¹ An exception to this, though not an important one, arises in questions of legal recommendation in respect to homosexuality, where it is singularly relevant to determine the correlation between homosexual behavior and other forms of behavior, e.g., paedophilic seduction, rape, assault, burglary, so that the necessity for legal surveillance of homosexuality can be established. However, it might be mentioned that The Wolfenden Report, a comparatively recent and highly reliable study, addressed to the problem of legal supervision of homosexuality in England, found no justification for continuing to make legal distinctions between homosexuality and heterosexuality. The study found that as a group, homosexuals manifest no exceptional transgression of the usual legal codes, aside from when homosexuality itself is illegal. The continuance of special legal sanctions against homosexuals seems to belong to the legislative tradition of prejudice.

² Hooker, Evelyn, “Male Homosexuality in the Rorschach,” in Sherman, Murray H. (Ed.), A Rorschach Reader (New York: International Universities Press, 1960), pp. 14-44.Google Scholar

³ Apropos of the tendency to make more than news out of prima facie information, I am reminded of another Rorschach study, also well conceived and executed, by Anne Roe, called “Painting and Personality,” (Rorschach Research Exchange, 10:86-100, 1946) in which the Rorschachs of twenty of the nation's leading painters were analyzed. While a variety of personality pictures representing a range of adjustment levels emerged, no criteria could be established to indicate a capacity to function as an artist, let alone a leading artist. Thus, like the Rorschachs produced by homosexuals, these Rorschachs were unexceptional, many o£ them quite banal.

⁴ It will be seen in the foregoing that certain creative efforts of known homosexuals do not, as I see it, contribute to the problematic side of homosexuality and theatre—for example, I have a serious admiration for the plays of Genet, and a question likely to arise is how it is that some artists are capable of functioning successfully in spite of their psychopathology, while others are incapable because of it. About this I believe we are in the dark, and I shall make no attempt at a hypothesis. The question has to do with the wellsprings and nature of creative talent and genius, before which psychoanalysis, as Freud once remarked, must, alas, lay down its arms. There is an excellent analytic literature on peripheral questions, e.g., the relationship between biography and creative themes, the distinction between creative and pathologic symbol formation. But there is as yet no general answer to the question at the heart of the matter—why talent triumphs over neurosis. The exposition that comes nearest to the question is Ernst Kris's classic Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art. Erik Erikson's scat tered writings on identity and pathography are relevant and classic, but also fall somewhat adjacent to the problem.

Also, I should like to urge the reader's attention to two papers of Otto Fenichel, “The Symbolic Equation: Girl = Phallus,” and “On Acting” (The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel, Second Series [New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1954]). I shall be saying something about the psychology of the actor, for I believe that the combination of the prominence of the actor in current theatre and his special psychology constitutes a possible, though not inevitable, danger for theatre. Again, I cannot possibly stray to the full limits of the problem of the actor's psychology. Fenichel's two papers are succinct indications of how psychoanalysis would approach the actor. There are numerous case studies of actors. But a full analytic treatment of the actor's general psychology does not exist.

⁵ Some of the common components leading to orgasm in homosexual activity are pan-epidermal stimulation—full-body contact accounts for the greatest frequency of orgasm among homosexuals, oral stimulation either by kissing or by sucking the partner's phallus, and comparatively infrequently (contrary to the widely-held myth) anal stimulation by the partner's phallus. Sado-masochistic scenes are artificial events leading to orgasm by arousing visual and exibitionistic components of infantile perversity. But whatever goes on, the inability of the homosexual to deal sexually with a partner who is not to a very significant degree a narcissistic extension, rather than a separate person, prevents the homosexual from going beyond an autoerotic, infantile experience.

⁶ Though such developmental models are clearly constructs, they are not merely arbitrary. The cogency of a construct depends upon the elegance with which it accommodates observed data and also upon its heuristic power. There are a number of contending constructs claiming to fit the observed data while offering an interesting program for continuing research. Naturally, the particular construct a scientist chooses has an influence upon his subsequent observations and the kinds of data he is going to look for and deal with. But this is a disappointing state of affairs only to those who cherish the myth that scientific activity is not selective and that the scientist has no ultimate stake in the outcome of his work. The sexual construct I am using here is the psychoanalytic one and follows Freud. An early and explicit statement of the analytic construct can be found in Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.

⁷ Beacon Press edition, pp. 49-51.

