The sexual undertones of social encounters with women, however, generate a steady flow of heterosexual anxiety. From time to time, therefore, in order to alleviate his distress, the homosexual patient may sporadically flee from women and act out homosexually with men.

In this section, we will concentrate on the special problems of technique peculiar to the psychotherapeutic management of the homosexual patient. We will not be concerned here with the many technical problems that the homosexual shares in common with all other patients. In that category, we include the management of dependency conflicts and inhibitions of self assertion.

In any particular patient, the various indicators in each column, favorable or unfavorable, tend to cluster together. It is unusual to find anything like an even division. More commonly, the indicators are either predominantly favorable or predominantly unfavorable.