influences of the object selection, we found the sexual rejection or the
early sexual intimidation, and our attention was also called to the fact
that the existence of both parents plays an important rôle in the
child's life. The disappearance of a strong father in childhood not
infrequently favors the inversion. Finally, one might demand that the
inversion of the sexual object should notionally be strictly separated
from the mixing of the sex characteristics in the subject. A certain
amount of independence is unmistakable also in this relation.

[12] Although psychoanalysis has not yet given us a full explanation for
the origin of inversion, it has revealed the psychic mechanism of its
genesis and has essentially enriched the problems in question. In all
the cases examined we have ascertained that the later inverts go through
in their childhood a phase of very intense but short-lived fixation on
the woman (usually on the mother) and after overcoming it they identify
themselves with the woman and take themselves as the sexual object; that
is, proceeding on a narcissistic basis, they look for young men
resembling themselves in persons whom they wish to love as their mother
has loved them. We have, moreover, frequently found that alleged inverts
are by no means indifferent to the charms of women, but the excitation
evoked by the woman is always transferred to a male object. They thus
repeat through life the mechanism which gave origin to their inversion.
Their obsessive striving for the man proves to be determined by their
restless flight from the woman.

[13] The most pronounced difference between the sexual life
(Liebesleben) of antiquity and ours lies in the fact that the ancients
placed the emphasis on the impulse itself, while we put it on its
object. The ancients extolled the impulse and were ready to ennoble
through it even an inferior object, while we disparage the activity of