Let me give you an example of one such typical case. Not long ago a young nurse came to see me. She was extremely upset and wept copiously before she could bring herself to tell me her problem. She had been married for about a year and had found that she could not have an orgasm during intercourse. It was necessary for her husband to manipulate her clitoris for a rather extended period of time before she could come to a climax. After she told me this she remained silent for a long time. Then she burst out with it. “Doctor, I think I’m homosexual.”
“Well, I had this dream, and I was hugging the head nurse in the hospital and I felt very warm and good inside.”
Now she really blushed. She hung her head, and one could hardly keep from going over and patting her head and saying there, there. “Yes,” she said. “When I was twelve. With this other girl. We used to, used to … ” Words failed her.
“Play with each other sexually?” I asked as gently as possible.
She looked at me, wide-eyed and said, “Yes,” nodding tragically.
She had had no repetition of the experience since she had really grown up, and I was able to set her mind completely at rest on that matter. She was not at all homosexual. That symptom is a very severe one, of course, and not always amenable to treatment. It always implies that the woman prefers women to men; she falls in love with objects of the same sex. She has no conscious interest in men sexually.
Our little nurse’s “homosexual” dream simply meant that she was having a disturbing time with her husband sexually and wanted a “mother image” to protect her from her difficulties, help her through them. She got one in me, of course, and her need for such a mother was probably why she selected a woman psychiatrist in the first place.
Her early sexual play with another little girl is perfectly normal. Not all children indulge in this kind of play, but many do, and unless it continues into adolescence it is generally harmless.
The reasons behind this delusion of homosexuality are complex. They lie in an early confusion of the clitoris with the male penis, as I will illustrate later. But you may be certain of one thing--you are not going to discover that your problem is based on homosexuality as it appears in the difficulty called “lesbianism.” To hold onto such mistaken conceptions is to frighten oneself with self-told ghost stories after the fashion of young children.