CHAPTER VIII

THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN SEXUALITY AND SEX IN RELATION TO UNIFICATION AND ORGANIC MATING

In the impatience of the industrial laboratory to meet the public need, it happens not infrequently that, through an omission of adequate qualitative tests due to the unusual haste of production, an inferior grade of material is distributed such as would not have been produced under more temperate circumstances. The time has come to acknowledge that through a like inadvertence many of the products of psychoanalysis are seriously open to criticism upon the same grounds. Owing to overhasty construction and to a lack of requisite tests of their genuineness, an appreciable deficiency has occurred in the quality of the material produced. Due to this occasion psychoanalysis is answerable for engendering in the public mind certain conceptions which are utterly without a basis in fact. Coupled with this want of moderation, certain publicity experts have disseminated a wide range of literature embodying a mass of disastrous misapprehension. In mere zeal for a market they have circulated it broadcast amid all manner of suggestible, because unconscious, individuals and communities. Unconscious doctrines, however, cannot be promulgated except from unconscious sources. When psychoanalysis has achieved a sufficiently impersonal and far-reaching outlook to apply to itself in reality the same tests which it is now applying to others in theory, it will realize the need of recalling, as far as is possible, the many conceptual products of its overhasty output and of offering instead a more scientifically controlled and a more adequately tested summation of views such as are suited to serve as an ultimate interpretation of human consciousness.

There is a characterological aspect of human consciousness which psychoanalysis has yet to consider. By character I do not mean the habituations of personal bigotry. I have in mind a characterology that is racial and that furthers the conscious integrations of man as expressive of his societal life as a whole. Thus far, instead of regarding the personality of man as a societal aggregate assembled of the elements comprising individual men, psychoanalysis has tended to create artificial divisions within this organic unity. Unconsciously influenced by a division based upon the bias of its own arbitrary alternatives, psychoanalysis has assumed contrasts of behaviour which completely lack the foundations of an organismic inclusiveness.

Perhaps the most unwarranted of such conceptual contrasts, because most harmful and far-reaching in the confusion it entails, is the artificial discrimination connoted under the terms homosexuality and heterosexuality. From an organismic viewpoint the alternatives presupposed in such a distinction are traceable alone to the unconscious ambivalence within the psychoanalytic system itself. From an inclusive position it will be seen that in the systematization underlying the contrasting concepts homo- and heterosexuality, the psychoanalyst himself has fallen a prey to the contrasting images of hope and fear, “good” and “bad,” underlying the alternatives of his own absolute system.

In a situation that is organically false, an organically false reaction is the inevitable response. As long as sentimentality--the unconscious projection of the flattering likeness of one’s own ego--dominates, as now, all clinical procedure, the tendency to inversion or image-substitution that underlies the psychoanalytic system itself will necessarily render what is now the purely fanciful isolation of the so-called homosexual complex inaccessible to consciousness.

It is the tacit assumption among psychoanalysts as among sexologists generally that the condition described by Freud as unconscious “homosexuality” deserves recognition as a true biological phenomenon, and accordingly they tend to concede it place in the social scheme. Since the analytic approach is not societal, the analyst necessarily gives to the homosexual inversion a position that is positive and static. Whether the case is regarded as “curable” or “incurable” it is customarily treated as an objective disease-entity. Many instances of so-called “analysis” that I have known have consisted in nothing else than overcoming through suggestion (consensual assurance) a patient’s social resistance to this type of adaptation, notwithstanding that to this end there were pressed into clinical service the external adjustments of active heterosexuality. This conception is as unfortunate as it is unnecessary. The adaptation of the homosexual disorientation within the societal consciousness is organically as impossible as is the adaptation of the disorientations of paranoia in the organically societal aggregate. “Normally” the adaptation of both phases of inversion are a commonplace, but that it is so is but an added commentary on normality and its collective unconsciousness.

