Homosexuality occupies a contested and unevenly mapped territory across the depth-psychological corpus. Freud’s contribution is foundational and double-edged: the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality dismantles any clean segregation of homosexuals from humanity at large, asserting universal bisexual potential and unconscious same-sex object-choice, while simultaneously retaining a developmental-pathological framework that treats inversion as a fixation or detour from normative libidinal trajectories. Abraham extends this by linking homosexuality to introjection and libidinal disappointment, while Freud’s correspondence and lectures connect it to paranoia and repression. The Jungian tradition treats the subject with notable ambivalence and sparse systematic attention. Samuels explicitly observes that analytical psychology has never resolved whether homosexuality is pathology or variant, and Jung’s own scattered remarks oscillate between a contextual tolerance for adolescent same-sex friendship and residual pathologizing language. Von Franz and Liz Greene introduce an archetypal-developmental hypothesis linking male homosexuality to the puer aeternus and flight from the maternal-instinctual realm. Esther Harding addresses female same-sex friendship with sociological sensitivity, resisting the term’s pejorative connotations while acknowledging the instinctual substrate. Lacan reads male homosexuality through the lens of sublimation and the social bond. Throughout the corpus the term functions less as a stable diagnostic category than as a pressure point where questions of object-choice, archetype, development, and cultural normativity converge.
psycho-analysis considers that a choice of an object independently of its sex—freedom to range equally over male and female objects… all human beings are capable of making a homosexual object-choice and have in fact made one in their unconscious.
Freud’s foundational thesis that homosexual object-choice is latent in all persons, dissolving the categorical boundary between invert and normal.
, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905thesis
Homosexuality has received little attention in analytical psychology. So far as I know there has never been a suggestion that homosexuality is either a mental illness or biologically determined.
Samuels surveys the post-Jungian field and notes the conspicuous underdevelopment of any systematic theory of homosexuality within analytical psychology.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis
We are bound, in fact, to regard the choice of an object of the same sex as a regular type of off-shoot of the capacity to love… one particular mental disorder, paranoia, no longer to be reckoned among the transference neuroses, invariably arises from an attempt to subdue unduly powerful homosexual tendencies.
Freud normalizes same-sex object-choice as a variant of love’s capacity while simultaneously linking repressed homosexuality to the etiology of paranoia.
, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 1917thesis
In the case of many inverts, even absolute ones, it is possible to show that very early in their lives a sexual impression occurred which left a permanent after-effect in the shape of a tendency to homosexuality.
Freud outlines the acquired-versus-innate debate over inversion, marshaling evidence for developmental and environmental factors against a fixed-constitutional view.
, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905thesis
we should be able to trace certain cases of homosexuality to the fact that the subject has introjected the parent of the opposite sex. Thus a young man will feel an inclination towards male persons because he has assimilated his mother by means of a psychological process of incorporation.
Abraham elaborates Freud’s introjection hypothesis, proposing that same-sex object-choice in men results from the incorporation of the mother as an internal figure.
, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927thesis
I think there is some relationship between the archetype of the puer and male homosexuality, and it probably lies in the flight of the puer away from the instinctual world of the Great Mother.
Liz Greene proposes an archetypal hypothesis linking male homosexuality to the puer aeternus pattern and its characteristic avoidance of the maternal-instinctual pole.
, The Development of Personality: Seminars in Psychological Astrology, Volume 1, 1987thesis
Homosexual relations between students of either sex are by no means uncommon… I am speaking here not of pathological homosexuals who are incapable of real friendship and meet with little sympathy among normal individuals, but of more or less normal youngsters who enjoy such a rapturous friendship.
Jung distinguishes between contextual adolescent homosexuality, treated as normative, and a pathological form he regards as incapable of genuine friendship.
, Civilization in Transition, 1964supporting
it does not seem right to refer to friendships of either character by a term which is linked in the mind of the public with debased practices and criminality, for they are often of a high moral and ethical quality.
Harding resists the stigmatizing connotations of the term ‘homosexuality’ when applied to women’s intense friendships, distinguishing instinctual coloring from explicit sexual expression.
, the way of all women, 1970supporting
When Adler demonstrates repressed homosexuality in the dreams of a prostitute, there is a distinct collision with the clinical concept of homosexuality as it actually exists.
Jung flags in correspondence the terminological confusion between repressed homosexual tendencies as a clinical inference and overt homosexuality as a lived condition.
, Letters Volume 2, 1951-1961, 1975supporting
When Adler demonstrates repressed homosexuality in the dreams of a prostitute, there is a distinct collision with the clinical concept of homosexuality as it actually exists.
Jung raises the same terminological problem in an earlier letter, indicating his sustained concern about conflating latent and manifest homosexuality in psychoanalytic discourse.
, Letters Volume 1: 1906-1950, 1973supporting
this something which analytic doctrine indicates to us as being the support of the social bond as such, of fraternity among men, homosexuality, attaches it to the neutralisation of the bond.
Lacan, drawing on Freud’s group psychology, frames homosexuality as the libidinal substrate of social fraternity, aligned with the function of sublimation.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting
Some of them accept their inversion as something in the natural course of things, just as a normal person accepts the direction of his libido, and insist energetically that inversion is as legitimate as the normal attitude; others rebel against their inversion and feel it as a pathological compulsion.
Freud documents the range of subjective attitudes among inverts themselves, noting that self-acceptance versus ego-dystonic experience is a meaningful internal variable.
, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905supporting
Friendship with women and homosexuality may then be based on
Klein briefly opens a line of argument connecting female homosexuality and same-sex friendship to the dynamics of envy, idealization, and the search for a good object beyond the primary maternal relationship.
, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957supporting
Under conditions of maternal stress, the critical cascade of events is disrupted so that the peak of testosterone secretion occurs several days earlier than it should… the brains of the affected males remain more femalelike.
Panksepp presents a neurobiological model suggesting that prenatal hormonal disruption may influence sexual differentiation, offering a somatic counterpoint to purely psychological theories.
, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998aside