The value of the theory is in this: It shows that the nature of our later emotional and especially our love life is far more dependent upon the nature, aberrations, inhibitions, sublimations, developments and transformations of our infantile sex life than we ever in our wildest dreams imagined it to be. Here in childhood are laid the seeds of our future emotional life. Early repression or seduction or bad training influences our later lives. These facts are recognised by many trained parents who refuse to over-fondle their children or to do anything that may awaken a sexual activity too prematurely.
Freud's idea is of value to the literary critic for it shows that the characteristics of an author's work may be traced back to his infantile sex life. As a rule we know little about the lives of literary men when they were children, but we can often judge what the infantile sex life must have been from the traits appearing in the writers' literary performances.
Inversion or homosexuality can be traced to the child's love life. As infants we are bi-sexual in our pre-dispositions. Children display sentimental friendships for members of their own sex, as we all know. Even in later life in each sex there are remnants of the other stunted sex, breasts on the man and hairy faces on women. Freud has given us a very interesting but by no means full explanation of the origin of inversion. The abnormal development is favoured by the disappearance of a strong father in early childhood, and by the overattachment to the mother at the same or earlier time. The love for the mother is soon repressed and the boy identifies himself with her and loves other boys like himself. He returns to that self-love which is a second stage after auto-eroticism in the infant, and is known as narcissism. He wishes to love those boys as his mother has loved him. He may like women but he transfers the excitation evoked by them to a male object, for they remind him of his mother and he flees from them in order to be faithful to her. He repeats through life the mechanism by which he became an invert.
The fact then is that homosexualism is an abnormal development from the infant's love life. It is in the germ in all normal people, especially in those capable of intense friendships. It is naturally abhorrent to us when it vents itself in any abnormal relations.