ticularly bees and wasps, but had a morbid horror of spiders, which embodied for him "malignant cold cruelty.

At age 15 D became aware of vague sexual promptings. He revived his attention to secondary sex characters, particularly the breasts, sought out books likely to bear on coition and began to masturbate. The latter practice afforded most gratification when he put on a pair of corsets. A sense of guilt and shame, however, followed the performance, and his secretive asocial behaviour left him with the idea that he alone indulged in such practices. Throughout these years D was not only unsociable but definitely antisocial. He regarded the society of the place and its conventions with positive abhorrence and sought companionship with nature not with humanity. He happened, however, upon his wanderings, to make the acquaintance of a Bohemian artist and novelist from whom he acquired a good deal of sophistication. "This man was the first good sportsman he had ever met and the only one who talked to him frankly as an equal." D received both encouragement and knowledge from this man and stayed with him on several occasions.

At age 18 it was decided that D should go to university, and his mother tried hard to persuade him to take Holy Orders. This he resolutely declined, and congratulated himself the more over his refusal when he later surprised his mother into the admission that her main reason for so urging him was the idea that he was neither strong enough nor clever enough for other careers. On going up to university D made a determined effort to overcome his feeling of inferiority and isolation. He discovered that alcohol helped him greatly towards this and called it "the breaker of barriers." By its aid he became popular with a certain set and "managed to amuse his company."

When he felt inadequate in a situation he resorted to buffoonery as a means of ingratiating himself. For a time he almost enjoyed life, though he "regretted the habit of masturbation and longed to realise a woman"; but whether drunk or sober he proved impotent. In other ways both at sports and in his studies he was well up to the average and manifested no objective signs of inferiority. Before leaving university D made the acquaintance of a lady some 20 years older than himself in whom he found for the first time sympathy and helpfulness. She opened up to him new worlds of literature and art and comforted him in his moods of depression and self-hatred, which he called "fits of blue devils." The relationship between them became almost that of mother and son with platonic love on both sides. Without her, D was prone to doubts as to his virility, mistrust as to his capabilities and regrets over the past, but her presence and encouragement always sustained him.

Upon leaving university, where he had obtained 2nd class honours in history, D became a schoolmaster. For a time he derived pleasure from venting his animosity against suburban conventions and humorously parading his eccentricities. Soon, however, he contracted a liaison with a demi-vierge in a neighbouring resort, which for a year or so ran a tempestuous course and included most things except actual coition. The girl, however, desired a more virile mate and broke off the relationship leaving D more than ever distrustful and angry with his own virginity. He now turned to nature for solace, and "rejecting a dualistic conception of a creator external to the universe moulding it from without he groped towards a pantheistic or monistic philosophy." He wished to be closer to the Earth-angel, to feel with her, to achieve some sort of mystic union. And, "in rare moments he seemed, like Richard Jefferies, to sink into the earth, to feel some peculiar power passing into him and to be on the brink of some strange revelation." This he called "sensing" -a term also used by W. H. Hudson-since to attain the experience he had to relax until his senses became blurred and blended into one. Then through this single channel he obtained “direct throbbing communion with his mystical Earth-Angel." Alcohol helped him towards this Gnosis, but the presence of man upon a landscape seemed to defile it and prevent communion. In his own words, he "continued to use alcohol not only to gain the fellowship of man, but also to further kinship with nature. The actual taste of spirit did not attract him;-the dreams were better than the drink." He quoted, as applicable to himself, Hardy's description of inebriated peasants returning from a fair, "they followed the road with a sensation that they were soaring along in a supporting medium possessed of original and profound thoughts, themselves and surrounding nature harmoniously and joyously interpenetrating one another." This phase lasted some years, during which he remained a schoolmaster, but grew increasingly restless. Then by a stroke of luck he managed to secure an appointment as entomologist in the tropics. On the voyage out he indulged in a serious flirtation, but "certain scruples prevented him from obtaining complete satisfaction," although he judged that the woman would have yielded had his attack been pressed. In the tropics he plunged into work with vigour and success, enjoying his new-found freedom; yet his addiction to alcohol increased. Few women were available and these were so greatly in demand that he "lacked confidence to enter the lists and avoided them instead." Then the war broke out and when it became apparent that all hands were needed another conflict arose in D's mind. He had no wish to join up and many excuses for not doing so, yet he

feared that he would be despised and unable to face people if he held back any longer. Under this added strain D increased his consumption of whiskey to a bottle a day and began to attract unfavourable notice. Eventually he insisted on war-leave and returned to England.

At first, as private and N.C.O., he was kept so busy and had so little money that he only indulged in occasional mild alcoholic orgies. As an officer with more money and leisure he became restless and apprehensive. "Self-distrust drove him to freakish escapades and heavy drinking." In the army of course his social environment was exclusively masculine and unusually intimate in character. He got out to France without coming into conflict with the authorities, but in France several times got into serious trouble on account of drunkenness and was only saved by the attribution of his "attacks" to malaria.

Upon demobilisation he was warned that his "old failing" had reached the ears of and greatly annoyed the higher authorities and that unless he had overcome it he had better not return to his job. He nevertheless went back, but found himself even more than before unable to settle down reasonably. His addiction rapidly became worse and he was soon compelled to resign.