That the natural expression of sex is the union between man and woman is indisputable. The concomitance between the sex of man and the sex of woman is self-evident. Being organic, this reproductive convergence of the male and female of a species is a process that occurs spontaneously and without intervention. No dissertation is required to establish this view. There is, however, the need to set forth clearly a factor entering into human behaviour that is not spontaneous and to render conscious the conditions now obtaining unconsciously among us through the artificial intervention of this extraneous factor. When we spoke of the reactions of the child to the early influences of inducement and prohibition (suggestion and repression) corresponding respectively to the mental images of good and bad, we saw that “good” coincides with the individual’s personal advantage as reflected in the social approval about him, and that “bad” represents his personal disadvantage as likewise reflected in his social surroundings. In the presumptive absolute of our arbitrary images of good and bad, the system of behaviour thus unconsciously begotten in us assumes sponsorship even of the primary and organic instinct of mating. Not even this fundamental impulse of our human behaviour is safe from the infringements of our self-reflective alternatives of good and bad with their attendant measures of individual advantage. Accordingly, the organic and inherent impulse of mating is henceforward seen from the point of view of personal self-interest. A common, societal instinct of reproduction experiences thus the inversion of a secret, personal aim.

This secret element of personal advantage and acquisitiveness that has come to mar the free and natural expression of man’s mating impulse is fully attested in the covert self-consciousness that characterizes his “in-love” attitude. In the alternative attitude of good and bad that necessarily limits him to the issues of advantage or disadvantage for himself, man no longer approaches the essentially unitary instinct of love with unity in himself. Either there is the response in the individual that is “good” in that it concedes the social exaction (positive suggestion of self-advantage), or the response that is “bad” in that it repudiates the social consensus (negative suggestion of self-disadvantage, i.e., repression). In the first instance the individual accepts the alternative of the socially approved adaptation of heterosexuality, in the second the individual’s reaction issues in the alternative of the socially repudiated adaptation of homosexuality. In either alternative the factor of psychic inversion and self-interest is equally decisive. In the first it is presented in the form that is the individual’s response to the consensual suggestion, in the second it is presented in the form that is his response to the consensual repression. What is significant is the fact that, as each type of response is an alternation on the basis of the social suggestion or the social repression answering, in the first instance, to the desire of personal gain or approval and, in the second, to the fear of personal loss or disfavour, both types of response, in returning upon self and self-interest for their satisfaction, are equally ego-sexual.

As is universally the case with reactions based on the unconscious contrasts of good and bad, in the choice of either alternative there are preserved the elements actuating both. In the heterosexual alternative there is the unconscious presence of the homosexual component, in the homosexual alternative there is the unconscious presence of the heterosexual component. The reason is that the underlying factor that equally determines each of these seemingly opposed reactions is the deeper unconscious inversion of man’s ego-sexuality with its inevitable alternatives of self-advantage based upon our artificial differentiations of good and bad.

The conclusion is unavoidable that we shall have to reconstruct entirely our conception of the interrelationship of man and woman in respect to the instinct of sex. As has been said before, hetero- and homosexuality are purely fictitious discriminations. Like the distinctions presumably expressed by the conception extravert and introvert, they embody no discrimination in kind whatever, but are terms for the alternative aspects of one and the same thing. As the concept connoted by these terms may with advantage be replaced by the concept connoted by the terms allocentric and autocentric, so the concept expressed by the terms heterosexuality and homosexuality may with propriety give way to a concept such as we may correspondingly express by the terms allosexual and autosexual--terms which do not indicate a difference of content between two reactions but merely an alternation of aspect in one and the same reaction. With a view, then, to what I feel will afford a clearer and more encompassing outlook upon the problems of our human adjustment, both individual and social, I shall, wherever convenient, dispense with the term “homosexuality,” because of the needlessly misleading stigma it imposes upon the individual, and use instead of homosexual the term autosexual; correspondingly, instead of the term heterosexual, with its equally misleading social implication of “right” comportment, the expression allosexual will be used, it being understood that by these contrasts I mean the dual alternations of self-love due to man’s unconscious repudiation of the organic instinct of sex in favour of the personal inversions of sexuality.

Sexuality is the effort of conjunction of peripheral and visceral spheres, but because of the interposition of the personal or self-reflexive element, with its necessarily inverse aim, there results on the one hand (socially) the mere apposition of periphery with periphery, entailing an inverse erotism or autosexuality in the form of narcism (self-reflection), or unconscious homosexuality proper; and on the other (centrally) the mere (psychic) enfolding of visceral with visceral, entailing an inverse erotism in the form of autoerotism or ego-sexuality proper. Sex, on the contrary, is the spontaneous, effortless and non-personal conjugation of the organismic poles comprising male and female. This distinction between sexuality and sex explains the ulterior quality of a sophisticated and self-conscious “in-love” state representing contrast, in replacement for the organismic love-state representing identification. Hence sexuality is but the temporary self-appeasement of a reciprocal adjustment, whereas sex is the permanent self-realization of a mutual co-ordination.

