conveyed concerns that undermined the daughter's self-esteem and autonomy.
Studies have indicated that the homosexual concerns and tendencies of schizophrenic patients, as well as their incestuous strivings and fears, reflect the incestuous or homosexual proclivities of a parent and, concomitantly, the failure of parents to maintain their own gender-linked roles and the essential boundaries between the two generations in the nuclear family (3). The child's development becomes confused when identification with the parent of the same sex does not promote formation of a proper gender identity that is fundamental to the achievement of a stable and coherent ego identity. The de-erotization of the child-parent relationship is one of the cardinal functions of the family.
[ "Homosexual Tendencies in Mothers of Schizophrenic Women," Ruth Wilmanns Lidz, M.D. and Theodore Lidz, M.D., The Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, Vol. 149, No. 2, Williams and Wilkins Co., p. 232. ]