The child’s dependency on the mother, which is reinforced by the mother’s excessive intimacy and overpowering intrusiveness and seductiveness, sets the stage for a primitive fear of engulfment and annihilation stimulated by the child’s naturally emerging erotic interest in her during the oedipal phase of development. The anxiety in relationship to the female genital may be of at least two kinds: (1) the anxiety may arise from the awareness that there are “penisless” beings, and this recognition in the child’s experience encourages castration fears; or (2) because of a more primitive connection of castration anxiety with previous oral aggressive impulses, the female genitals may be seen as the castrating instrument capable of biting or tearing off the penis—the vagina dentata fantasy.
Central to the development of male homosexuality is the identification with the mother. The general unavailability of, distance from, or rejection by the father in such cases makes his availability as a model for developing masculinity somewhat limited. Consequently, the basic identification with the father, which would shape the young male child’s emerging sense of himself as a man, is undercut, and the child is drawn with powerful emotional ties to his mother. The tendency of such mothers to be oversolicitous, overprotective and overinvolved -frequently in seductive ways-with these male children contributes to the intense affective coloring of this maternal identification.
It should be noted that such identification generally is not without considerable conflict, and that the degree of anxiety related to it depends largely on the extent to which the child has remained pathologically dependent on the mother and the degree to which he has been unable to establish some degree of separation from her without the threat of loss or abandonment. The basic identification with the mother underlies the homosexual impulse to take a man as a sexual object, since in this way one lives out the maternal identification. One often sees in such cases a combination of impulses which brings the male homosexual to want to be in the position of nurturing, caring, and mothering, usually for a younger male. In this way he can imitate the mother who exercised these functions toward him. It also contributes much conflict about the exercise of more active, assertive, and aggressive masculine propensities.
The penis comes to be seen as a powerful, destructive, and harmful organ, a fantasy adding to the difficulty in relating to the opposite sex and in achieving genital satisfaction. Clinically a frequent component of this complex is an abiding, unsatisfied, continually frustrated yearning and longing for closeness, acceptance, and loving communication with the father. Often in the course of clinical work with such homosexuals, these wishes can be more or less consciously expressed directly in relation to the father, but more frequently they remain relatively unconscious and tend to be acted-out and expressed as wishes for approval, closeness, and acceptance from other significant male figures in the patient’s life. Frequently this dynamic expresses itself in the homosexual inclinations.
It is worth noting that this dynamic also may be part of a religious context. The religious is exhorted to submit himself to the superior in loving obedience. The religious practices which reinforce this submissive and obediential demeanor may serve as a vehicle for essentially homosexual impulses, representing a homosexual submission to a substitute father. Optimally such impulses need not be disruptive and can be effectively sublimated, given adequate strengths of character and the capacity to control and master them. We should not overlook the potentiality for such obedient submission to force a given individual into an equivalent homosexual position either increasing homosexual anxieties (if the wish to submit is ego-alien) or reinforcing such tendencies (if it is not).
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