are respectable and valuable members of the community."

The Wolfenden Committee, set up in 1954 by the British Government to recommend changes in the laws, was also sharply critical of the growing tendency to regard homosexuality as a mental “discase" or "illness."

"Homosexuality cannot legitimately be regarded as a disease," their September 1957 Report asserted, "because in many cases it is the only symptom and is compatible with full mental health in other respects."

"In some cases," they added, "associated abnormalities do occur, and it seems to us that if, as has been suggested, they occur with greater frequency in the homosexual, this may be because they are products of the strain and conflict brought about by the homosexual condition and not because they are causal factors. It has been suggested to us that assoriated psychiatric abnormalities are less prominent, or even absent, in countries where the homosexual is regarded with more tolerance."

In the first article, it was pointed out that, by and large, there is agreement on the belief that homosexuality (and heterosexuality as well) is a product mainly of the individual's family and social experiences, primarily those of the early years.

However, there is a tremendous divergence between the classical Freudian concepts and their later revisions which more or less dominate psychiatric thinking today and the views put forward by the Kinsey group.

Freud considered unconscious homosexuality as the basic and causal factor in neurosis. He held that every individual at birth pos'sessed

heterosexual and a homosexual component. The homosexual component might exist as latent, repressed, or overt.

When homosexual desires were latent, they were not necessarily pathological. They could either be sublimated, or they could express themselves in some kind of disturbance.

In the course of development, one of the two components-heterosexuality or homosexualitywins out. The loser either becomes sublimated or becomes the foundation of neurotic difficulties.

More recent schools of psychoanalysis and psychiatrists do not accept all of Freud's original formulation, but the Freudian stamp has impressed itself clearly upon many of their theories. Most hold that homosexuality is but a symptom of more general difficulty, which will be resolved if you clear up the general personality distur bance.

Basic to most psychiatric, and Virtually all pyschoanalytic, thinking is the belief that the cause of homosexuality is a sexual immaturity. Homosexuals, according to this view, do not progress through the various sexual stages toward a concept of heterosexual relations.

All persons, this view maintains, start life with sensual pleasures centered about the oral, or mouth, zone. Later, during toilet training come pleasures associated with the anal and urethral areas. Following this period the individual must progress toward an interest in genital activities.

Homosexuals, according to this view, get delayed (fixated) at the oral or anal stage. They are thus immature in their sexual development, as well as emotionally unstable and immature in their reactions.

In other words homosexuality is viewed as the persistence of infantile trends. Homosexuals are living out what they thought and wanted to do at the early oral and anal stages. Since they were frustrated and prevented from doing these things when younger, they are

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neurotically living out their impulses later in life.

In sharpest contrast to this view have been more biologically oriented views of investigators like the Kinsey group and Ford and Beach.

According to Kinsey, the Freudian interpretation of psychosexual behavior did not accord with the actual facts. The histories of the males and females in his sample, he declared, did not support the interpretation of homosexuality in an adult as a product of fixation at immature stages of development. They also showed that only an exceedingly small portion of these individuals ever passed the stages which Freudian theory postulated.

"Some children," Kinsey said, "begin with an exclusively narcissistic interest in their own sexual responses, others begin with exclusively homosexual play; but the great majority begin by responding to any sufficient stimulus. This is exactly what we would expect on the basis of all that we now know about the anatomy and physiology of the sexual mechanism."

"In brief," he went on, "the psychosexual pattern in the human animal originates in indiscriminate sexual responses which, as a product of conditioning and social pressures become increasingly restricted in the direction of traditional interpretations of what is normal or abnormal in sexual behavior."

Following Freud, most psychiatrists have viewed homosexuals as being neurotically fixated at an infantile sexual stage.

spond if the opportunities offered and one were not conditioned against making such responses."

The British psychiatrists East and Herbert presented a somewhat similar position. They pointed out that the sexual impulse starts as an undifferentiated urge. The earliest form of sex acusually self-erotic tivity is probably at first purely mechanical.

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Largely by chance, various linkages and fantasies will develop around the pleasure aroused by this sexual activity. These may occur in association either with individuals of the same sex or of the opposite sex, or in some cases,

Thus, according to the Kinsey with animate or inanimate ob-

group, "the inherent psychological capacity of an animal to respond to any sufficient sexual stimulus is the basic explanation of why some individuals will respond to sexual stimuli originating in other individuals of the same sex"-in fact, "every individual could so re-

jects.

Thus, a chance occurrence in which sexual pleasure is experienced for the first time with emotional intensity, may by its associations permanently affect the sexual life of the individual.