A consideration that cannot fail to be of interest to the psychoanalyst is the obviously complementary relation of the two types, the allocentric and the autocentric, in respect to one another, and its undoubted significance as regards the instinct of mating among the more conscious personalities such as we should expect to follow the unifying process of analysis. The marked unconscious affinities observable between the two types I take to be a fact of general recognition among psychoanalysts if not among the laity itself. But unconscious affinities, being infantile or adaptive in character, are obviously attachments of an ego-sexual nature. It is an organic corollary, however, which in its social implication is unconsciously blinked by psychopathologists, that an individual who is infantile or unweaned or ego-sexual is in his objective sexual interest also de facto ego-sexual--ego-sexuality here being nothing else than the extension of the ego-sexual or autoerotic mode into the sexual objective of another individual. If, as would appear, normality is the expression of the unweaned and unconscious mode of society generally, it is not to be wondered at that the admission of this fact has been so generally suppressed, since there follows logically the distasteful conclusion that, unconsciously, normality or society in general, which includes us all, is ego-sexually constellated.

Accustomed as we are to think so much more readily in objective than in subjective terms, the conception of ego-sexuality as the determinant of the relationship between persons of the opposite sex, or the conception of our supposedly “normal” or “heterosexual” society as being in essence ego-sexual, has not yet entered the analytic consciousness, nor is it likely to do so without a violent storm of social protest and “resistance.” But the typical expression of sexual union, as it exists among “normals,” is redolent of this inverted bias. The folk-reaction of the social mind represented in the custom of marriage, if clearly confronted, reveals throughout the unmistakable signs of this alternative. If we note carefully the countenance of this social reaction, we cannot fail to observe that its instigation is based upon the mutual desire to mollify, to “please.”

Hence, marriage is for the most part a process of mutual adjustment of the ego-sexual claims upon one another of the two parties involved. After all, the “oneness” of marriage is an achievement due to the pooling of the private unconscious of the two parties to the arrangement. It is the permanent coalition of the unconscious of both, collectively, with a view to the temporary guarantees of each, severally. For marriage is an arrangement in accordance with the terms of which each party to the covenant secretly withdraws from his organic place as a societal element, in exchange for his fanciful sovereignty as a circumscribed domestic aggregate! That is, in marriage two unconscious elements have merged into a single unconscious entity. Through the self-reflection one achieves in his unconscious mate, through the self-reduplication he achieves in his unconsciously begotten offspring, one’s family is again but the unconscious of the individual freshly reinforced through a subtle recourse to symbolic replacement. It is the substitution of the single, self-limited social group for the all-inclusive, organic consonance of the societal aggregate. Thus the social cluster comprising the family is but the symbol of the societal unity comprising one’s own confluent life. The transaction is, in reality, nothing else than the unconscious reinstatement of the early childish mode of separateness, fear and dependence, such as actuated the mental bias of one’s own domestic traditions. In the marriage and homemaking of each of us there is but the unconscious transmission of the marriage and home of our parents. For as the child is nurtured amid a codified system of opinionativeness, this self-reflective (suggestive) habit about him engenders a self-reflective habit within him. Having early formed an image of himself in the social reflection with which he is surrounded, he begins early to examine his own reactions from the sector of this habitual self-reflection. It is in this reflection of the self that consists the repercussion of consciousness constitutive of self-consciousness or the manifestation we unconsciously personify as behaviour--an off-hand term for a reaction which we have not yet begun half adequately to analyze.

