of complicated and subtle ramifications. If my friend had been paychoanalysed I should think It would have been disastrous if the analysis had gotten bogged down in a wrangle as to whether the mother had loved her baby and the baby misunderstood, or had not loved him, as he had always believed and felt. The point is that when a man advanced in years still burns with resentment towards a mother, long dead, something is drastically wrong, period.

'While willingly granting all this, there remains a peculiarity in Dr. Bergler'a book I find it difficult to understand: he tends to whitewash his patients' families and to place the entire blame for his condition upon the patient. He says, in effect, "Other children in similar situations managed to discover better solutions. If you didn't you have only yourself to blame." Again, Dr. Bergler shows no awareness of the degrees of difficulty which life-problems may present to children, due to complicating accidents and contingencies. And it seems fantastic to hold an infant in arms responsible for the course he blindly and gropingly embarked upon, while equally fantastic to absolve parents of responsibility for the neuroticism of their children. Dr. Bergler's attitude seams to give to parents the sort of blanket indulgence and tolerance we normally extend only to very small children and to expect of children a degree of responsibility for the consequences of their acts which we normally reserve for adults. He also shows a sympathetic, tender concern for the sensibilities of parents and other relatives of homosexuals, while it seems to me that the weeping, wailing and mashing of teeth by families when it is discovered that one of the clan is homosexual is, in itself, a pretty pathological way to react.

To return to my friend who, on Máis death-bed still bitterly reproached his long-dead mother for not having loved him, he was a reformer and a leftist in social and political matters. It is easy to see the connection between his life of social protest and that basic protest against an unloving mother. All the same, I do not think it is the function of psychotherapy to make such an individual into a conformist. I baliove, on the contrary, that it should be the aim of the psychotherapist to bring the patient, to the point where he can make truly independent, rational decisions and judgements, unimpinged upon by the ideology of the therapist, on the one hand, yet free fraz the old neurotic premises on the other. My friend might have become more conservative as a result of analysis, but it also seems to me within the realm of possibility that he might have become a mature, rather than & neurotic reformer and radical. Similarly, it seems to me that the homosexual ought not to be bulldozed into conformity, but rather brought to the point where his past no longer dominates his adulthood and he is free to choose whether or mt he will continue life as a homosexual or turn to heterosexuality.

Dr. Bergler explains to us that the homosexual, when an infant, fears, hates and rejects his mother, while remaining dependent upon her. These negative emotions he then turns back upon himself and experiences them as guilt. Now, Dr. Bergler also tells us that the analyst utilized this guilt, this masochism, in therapy. He doesn't make it clear to me just how the patient's guilt is used. Does the analyst support and fortify this neurotic guilt, throw the weight of his influence on the side of the guilt, in order to force the patient to give up homosexuality? If this is the case it would seem that "cure" is really a victory for neurosis, masochism triumphs over erotism. Then after years of severe discipline and intense striving the patient emerges as a sexually "correct person". One cannot help wondering whether there is any spontaneity or poetry left in sexual love. When the average boy mallachine REVIEW

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goes for the average girl he is simply "doing what comes naturally", his love has a quality of inevitability, his entire history has prepared him for the love of woman, his entire nature gives assent to it. How different a situation for the converted and remodeled homosexual! He is a man uprooted, estranged from his om past, bitterly hating his om past and his former self. Perhaps there is a cortain quality.of fanaticism in his heterosexuality, like the fanaticism of converts to a religion or to some political creed. One wonders whether this newly attained heterosemality is a genuine liberation of a formerly repressed part of the patient's self or rather the result of intensive indoctrination over a long period. Dr. Bergler', avowed utilization of the neurotic sense of guilt and the masochism of the patient leads one to suspect that the whole process, in the last analysis, boils down to the enforcement of the laws "Thou shalt not love man, thou shalt love woman". But this motivation is very different from that of the normal man who does not love woman because he ought to, but because his whole nature wants her, yearns towards her.

More liberal psychiatrists make a distinction between neurotic guilt and real guilt-that is to say, gullt arising from actual destructiveness, actual harm done. It seems to me that it may be argued that there is no real harm, and hence no actual basis for guilt, in homoeroti per se. Certainly, the patient ought to be led to recognize and to accept whatever real guilt he or she may accumulate, and to eliminate the character defects which are responsible for that guilt, but without the necessity of giving up homosexuality and becoming heterosexual. I should think that both patient and therapist were morally obliged to work for the elimination of those defects which result in genuinely destructive behavior. If a patient wants to change, wants to become heterosexual, that is one thing-he ought to have all the help possible in effecting the change, but if the patient does not want to change I do not think that his neurotic dependency upon the analyst plus his masoIt seems chism ought to be exploited as tools to force him to change. to me that the latter comes very close to coercion, to "brain-washing." Dr. Bergler believes that homosexuality is not genuinely erotic at all, that it is a thoroughly masochistic pleasure, thoroughly neurotic. But if human nature is, in truth, bisexual then we must acknowledge that there is a basic and genuine element of erotism in homosexuality. If this is the case, homosexual interests may not necessarily disappear when the infantile neurosis is worked through and dissolved. If this is the case, individuals may turn to homosexuality for a diversity of reasons, not only those covered by the theory of preoedipal orality. If this is the case, homosexuality may vary from the pathological to the mildly abnormal. Dr. Bergler seems to believe that the test of whether or not a theory of homosexuality is correct depends upon whether or not the theory results in cures. If bisexuality is a fact, then it is conceivable that in certair cases homosexuality may be so genuinely rewarding thɛt the initial causes might be quite correctly determined yet remain therapeutically ineffective, if the therapeutic air is "cure" in Dr. Bergler's sense.

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Actually, in the course of these notes, I've been dealing in a seesingly contradictory way, with three quite different kinds of guilt: First, the unconscious, neurotic guilt of the preoedipal stage; second, the social guilt arising from transgression of the introjected mores, and third, real guilt, arising from genuinely destructive, harmful behavior. It seems to me that therapy should als to relieve the individual insofar as possible from guilt arising from the first two sources, while enabling him to become deeply responsible in his attitude towards the third. Whether or not he emerges from therapy "a correct person" is of little importance if he behaves with self-respect and a decent

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