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Moreover, the musician is frequently one-sided in his gifts, and
the possession of a single hypertrophied aptitude is itself
closely related to the neuropathic and psychopathic diathesis.
The tendency to dramatic aptitude--found among a large proportion of my
subjects who have never been professional actors--has attracted the
attention of previous investigators in this field.[221] Thus, Moll refers
to the frequency of artistic, and especially dramatic, talent among
inverts, and remarks that the cause is doubtful. After pointing out that
the lie which they have to be perpetually living renders inverts always
actors, he goes on to say:--
Apart from this, it seems to me that the capacity and the
inclination to conceive situations and to represent them in a
 masterly manner corresponds to an abnormal predisposition of the
nervous system, just as does sexual inversion; so that both
phenomena are due to the same source.
I am in agreement with this statement; the congenitally inverted may, I
believe, be looked upon as a class of individuals exhibiting nervous
characters which, to some extent, approximate them to persons of artistic
genius. The dramatic and artistic aptitudes of inverts are, therefore,
partly due to the circumstances of the invert's life, which render him
necessarily an actor,--and in some few cases lead him into a love of
deception comparable with that of a hysterical woman,--and partly, it is
probable, to a congenital nervous predisposition allied to the
predisposition to dramatic aptitude.
One of my correspondents has long been interested in the
frequency of inversion among actors and actresses. He knew an
inverted actor who told him he adopted the profession because it
would enable him to indulge his proclivity; but, on the whole, he
regards this tendency as due to "hitherto unconsidered
imaginative flexibilities and curiosities in the individual. The
actor, _ex hypothesi_, is one who works himself by sympathy
(intellectual and emotional) into states of psychological being
that are not his own. He learns to comprehend--nay, to live
himself into--relations which were originally alien to his
nature. The capacity for doing this--what makes a born
actor--implies a faculty for extending his artistically acquired
experience into life. In the process of his trade, therefore, he
becomes at all points sensitive to human emotions, and, sexuality
being the most intellectually undetermined of the appetites after
hunger, the actor might discover in himself a sort of sexual
indifference, out of which a sexual aberration could easily
arise. A man devoid of this imaginative flexibility could not be
a successful actor. The man who possesses it would be exposed to
divagations of the sexual instinct under esthetical or merely
wanton influences. Something of the same kind is applicable to
musicians and artists, in whom sexual inversion prevails beyond
the average. They are conditioned by their esthetical faculty,
and encouraged by the circumstances of their life to feel and
express the whole gamut of emotional experience. Thus they get an
environment which (unless they are sharply otherwise
differentiated) leads easily to experiments in passion. All this
joins on to what you call the 'variational diathesis' of men of
 genius. But I should seek the explanation of the phenomenon less
in the original sexual constitution than in the exercise of
sympathetic, assimilative emotional qualities, powerfully
stimulated and acted on by the conditions of the individual's
life. The artist, the singer, the actor, the painter, are more
exposed to the influences out of which sexual differentiation in
an abnormal direction may arise. Some persons are certainly made
abnormal by nature, others, of this sympathetic artistic
temperament, may become so through their sympathies plus their
conditions of life." It is possible there may be some element of
truth in this view, which my correspondent regarded as purely
hypothetical.
In this connection I may, perhaps, mention a moral quality which is very
often associated with dramatic aptitude, and also with minor degrees of
nervous degeneration, and that is vanity and the love of applause. While
among a considerable section of inverts it is not more marked than among
the non-inverted, if not, indeed, less marked, among another section it is
found in an exaggerated degree. In at least one of my cases vanity and
delight in admiration, both as regards personal qualities and artistic
productions, reach an almost morbid extent. And the quotations from
letters written by various others of my subjects show a curious
complacency in the description of their personal physical characters,
markedly absent in other cases. It is suggested by Alexander Schmid, on
the basis of Adler's views, that this vanity, which sometimes in the
inverted artist becomes an exalted pride, as of a guardian of sacred
mysteries, may be regarded as an effort to secure a compensation for the
consciousness of feminine defect.[222]
The extreme type of this preoccupation with personal beauty is
represented by the history of himself sent by a young Italian of
good family to Zola in the hope--itself a sign of vanity--that
the distinguished novelist would make it the subject of one of
his works. The history is reproduced in the _Archives
d'Anthropologie Criminelle_ (1894) and in _L'Homosexualité et les
Types Homosexuels_ (1910) by "Dr. Laupts" (G. Saint-Paul). I
quote the following passage: "At the age of 18 I was, with few
differences, what I am now (at 23). I am rather below the medium
height (1.65 metres), well proportioned, slender, but not lean.
My torso is superb; a sculptor could find nothing against it, and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]