Toward Psychosexual Development: Preliminaries to Queer Youth Prehistory

Abstract

The closing decade of the nineteenth century saw the outlining of conceptual frames allowing “normal psychosexual development” to begin capturing the empiricist’s fascination. Adult homosexuality made for a likely, and indeed premier, catalyst. An initial casuistic-clinical interest in the sexual histories of “inverts” cross-faded with survey-based typological circumscriptions of the “urning child”. However, data considered to speak to the mobilizing questions of etiology and developmental consolidation remained both few and inconclusive, in fact well beyond the mid-twentieth century. Inevitably, pre-adult homosexuality animated widely diverging viewpoints securely in advance of psychoanalysis: as habit-formation; as evidencing a more distinctly developmental vulnerability to situational digression of the passions; as pathognomonic of a distinctly inborn “sexual inversion” or yet to unravel “sexual intermediacy”; as an unstable outcome of an at times indefinitely deferred “sexual differentiation”.

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