As self-consciousness is of its nature personal and adaptive, it does not lend itself to analysis on the static basis of a merely adaptive and personal premise. Its true analysis is the realization on an inclusive basis of a genetic and relativistic principle of consciousness. In the mere match-making of our pictorial affects, human relationship has become throughout artificial. It is this private impersonation of affects which we have substituted for the common unity of our real affects. In this mutual comparison of reflected impressions our relation to one another becomes a superficial and meaningless balancing of one affect against another. This artificial substitutive quality has entered even into the expression of man’s mating and reproductive impulse, and it is blindly venting itself to-day in the merely mutual attritions of our so-called sexual life. But this suggestive, substitutive image-systematization of sexuality is the direct antithesis to the unification and spontaneity of sex. Where there is unity of spirit, the symbol of unity expressed in bodily congress assumes a totally different significance. Sexuality is the mere apposition of bodies in place of a unity of spirit. In this apposition of the personal is the very abrogation of personality. It is the mark of sexuality that it is autocratic and exclusive; it is the mark of sex that it is relative and inclusive. This bidimension or image-substitution of sexuality is the psychological mechanism of our sexual resistances. For resistances, after all, are but the irksome oppression of our habitually enforced adjacencies. For this reason marriage is habituative, suggestive, inverted.

Wherever conditions require the isolation together of any two normal individuals though of the same sex, over a protracted period, there appear very unexpected phenomena in the mental reactions of the two with respect to one another. These reactions may be noted not only where their isolation is due to the accidents of circumstance, but also where it is due to voluntary withdrawal from habitual associations in the mutual interest of a common pursuit. The observation is noteworthy that, in such instances, the dreams of each individual show a persistently autosexual trend whose invariable object is the other, while, on the other hand, the fancies of their days’ dreams disclose a no less persistent criticism and repugnance on the part of each toward the other. It is the more interesting that this identical ego-sexual reaction (secret antagonism) is found also in two persons of unlike sex under the mental conditions of isolation involved in the mutual pursuance of self-interests represented in the bilateral attitude of marriage.

It is not inevitable that marriage should be the expression of inversion we make of it at present. Marriage is inverted or ego-centred not because of an organic necessity but because, in its mistakenness of form or its violation of the organic inherencies, marriage, like all mere external forms, is not biological but symbolic. In the present stage of society’s arrested growth marriage is not the outcome of a mode of societal confluence but of a mode of personal preference. It is the unconscious enforcement of a self-predicated want, not the conscious acceptance of an organically determined need. When I speak of marriage, I have not in mind the permanent union of man and woman that is biological and true and that is the natural basis of our human society. I refer to the mental attitude toward marriage that we have come to substitute unconsciously for marriage itself. In place of the bipolar position of man and woman, we have substituted the bidimensional attitude of male and female. Because of this mental attitude of “marriage,” people whose lives might be mutually necessary become, on the contrary, merely inevitable to one another. It is again our paramount image of self with its resultant reflection in the bidimensional picture. But whatever is pictorial is personal, whatever is personal is factional, and wherever there lurks the unconscious element of the factional or separative, union is organically interdicted.

Glancing even superficially at the obvious aim toward the mutual exchange of egoistic satisfactions and at the give-and-take of superficial coquetries and accommodations generally characterizing the marriage relationship, there is ample evidence of the completely infantile, undeveloped, ego-sexual nature of the motives determining such unions. If one considers the large number of women who are supported by men in the capacity of sexual partners, and observes their obsessive self-ornamentation, their voluptuous exaggerations of dress and manner, their liberal use of perfume and cosmetics with which to enhance their personal appeal, and considers correspondingly the large sums of money contributed annually by their votaries in maintenance of such sexual commodities, the ego-sexual character of such mutual arrangements is not far to seek.

In contrast with this state of affairs in the sexual life of “normals,” it has for some time interested me to observe the unconscious autosexuality invariably presented by neurotic individuals. The unconscious character of it, whether latent or actual, always manifests itself in a privately repressed, unsatisfactory form or in a form that invariably entails conflict. It has long seemed to me that this repressed and tormenting expression of the tendency to the enfolded satisfactions of autosexuality, or to the unconscious extension of one’s ego-sexuality to others of one’s own sex, is but the aim of the personality toward an organic unification deflected into the symbolic form represented in bodily identification or in objective likeness. It has further seemed to me that such a symbolically distorted urge, if converted into its true meaning, would issue in an organic identification representing a completer, more conscious order of union. I am not unmindful that in the fixity of our own symbolic substitutions our tendency is to make such organic conceptions needlessly difficult of assimilation. In a paper read before a psychoanalytic meeting several years ago I gave expression to this same view, and my meaning was so completely misconceived that I was actually quoted subsequently as having said that I considered neurotic autosexuality (I then suggested the use of the term homo-phyllism) to embody a “higher expression of love” than that represented in allosexuality. Such a statement could not be otherwise interpreted than as an outspoken advocacy of homosexuality! It is, of course, not to be denied that the union typified in the allosexual relationship is alone an adequate expression of sex-unity. But it is adequate only as organic unity or conscious love, not as sexuality or self-love, the basis on which at present it very generally rests.

