Psychology of sex - Total No. of Records in System :: 2032

HOMOSEXUALITYCongenital sexual inversion is thus akin to a biologicalvariation. It is a variation doubtless due to imperfectsexual differentiation, but often having no traceable connectionwith any morbid condition in the individual himself.This view of sexual inversion now tends to prevail andhas gained much force recently. But itmaybe traced someway back. Ulrichs, so long ago as 1862, declared that inversionis "a species of hermaphroditism." Kiernan in Americain 1888 insisted on the significance of the fact that theancestors of the human species were originally bisexual;Chevalier in 1893 put forward a theory of inversion basedon foetal bisexuality. Letamendi of Madrid in 1894 setforth a theory of panhermaphroditism according to whichthere are always latent female germs in the male, andlatent male germs in the female. Finally, about 1896,Krafft-Ebing, Hirschfeld, and I(all,it seems, more or lessindependently) adopted a somewhat similar explanation.The prevalence of these general views of sexual inversionhas influenced the clinical classification of itsvarieties.Krafft-Ebing accepted four different varieties ofcongenital inversion and four different varieties of theacquired form. Moll rejectedthis elaborate classification,as itrecognizing only psychosexual hermaphroditism (or,is now usually termed, bisexuality) and complete inversion.This corresponds to the division now recognized bymost authorities. That is to say that when we have putaside the people who are exclusively attracted to the oppositesex, we have those who are exclusively attracted to thesame sex, and those who are attracted to both sexes. Whenwe go beyond this simple and elementary classification weencounter an endless number of individual variations butthey do not easily admit of being arranged in definitegroups. Even the bisexual class is not rigidly uniform, for