D was now in the depths of despair and his feeling of inferiority and isolation made life seem not worth living. Many times indeed he contemplated suicide, to which he referred humorously as a "going back to the land." Through the influence of a friend he was offered another entomological post, but lost the opportunity by appearing for medical examination in an intoxicated state. Having in this way cut himself off from entomology he was driven to seek employment in his old line as a schoolmaster. In this capacity he managed to hold several positions for short periods, but through ill-timed orgies invariably lost them. During this swift débâcle he tried various methods of struggling against drink. He coquetted with catholicism, strove to regain his earlier mysticism. and produced a pantheistic philosophy, but all in vain.

In giving this historical outline I have used as far as possible the patient's own words and phrases.

The outstanding features in D's life-history, upon which I wish to concentrate attention to the exclusion of many other points of secondary interest, are his attitude towards his mother and his mysticism. The deeper interpretation of these two correlated phenomena is, in my opinion, illuminated by a thesis for which we are indebted to Burrow1. This

1 Trigant Burrow, "The Genesis and Meaning of Homosexuality,” Psychoanalytic Rev. vol. IV, No. 3

author contends that the condition of harmony existing between mother and foetus while the latter is still in utero persists in but slightly modified form during the early period of infancy. The larval consciousness, which then obtains is undifferentiated, intensely subjective and tends towards a close consolidation and welding together of the infantile ego and the mother-imago. "This subjective continuity; this organic mental bond" Burrow calls the principle of primary identification. It is the same phase of existence which Ferenczi1 has described as the stage of "magical hallucinatory omnipotence." The condition which may result from an undue prolongation of this resembles that met with in Melancholia, though differing in mechanism in that whereas the melancholic has withdrawn his libido from an object which it once invested and has then secondarily set up the object within the ego itself D never reached the stage of object-investment but continued fixed in the subjective mode of primary identification with the mother. We note that D was in consequence of his delicacy as a baby, and possibly other causes also, excessively coddled, while later circumstances combined to render adaptation to reality unusually hard. At the time when the primary mother-self identification should have been superseded by the development of object love and when in most children the Oedipus situation is in process of formation D was repelled by his mother's behaviour and instead of love, disgust and hatred towards her were called forth. The process of weaning in the larger sense of the word should be and usually is gradual; the infant being led to objectivation and adaptation slowly and kindly. With D the demand appears to have been made abruptly and ruthlessly, in consequence of which he refused it. He thus came to hate his mother as he found her at that time, but since his own ego was identified with her imago he by the same means came to distrust and despise himself. This must be conceived of as taking place at the transition period between the stage of primary identification and subjectivity and that of objectivation, i.e. just when D should have been developing an individuality of his own. Unfortunately he received no help from his father, either at this critical period or later, for his father held entirely aloof from the situation. Yet in later years his father's very aloofness and "sardonic intellectualism" did contribute towards the formation of D's ego-ideal, giving rise to what D termed his "intellectual snobbery and highbrowism."

The most important consequence of D's primary identification with the mother and his adoption of a feminine ego was that it motivated in him unconscious homosexual trends of the passive variety. Now the 1 S. Ferenczi, Contributions to Psychoanalysis. Trans. by Ernest Jones.

Freudian1 explanation of homsexuality is well known and is undoubtedly correct, from the mechanistic standpoint, in a large number of cases, but Burrow has argued that genetically unconscious homosexuality arises as a consequence of primary identification and the latter hypothesis seems more fully to interpret the facts met with in D's case. According to Burrow the subjective unity with the mother causes the infant in his first attempts at objectivation to follow the lines of his mother's solicitude, namely himself. His own body thus becomes the focus of his interest -which is auto-erotism. "Now auto-erotism or the love of one's own body is the love of that sex to which one's body belongs and this in psychological interpretation is precisely homosexuality2." We note, further, that D's homosexuality was of the feminine or passive variety, that is to say, he tended to adopt the receptive rôle in life and acted as female both in masturbation phantasies, in his behaviour with women and in feeling himself recipient of mysterious force when "sensing nature. I would explain the passive type of his unconscious homosexuality as being due to the identification of his ego with the maternal ego. That is to say, his real ego, psychologically though not physiologically was feminine. Now the ego-ideal is particularly resistant to the implied inferiority of complete sexual inversion much more so than to aggressive homosexual cravings. Kempf3 in his studies of the social and sexual behaviour of infrahuman primates suggests that "probably the irrepressible sexual craving to assume the female rôle in the sex act causes so much distress because the individual's other wishes, namely to be 'manly,' 'strong,' biologically as potent as others are so seriously conflicted with and belied." D certainly felt inferiority and anxiety in the presence of other men, was quite unable to account for such inadequate feelings and sought to remove them by means of alcohol. He also constantly railed against the shams and pretences of suburban life although, or just because, he was held in bondage by them. His mother, as epitomising such things, always received the strongest mead of his contempt and hatred, for until analysed he had not perceived that she was the external counterpart of the tendencies he so much disliked in himself and that in abusing her he was indulging in projection. Consciously he vainly sought to establish virility towards women although despising them and fearing their domination. He was, however, unsuccessful in this because unconsciously he craved to adopt the feminine receptive

1 S. Freud, Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie.

2 Burrow, op. cit. p. 277.

3 E. J. Kempf, "The Social and Sexual Behaviour of Infrahuman Primates," Psychoan. Rev. vol. IV, No. 2.