DR. TRIGANT BURROW, Baltimore, Md., read a paper
entitled "Material Illustrative of the `principle of Primary
Identification.'"[4]
DISCUSSION
DR. JAMES J. PUTNAM, Boston: I am very much interested
in Dr. Burrow's paper and understand it as illustrating
the argument brought forward by him last night.
As I remember the situation I do not quite see why this idea
is not essentially the same that has been endorsed by Freud
and others. One's interest in one's self is certainly in part
the basis of homosexuality, and this is intensified by the
reflection from the mother.
DR. JOHN T. MAC CURDY, New York: When Dr. Burrow
first brought up this subject last year it struck me as being
the most original theory in psychoanalysis that had been
formulated in this country and one of the most important of
all the additions to our general psychoanalytic concepts.
Personally, I found that it immediately solved certain
problems which had been in my mind for some time. I
had never been able to see how it came about that the
alcoholic had a strong latent homosexuality. The ordinary
interpretations of drinking as a fellatoristic substitute has
always seemed unlikely, for, if this were so any liquid would
serve the purpose, so why alcohol? Now it is manifest that
the alcoholic is an individual who is taking a drug which
dulls his sensibility. That is a way of retiring from reality,
of getting away from objectivity, retiring from what Dr.
Burrow calls the subjective phase. Now we understand
why the patient in an acute alcoholic hallucinosis almost
invariably hears voices making homosexual accusations.
The unreality complex is translated into sexual terms and
he is accused of unreal love. I have been struck in dream
analysis by the almost constant coincidence in dreams of
Mutterleib symbols in the same dream that on analysis
proved to be homosexual in principle. I can quote one
dream that demonstrates dramatically every point which
Dr. Burrow makes in his thesis. This patient, a man who
was being treated for homosexual tendencies which worried
him a great deal, on one of the first days brought this dream.
He was a hospital interne. Someone came to him and said
a nurse had cut herself. He ran up to the surgical amphitheatre
where preparations were made to fix her wound.
He suddenly discovered that his was the cut and that it was
on the ventral surface of the penis corresponding to the
primitive subincision operation. He took up a needle,
sewed it up and put on a bandage. At the end of the dream
he wondered what was going to happen, whether the bandage
would come off or not. Any psychoanalyst can imagine
what the incision indicated, that it led directly to the idea
of a vagina, also to the idea of castration which is combined
with that. The bandage led to swaddling clothes. Here
we have the whole situation rehearsed. The associations
went to the mother. The mother changes into himself.
At the same time he represents himself with a vagina and
gives birth to a child, his own penis which he can fondle as
his mother did him.
DR. SMITH ELY JELLIFFE, New York: It seems to me the
phrase identification with the mother is very illuminating.
I have no doubt that Dr. Burrow would say that the failure
to develop away from this primary identification lies at the
basis of what is called Narcissism. I have noted this
identification with the mother, i. e., with the female, in
many patients. They are, in ordinary life, after making
a very hard fight with unconscious homosexual trends and
are managing themselves with great difficulty. This shows
particularly in the analysis of alcoholics especially of
periodic types. Self-fertilization is a frequent symbol in
the unconscious. In males, particularly, the identification
with the mother is a frequent factor and often explains the
value of the instinctively sought relief through narcosis and
withdrawal from the conflict. Male hysterias also show it
markedly. The aggression towards the father is a frequent
female symbolization in hysteria as well.
DR. TRIGANT BURROW, Baltimore: It seems to me that
the President's reference to this heterosexual instance need
not necessarily be heterosexual in a psychological sense.
It is important to recognize that though the object of the
male in a particular case be a woman, yet psychologically
this need not be a heterosexual adaptation. In the case I
have cited the relation of the patient to his wife is psychologically
a homosexual one. We have seen in this case the
presence of a profound neurosis and coexistent with it an
apparently normal sexual life. This we know from the
Freudian standpoint is impossible. The heterosexual adaptation
is but apparent.
DR. TRIGANT BURROW, Baltimore: In regard to Dr
Putnam's comment that my thesis contains what has been
said already by Freud. Undoubtedly to a large extent it
has. There is, though, some modification here which seems
to me of importance, if only in the way of an extension of
Freud's original conception. One gets a very clear idea from
Brill's excellent paper on homosexuality of Freud's essential
thesis. Here the idea of homosexuality is that of a revulsion
from the mother. The child is assumed to adapt itself as
the mother in order to get rid of the mother as object. This
first hypothesis related only to the male child. To explain
homosexuality in the female, either an analogous mechanism
must be assumed, according to which the female child adopts
homosexuality to escape the father image, and analysis does
not bear out this explanation; or, assuming the same reaction
in respect to the mother in the female as in the male, the
result would entail not homosexuality but a heightened
heterosexuality. I think the formulation I have here
advanced offers us a distinct advantage in placing the
causative factor in homosexuality in either sex upon an
identical genetic basis.
[[4]]
Reserved for publication.
