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

HOMOSEXUALITYin a slight and undeveloped degree, are probably morecommon, they are not nearly so often met with in a fullydeveloped degree as is inversion. This prevalenceis stillfurther emphasized by the energy and character, in manyof the subjects of the anomaly.cases,It is the gradual recognition of the prevalenceof inversionamong people of ordinary normal intelligenceandconduct which has modified the opinions of alienists concerningthe nature of this and, indeed, other sexual anomalies.In medieval and earlier days homosexuality, in itsonly recognizable shape as sodomy and tribadism, was asin and a crime, often expiated at the stake; it continuedto be regarded only as a manifestation of disgusting depravityuntil well on in the nineteenth century; then therewas a tendency to look on it as a sign of insanity, or at allevents of degeneracy. That view isnow out of date, as isinevitable when we find that such deviations and the likeoccur in mentally capable and morally well-conducted andself-controlled people, many of whom are by no meansovermastered or obsessed by their impulses and some ofwhom have never yielded to them at all. Occasional homosexualityis a tendency to which Man iseverywhere liablein common with that part of the animal world to whichhe is most nearly allied. Congenital sexual inversion is ananomaly, an inborn variation of which we are beginningto understand the causes; it is, even when extreme, onlypathological in the same sense as color-blindness or albinismor transposition of the viscera is pathological.BIBLIOGRAPHYMOLL, The Sexual Life of the Child.HAVELOCK ELLIS, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. II,"Sexual Inversion."FREUD, Collected Papers, Vol. III.