ABSTRACT
The prepubertal love of a boy for his father is a quite normal and healthy thing, and if psychologists call it homosexuality it is certainly not homosexuality in the popular and legal sense. Now at the age of eleven or twelve the patient was emotionally very much more attached to his father than he was to his mother. Between the time of this attachment and the patient’s pubertal sexual development, the father died. All his longings for the dead father presently became reinforced with the development of sexuality and its sexual longings. There was no material, or real, father to present this developing unconscious phantasy of complete union with reality difficulties and moral taboos. The emotionally disturbing memories of his father, and of the agony produced by their contact with the realization of father’s death, had already undergone considerable repression.