⁸ Vintage edition, pp. 51-52.

⁹ indebted to Jule Nydes for stressing, at the time I was his this extremely important relationship. (Cf. Jule Nydes, “The Magical Experience of the Masturbation Fantasy,” American Journal of Psychotherapy, April 1950, pp. 303-310.)

¹⁰ Nydes, op. cit. p. 306.

¹¹ The myth that orgiastic potency is the ultimate index of mental health, i.e., “liberation,” “self-realization,” “openness,” etc., is just that—a myth. With due regard to Norman Mailer (is this youth-leader really past forty!), it must be pointed out that orgiastic potency is not infrequently found among those whose lives are teetering on the brink of chaos. “How has his sexual behavior been?” we might ask the wife or mistress of a patient lately admitted to the hospital for slashing his wrists. “Magnificent!” she may reply, which supports a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Wilhelm Reich, in the last months of his life prior to his tragic encounter with the Food and Drug Administration, would attend the movies carrying a loaded pistol and would stand against the rear wall of the theatre to insure that nobody sat behind him. In the midst of this terminal paranoia, he claimed for himself the greatest orgiastic potency on earth. “But isn't madness healthy in a sick society?” goes the protest along about here. No, it is not.

¹² An over-emphasis on reality leading to legalistic and circumstantial cautiousness is a regular aspect of paranoia, a common condition which, according to the psychoanalytic view, attempts in its symptoms to ward off, among other things, homosexual impulses. The concretization of symbolic forms of thought is what gets the paranoic into so much communicative trouble with his environment. Wilhelm Reich has been mentioned in the previous note: his later writings are characterized by a severe symbolic impoverishment; the orgone is a paranoid literality, a simplistic concretization of certain theoretical matters far too complex for the paranoic's desperate enthusiasm for direct contact with “reality.” It is interesting that sexual pleasure became for Reich the ultimate measure o£ sanity, while he went on to detest humanity's “plague” of symbolic cognitive function; to Reich the mind was anathema, and any scientist who used it, as against “open, mindless feeling,” was automatically disqualified from contacting truth—only that which is felt is true.

¹³ Instances of impressive identification in later life are widespread. The evolution from apprentice to professional consumes a great deal of identificatory effort. A pregnancy, especially a first one, provides a very important identificatory process in the husband and wife in respect to parental imagos. However, the identifications of childhood— how the animal infant becomes the human child—decide the character and disposition of all subsequent identifications.

¹⁴ Much can go wrong with the process, and very frequently does. Since the process requires a certain constancy on the part of authorities being identified with, a broken home is an obvious disadvantage to a child's identificatory experience; the death of a parent early in the child's development is an unspeakable hardship; absentee parenthood is another common obstruction to the process. On the other hand, constancy in respect to a life-style alien to the environment outside the immediate family invites a strong identificatory experience, but with poor subsequent survival value when the immediate family withers from the grown offspring; to the world around him the offspring may appear anomic and bizarre. Identification appropriates the total parent, which includes the parent's unconscious, and where the parent's outward social adjustment is sustained through a precarious equilibrium of psychic conflict, the child may be identifying more with the parent's unconscious id than superego, which is generally what has happened in those numerous instances where a supposedly socially upstanding parent is shocked to discover his offspring is an irrepressible delinquent. (Here, again, overt behavior is a misleading indicator of what is going on between people.) Also, since the parent's power is what identification seeks, an identificatory opportunity for the child disappears or is spoilt when parental anxiety is typically conveyed where power is expected instead. And so on…

¹⁵ Collected Papers, II, Norton, pp. 352-353.

¹⁶ If actors are difficult people with the opportunity to pursue acting seriously as work, without the opportunity they are impossible. The actor native to Hollywood has an especially hard time; rather than his talent achieving subsequent license, the movie-actor need only show his public sufficient private exploit, for which he is then judged retrospectively a successful talent. This obviates his last means at personal integration. Psychoanalytically, Hollywood actors are notoriously untreatable. They are only capable of handling a primitive kind of benevolent supervision from their analytic doctors. The only patients receiving psychoanalysis in Hollywood these days are analytic trainees, depending, of course, on whether the Hollywood analyst can still remember what psychoanalysis is all about.

¹⁷ The Idea of a Theater (New York: Anchor Books), pp. 177-178.

¹⁸ Eros and Civilization, preface to the Vintage Edition, p. ix.