Biologically, autosexuality cannot be other than essentially infantile and regressive in character and as such it runs counter to the basic aims of analysis. But emphasis should be placed upon our need of recognizing to what a very large extent actual autosexuality exists under the objective symbols of allosexuality. Marriage, I repeat, as it largely obtains in the present stage of society, fairly teems with this infantile mode of sexuality. As the dominant impulse between “lovers” with their coy, infantile aim of secret self-satisfaction amply attests, the relationship, under whatever guise of exterior circumstance it may be concealed, is necessarily egoistic or autosexual.

I feel sure that sooner or later it will be recognized that allosexuality and autosexuality are synonymous, that these seemingly contrary adaptations are really but alternate aspects of one and the same thing. Sooner or later it will be seen that, while the neurosis entails in every instance an autosexual undercurrent, it is an expression of autosexuality that is organically intolerable, and that the social adaptation underlying normality is equally the unconscious expression of a collectively assimilated ego- or autosexuality. Thus our pseudo-normality is an unconsciously conceded (socially assimilated) inversion to this infantile mode of sexuality in substitution for the original organic instinct of sex. This is why it has seemed to me that in the neurotic reaction, for all its distortion, there is presented a progressive urge of evolution--that in the very distortion of the neurotic personality there is the premonition of a type of a clearer, more conscious social order. In his distorted effort to assimilate to himself a vicarious, objective (bodily) likeness, the neurotic expresses symbolically, unconsciously, an inherent urge toward a subjective, organic identification. In this view normality with its allosexual reaction is psychologically more autosexual than the reaction we recognize as unconscious or neurotic autosexuality. Although this repressed expression is symbolically the more infantile and regressive of the two, yet, of the two, it is potentially far the more competent to the truly complemental relationship whose fulfilment is merely symbolized in the allosexual adaptation as it commonly exists among us. What really underlies the conflict of the neurotic or the unconsciously autosexual is his organic urge toward a completer oneness of life. His autosexuality is but symbolic. It is a disposition the essence of which is what I have elsewhere called “homophyllic” and the organic culmination of which can be realized only in the unification of the complementary systems embodied in a corresponding monophyllic union.

In the beginning of my analytic work I fully believed with other psychoanalysts that there was a condition of neurotic or “unconscious homosexuality” distinguishable from what I then believed to exist conversely as “heterosexuality.” I was too theoretical, habituative, academic, too limited in the freedom of unsystematized observation to recognize that sexuality, as it now exists socially, is everywhere of one cloth, that all sexuality being narcistic is “homosexuality,” that it is of its nature an expression of the infantile desire of self-supremacy, of self-seeking, of self-gratification, that, in a word, sexuality is synonymous with autosexuality or ego-erotism. As homosexuality is but the projection socially of what is ego-sexuality individually, sexuality or ego-erotism is the very essence of homosexuality or homo-erotism. But, like the rest of my confrères, it was my habit to refer the question of health or disorder of adaptation to the artificial distinction between heterosexuality and “unconscious homosexuality” respectively. In other words, my criterion of health and growth was formerly the merely unconscious conventionalization of sex, the mere procuring for it, as it were, the external formality of the social blessing. It is only in the last years that I have seen in its fuller clarity that health is essentially unity and identity of personality as contrasted with the introversions of an unconsciously alternative adaptation. Only in the last years have I seen that as life and sex are one, so are self-worship and sexuality one, and that the real contrast as seen in the light of the health and growth of the organism, whether individual or societal, is the contrast between the organic instinct of sex on the one hand and the introversions of sexuality on the other.

