ABSTRACT
Clinical studies of overt homosexuality are rendered difficult by the fact that only when the delicate balance achieved by manifest homosexuality is threatened or lost will homosexuals of either sex turn to a psychiatrist or analyst for help. This chapter discusses the relationship of the homosexual women to each parent separately. When submitted to analytic scrutiny, the differences between the women of "masculine" character and the overtly homosexual women are more striking than their similarities. The homosexual girl appears to have eliminated the father and all other men as possible objects of libidinal investment. The homosexual constantly seeks other women for tender and eroticized relations, which have in addition the quality of a mother-child relationship. When a woman builds her life around homosexual object relations she is unconsciously seeking to maintain an intimate relation with the paternal imago, decathected as a libidinal object but possessed symbolically through identification.
