“I have always honored and respected my mother. I was 38 years of age when I received a telegram calling me to her sick bed. She passed away shortly after my arrival. As the only son it was my duty to put everything in order after her. I went through her old correspondence and in a box I came across a mass of love letters. First I was not going to read them. But curiosity got the best of me. I said to myself: ‘every married person loves once in his or in her life some one else, why should not that be permitted to my mother when father died while she was still very young.’ If I only had not done that! I found not one letter, I found hundreds of letters and ... they were not all from one man. The letters were so vulgar, so plain, so cynical, so revolting that I wished myself dead. I lost the holiest thing in my life. Before then I always dreamed of finding a woman like mother, and her type of womanhood always stood before me as the ideal. Now I found that she could be bought and she was to be had for ordinary degrading purposes. The tone which her lovers assumed in those letters was so revolting that I imagined the worst. Since then I feel a deep scorn for all womanhood. Shortly after that I yielded to the temptations of a homosexual friend.... “Do you believe that my impotence has some relation to that occurrence? I have often thought of it. Whenever I go to a woman I cannot help thinking of the box in which I found mother’s letters. After such an experience how is it possible for one still to consider marriage?” * * * * * A late homosexuality induced by a very tragic experience. Naturally the man was always latently homosexual. But it was that experience which turned him into a manifest homosexual. Unfortunately I am unable to state whether he married the woman and became heterosexual again or not, because I never saw him after that. The reader will observe that in this chapter I have quoted quite a number of cases culled from the reports of other practitioners. I do this for a double reason. First, I want to prove, on the basis of other material than my own, that homosexuality has its psychogenesis; and, in the second place, I aim by this means to disprove the contention unfortunately rather widespread in some circles and actually expressed by some critics, that my case histories correspond to the “genius loci.” As if the Viennese differed in sexual matters from the North-German or from the Englishman! My material is derived from the world at large. _I have been unable to discover thus far any difference with respect to sexual matters between any two nations, except that one may keep things under cover more cleverly than the other._ * * * * * This series of cases aiming to illustrate the rôle of psychic trauma in sexuality may be concluded with the following case, reported by _Pfister_ (l. c. p. 169):