ABSTRACT
A disturbed father-son relationship has long been alluded to as contributing to adult male homosexuality. Freud, at several intervals, commented on the importance of the father in the psychogenesis of homosexuality. As early as 1905 he predicted with remarkable prescience the family constellation so commonly noted in subsequent decades (Bieber et al., 1962; Socarides, 1968) in the psychoanalysis of homosexual patients: a domineering, psychologically crushing mother and an absent, weak, hostile, or rejecting father. In Leonardo da Vinci (1910, p. 99) Freud observed, “In all our male homosexual cases the subjects had had a very intense erotic attachment to a female person, as a rule their mother, during the first period of childhood, which is afterwards forgotten; this attachment was evoked or encouraged by too much tenderness on the part of the mother herself and further reinforced by the small part played by the father during their childhood.” He stated that the mothers of homosexual men were frequently masculine women “who were able to push the father out of his proper place” (p. 99). He was “strongly impressed by cases in which the father was absent from the beginning or left the scene at an early date, so that the boy found himself left entirely under feminine influence. Indeed, it almost seems as though the presence of a strong father would ensure that the son made the correct decision in his choice of object, namely someone of the opposite sex.” Again, in a 1915 footnote to the Three Essays (1905b), he reflected that the presence of both parents played an important part in normal development and that “the absence of a strong father in childhood not infrequently favours the occurrence of inversion” (p. 146). Freud concluded that homosexual men show a lack of regard for the father or a fear of him. Their motivation in turning toward other men was in all likelihood a resuit of their need to diminish castration anxiety secondary to oedipal conflict. They sought reassurance by the presence of the penis in the sexual partner, avoided the mutilated female, and denied all rivalry with the father (Freud, 1921).
