How may the cure be effected? The subject must be made to understand
that he will never really carry out the crimes which contact with women
suggest to his unconscious. He must learn to apply love in its bipolar
form alike to men and women. His plethora of cravings should enable him
to awaken within himself the hitherto badly neglected love for woman.
Before the analysis all his erotic trends were directed towards male
friends. The cure leads through approach of woman as friend. First she
is a friend, and subsequently—after much struggle and searching—the
beloved. He must learn to play the rôle of father to some strange woman.
Is analysis the proper means? Who, in the present state of our
knowledge, knows another? What can we accomplish through commands,
punishment, formal training, or hypnosis? Primordial love achieves
supremacy only through the exacting process of self-knowledge and
through the recognition of the primordial instincts, including the
primordial hatred. The subject has concentrated his primordial love
feeling wholly upon his own person.
Like all homosexuals he loves only himself. This peculiarity, too, he
shares with all primordial beings. Does primordial man know any other
love than love of self?[44]
I have already pointed out that _urnings_ always seek themselves first
and assume subsequently the rôle of another person; or else they seek in
the male different variants of their own childhood. The same is true
_pari passu_ also of the _urlinds_. To be in love always means to find
one’s self in another. But why do _urnings_ not find themselves in the
female _Imago_? This question cannot be covered with a generalization
that will hold good for all cases. In the two last cases the fact that
the subjects regarded themselves as the reverse of handsome played an
important rôle. They had a sense of inferiority with regard to woman and
a feeling of envy. Self-love induced fear of defeat by woman on account
of lack of attractiveness. How could they feel confident of conquering
woman in view of their ugliness? How could they play the rôle of a Don
Juan to which their latent homosexuality might otherwise have driven
them? Among men physical beauty does not matter. What is important is
the size of the genitalia.
If love capacity be measured by the size of one’s genitalia, the patient
_Delta_ (Case 83) could measure himself against any one. He took
ridiculous pride in his great penis,—a pride shown by many men. His
whole sexuality was centered upon the symbol of masculinity. With
_Sigma_, with whom the penis played but a secondary rôle, the case was
different. _Sadger_ who sees in narcissism the love of one’s genitalia
would find his view corroborated by the history of the first case but
not by the second, the subject in the latter instance showing not the
least interest in his penis.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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