ABSTRACT
A fact which had been known for a long time has In recent years been impressed afresh with great poignancy on the student of the history of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts, he thought, should be less preoccupied with the inner life of man and focus their attention more on man's external behavior. As has long been established in psychoanalysis, a man's homosexuality does not usually stem from the fact that he was surrounded by men in his childhood. His homosexuality arises much more frequently from the elaboration of the experience of his relation to the mother, from a search for his grandiose infantile self, and from the re-enactment of a wish-fulfilling narcissistic fantasy through the love for an idealized self-image of the past. Of still greater importance is the fact that the broadness and the central location of our topic render it inevitable that it impinges, indeed, on many aspects of psychoanalytic theory.
