=The Escape from Biological Duties.= Kempf also considers homosexualism as a compromise and a convenient escape from biological duties. "Heterosexual potency," he writes "judging from the behavior of many psychopaths and normals of both sexes, varies in its vigor and is never quite secure from the possibility of disintegration in the face of depressing influences, such as disease, a frigid, unkind, terrifying, neurotic or disgusting mate, hopeless economic burdens, fear of pregnancy, or venereal diseases, social scandals, an inaccessible or unresponsive love-object, death of the mate or a too fixed mother-attachment. The intrigues and usurpations of power by the family of the mate, suppressing the idealised wishes of the individual, often cause the regression to the lower level of homo-sexuality, where, at least, parental sacrifices need not be made." CHAPTER XVIII HOMOSEXUALISM, A NEUROTIC SYMPTOM The varying views as to the genesis of homosexualism, which I have attempted to summarise in the preceding chapter, can be easily reconciled. Doubts as to one's "completeness" and a craving for safety may, even at an early age, cause the gonads to remain undeveloped or to develop in the wrong direction. Craig's pigeons were as completely "perverted" by the wrong environment as Steinach's rats by surgical operations. Hirschfeld's intermediate sex, in its concealed forms, that is, when the individual, upon gross examination, appears normal, may well be produced by the environment. Freud's Oedipus situation is not incompatible with Adler's theory of the neurotic constitution. Gonads are not different from any other glands. Thyroid involvement may produce fear or, at least, a picture of fear (exophthalmic goitre), but fear also produces many forms of thyroid involvement (goitre and exophthalmic goitre were alarmingly frequent in French towns submitted to bombardment during the world war). A study of psychic impotence in men and frigidity in women has proved that impotence was mainly a refusal to be a potent man, frigidity a refusal to be woman in intercourse. In certain cases, exaggerated cravings for impotence or frigidity may modify the gonads so completely that they present the condition Hirschfeld has called typical of the intermediate sex. Homosexualism can be best understood when viewed as a neurotic phenomenon, not as a neurosis in itself, but as a detail of the neurotic attitude to life outlined by Adler. Homosexualism is, in its last analysis, an organic striving away from life's normal goals. =A Denial of Life.= Homosexualism cannot be understood unless we associate it with a denial of life and all its duties. Nor could love be understood if we tried to dissociate it from its primary sexual goal which is the acceptance of life with its duties, symbolised by the procreation of life and the creation of new duties by the individual, duties which he considers as a source of joy.