It is the unerring test of unconscious autosexuality that the quest that manifestly registers itself under this artificial form of expression can find its answer only in a realization which, in its true sex determination (love), is latently the precise reverse of this expression. In the attitude of lust and autosexuality toward the male there is presaged love or sex toward the woman; in the attitude of lust or autosexuality toward the female is the earnest of love or sex toward the man. On the contrary, it is the unfailing test of the delusionally systematized autosexuality (ego-sexuality), which is social or “normal,” that the quest thus recorded in its manifest content can find its satisfaction only in the no less manifest “reliefs” of a seemingly opposite sexual determination (allosexuality). In the self-lusts (autosexuality) of the male, his objective is the body of the female with her autosexuality or self-lusts; in the self-lusts (autosexuality) of the female, her objective is the body of the male and his self-lusts or autosexuality. In the satisfactions of these objective conquests lies the whole meaning of sexuality, as in the inclusiveness of a subjective unification lies the meaning of love.

The type of union biologically natural and fitting is that between man and woman as unified personalities. But in the present repressed, vicarious, infantile state of the individual and society, such a union is as yet in very large measure merely a type. To make of the union of personalities something more than a type--to make of it an organic reality--there is needed some such unification within each through the personality of the other as would be realized in a relationship representing the union of the two complementary systems, the peripheral and central, the societal and individual. The separation of these two systems we have seen to be the response to external repression from without, and in the re-uniting of these artificially separated complements there would be re-established the originally confluent organism, individual and societal, such as alone embodies the free and unified personality.

Union is not a thing of body in the contrasts of male and female with their artificial dissociation from life. The female in her rôle of costly objet d’art and the male as collector of such wares do not approach in this mere surface affinity a consummation even remotely akin to any such organic reality. No man or woman ever understood the other’s body who has not understood the other’s mind; no man or woman ever understood the other’s mind, who has not understood the body of the other. It is only in an organic identification such as is inclusive of both that there is fulfilled the united understanding, in both, of the mind and body of each. Union is of personality as realized in man and woman through the fulfilment in each of their identification with life in its totality, the one (male or female) embodying the peripheral, societal, allocentric complement, the other (male or female) the internal, central, autocentric complement, the two divided personalities realizing in the welding of each with each the organic unity of both.

In saying “male or female” I am advisedly avoiding assigning specifically either sex element to either organic rôle. In general the societal or peripheral rôle and the visceral or central rôle would seem analogous to the respective rôles of male and female, in the fact that the former is more fittingly adapted biologically to the external demands of life as hunter and provider and the latter to the more retired, enclosed conditions of life pertaining to the functions of conservation and maternity. There is the further parallel that in the female the reproductive organs are organs of receptivity, lying deeper, more centrally within her organism, while those of the male are more contiguous to the external skeletal tissues and are invasive in function. Nevertheless, because of the frequent transposition between the two sexes of the traits supposedly specific of each--a far more frequent transposition than the conventional division between the sexes affords opportunity to observe, the woman being often the more aggressive, the man the more retired of the two--to assign forehandedly one or the other complement to one or the other sex is arbitrary and without warrant. This is true particularly in respect to the distinction between the neurotic exaggerations of type described as auto- and allocentric, in which the conventional psychosexual differentiations are practically indeterminable.

These and kindred reflections lead me to feel that the term “opposite” sex is subjectively an unfortunate misnomer. To the neurotic especially, whose life has been crippled through repression in response to external opposition, all “oppositeness” is felt as a menace. Consider the inhibiting intimidations to the subjective child, resulting from the implied oppositeness between teacher and pupil, that characterizes the attitude of our prevailing pedagogical systems. Consider to what extent our systems of education are really barriers to education. In the very idea of oppositeness the child is instinctively revolted. His organism shrinks from it as from a blow. It is under such circumstances that, in his sense of the oppositeness of the sexes, the individual’s unconscious recourse is to the sex that is not opposite his own. Yet here too, as we have seen, he has only turned to the objective symbol of unity, and the inherent opposition remains. For the symbol of unity or that which stands instead of unity is itself opposition. Thus in the neurotic’s unconscious recourse to this symbolic or autosexual form of identification the opposition or separation is only accented anew.

Organically, or from the point of view of personality, woman is not opposite to man but each is the complement of the other. As in a current of electricity the flow between its two termini is dependent not upon their opposition but upon the functional confluence between its positive and negative poles, each being incomplete in the absence of the other, so is the relationship of sex between two organisms; it is confluent and not opposite, it is of the nature of complement and not of contrast. And so the need of the neurotic, as of the normal individual, is such a completion of his personality in the organic complement of his mate as is co-extensive with his unification with life in its organic compass.

In the symbolic unification or unconscious autosexuality represented in an objective likeness or bodily identification there is but the short-circuiting of a true organic unification. Where it has occurred in personalities of a high intellectual or social order, the phenomenon has tended to be accounted for through recourse to a conceptual accommodation that is more generous than scientific. A plea has been advanced for the acceptance of the comrade-love of such individuals on grounds of the high character of the expression of their inverted tendency. To this end there has been invoked the conception of an “intermediate sex.” But in this undoubtedly hospitable envisagement there is to be seen the sentimentality that is as always but inverted sentiment. The conception of an intermediate sex is the creation of an intermediate imagination. An intermediate sex is a biological solecism. It represents the attempt of a divided mind to reconcile a divided state of feeling that is prior to it. It is again the arbitrary assumption of opposition and the vicious circle of separateness and unconsciousness. As for the high order of many of its representatives, there is no high order of infantilism or autosexuality. The existence of a high order, moral and intellectual, of this type only imposes upon its representatives the greater societal obligation to understand and encompass its meaning. Their need is to relinquish the infantile distortion of life symbolized in this inverted bias of their unconscious autosexuality, and concurrently to enter into the organic realization of their innate consonance. It is only when this organic inherency has become disturbed, whether neurotically or normally, singly or societally, that there occurs the reflex effort toward vicarious restitution, resulting either in the exaggerations of self-assertiveness or in an over-emphasized self-derogation representing respectively the spurious bravadoes of an alternative maleness on the one hand and the artificial propitiations of an alternative femaleness on the other.

As has been said, because of our objective, perceptual attitude toward one another, our contacts, whether mediated through visual, auditory, tactile or other stimuli, are necessarily superficial and attributive. This superficial registry of stimuli includes also the sphere of our sexological responses. Thus in civilized man the sexual reaction, in both male and female, is restricted to the superficial sexual zones. Because of man’s repression of this essential sphere of his feeling, the natural flow of the sexual impulse is artificially intercepted. Hence the genital stimulus in man is limited to the superficial tactile organs. It does not radiate to the deeper visceral structures constituting its nuclear terminus--in the male the rectal, prostatic and crural zones, in the female the rectal, the deeper vaginal zones and the cervix uteri (the homologue in the female of the prostate in the male). It is because of this intercepted radiation of the natural sexual response that there has arisen the necessity for the formulation of an “anal complex”--a complex that is regarded by psychoanalysts as existing quite sporadically in certain neurotic individuals and that is by no means recognized as a condition common to the race of civilized man! For naturally with the interception of the sexual impulse at its nuclear pole, or with repression of the visceral sex zone, there can only result in its stead a “complex” and along with it such artificial sexual adaptations as have been described as intermediate. In addition to this repression of our organic sex feeling there has occurred a corresponding compensation in the sphere of the mental and social life, which in the woman has led to the social adoption of the rôle corresponding to the mental image female and in the man to the mental image male.

Among the lower orders of animals the distinction between male and female entails no organic opposition. In one and the same organism this bipolar condition is undifferentiated and self-contained. On the other hand, with the mental sophistication connoted under the distinction man and woman we have come to assume the presence of an artificial opposition between the male and female organism. With the male element or organism we demand the mental and physical attributes we arbitrarily posit as “man,” with the female element or organism we demand the mental and physical attributes we arbitrarily posit as “woman.” Thus we repudiate the polarity that is confluent of the two elements male and female and exact of the organism we discriminate as man that it repudiate the characteristics we discriminate as woman, and of the organism we discriminate as woman that it repudiate the characteristics we distinguish as man.

This arbitrary, unbiological dictum necessitates that a “man” shall repress the female component within him notwithstanding that his organism is compounded of it along with the male element. Conversely, it makes obligatory upon the woman that she repress the male element within her notwithstanding that it is a no less constituent factor than the female element in composing the bipolar quality essential to the unity of her organism.

With this artificial condition and its edict of enforced repression there often occurs such a one-sided development within the organism that the result is the exaggerated reaction we see in the bilateral extremes we have described as good and bad, as saint and sinner. It is interesting to observe, though, that upon analysis one discovers within the repressed sphere of the sinner’s personality all the factors that constitute the personality of the saint, and that within the repressed sphere of the saint’s personality, there are disclosed all the elements that constitute the personality of the sinner.

Such findings as we owe to our deeper penetration into individual psychology make clearer the superficiality of our normal, social distinctions. They afford us reason to believe that when psychiatry has loosed itself of its superficial acceptations we shall find that wherever the bipolar life of the organism, male or female, is permitted to fulfil its natural expression there will be no longer the repressed or unconscious instigation to such exaggerated distortions or over-compensations as now issue as a result of the organic repression of these artificially dual phases. We shall then recognize that the “intermediate sex” is a fallacy due to discriminations that arise from a disregard of the inclusive nature of sex. What is really apprehended by the term intermediate sex is the composite sex whereof the unification of personality within every individual, normal as well as neurotic, is the inherent embodiment. It is in this concomitance of the social and nuclear systems that consists the organic co-ordination of the individual element. Without it there is lacking the organic correlation of the societal aggregate such as is the essential biology of man.

The organismic postulate here proposed sets out from the conception of a principle of primary identification within the original psychic organism as the biological basis of consciousness. Upon this principle rests the biological significance of the unity of personality that comprises the consonance of life, individual and societal. The essence of the neurotic diathesis, socially and singly, is merely the reflection within the individual of these surface diversifications of external suggestion or repression, as more and more they infringe upon this original consonance of the organism. This gradual replacement of our original unity and inherency by the external inducements of the extraneous and alternative is the whole significance of unconsciousness. This, in reality, is the meaning of the manifold dissimilitudes of men as compared with the unified personality of man.

If, in the androgynous personalities represented in such autocentric types as Buddha, Plato or Christ, there is manifested this unifying urge of the inherent organism of man, so the allocentric personalities of Socrates, of Napoleon and of Nietzsche are equally expressive of this same composite urge. If this unifying urge of man’s common sex incited the genius of an Hypatia in centuries past, it has directed no less in our own times the creative impulse underlying the genius of George Eliot or of Olive Schreiner. In the contemplation of such genius we see presented the unity and concentration of personality that is the real meaning of the artist as contrasted with the extraneous dissipations and diversities of the average reaction-type. It is this unity of personality that is the source of the artist’s creativeness as it is the inspiration of his genius. This composite quality of the sex life explains the gentler intuitions we often find in the personality of a man. There is undoubtedly the feminine in man though as yet he stands in fear of it. It does not wrangle or contend. It does not calculate success. The feminine in man is the artist in man. It is because of this that there can be in the societal unity of the artist’s intuitive instinct no place for the illusion that is called “the public.” To him “the public” is but the collective repudiation of the common soul of man--a repudiation that corresponds to this same disavowal within the private soul of each of us. Unmoved by its clamorous demands, the artist feels within these manifestations of the public mind the common soul that underlies it, and senses within it the pain of denied needs identical with his own. This is the unfailing intuition of the artist. It is because of this sense of the unity of life that no artist was ever yet successful, that his triumph or his failure are above all public concern.

And so by “the artist” I mean the quality of personality that is enticed by no external advantage, that entertains no indirection, is unmoved by the inverse compensations of egoism and the unconscious wish. Such a quality is organically, societally self-contained and subsists without object. It does not sue for favour nor seek to please. In this confluence of the personality of the artist as of the neurotic, in this creative concentration of man’s genius, whether articulate or denied, is embodied the societal instinct that is the composite life of the race. This organic integrity of personality that is the composite life of man and that is organically inseparable from the unifying urge embodied in the impulse of mating has its clearest intimations in the affirmations of the artist as in the frustrations of the neurotic. In the unifying urge represented in these two opposite extremes of reaction--an urge which shall neither impose nor accept an adjustment extraneous to the inherent personality--is expressed the demand for a self-realization in a unification which, being organic, is all-inclusive.

Only in such a conjunction will man realize his original mode of societal confluence. When such a conjunction will enable him truly to realize in the instinct of mating the deepest need of his being, union will no longer as now be represented through juxtaposition in the mere physical symbol of bodily interpenetration, but it will be through unification the societal reality of an organic intussusception.