The first technique for survival and for need gratification is dependency. This is an adaptation that is rooted in the biological helplessness of the infant at birth. Clinical studies demonstrate that the adult unconsciously thinks of the infantile period as one of magical control. This must be the way the infant sees himself. He is magically omnipotent and his parents are magical agencies for the satisfaction of his needs. To the extent that the child learns to do for himself as he matures, he gives up his desires for magical (dependency) intervention. The goal of healthy development is a self sufficient, self reliant, independent person. Resort to infantile dependency in an adult is an unerring indicator of a failure in adaptive resources.

How do such failures arise? All important in their origin is the interaction between dependency and discipline. It is through this interaction that the behavior of the child is molded in accordance with social demands as mediated by the parents. The child will abandon important gratifications to insure dependency status. A good example is infantile sexual activity. Here, excessive parental discipline confronts the child with two great dangers: physical punishment and the withdrawal of love. The former is frequently extended in fantasy to imply bodily mutilation (castration) and death; the latter means loss of dependency. In either case each is a threat to survival and the child responds with the emergency emotion of fear. This fear may be so great as to force a partial or complete withdrawal from sexual activity. Later, as the child grows, any sexual situation will revive the earlier fear, and an inhibition of normal sexual behavior is established. This inhibition of healthy function by fear in response to an imagined danger is the core of the neurotic process.

Such an inhibition is the take off point for a homosexual adaptation. The person reacts with such intense fear in relation to a heterosexual object that he fails in heterosexual performance. His sexual need, however, continues unabated and is diverted to a "safer" object. This object is a homosexual one, and it derives its added safety from the reassuring presence of the penis, which allays the patient's castration anxiety. Homosexuality, in this light, is a deviant form of sexual adaptation into which the patient is forced by the injection of fear into the normal sexual function. This, of course, is a general statement that holds good for any type of sexual psychopathology, but as of today it is the best that can be offered. We do not know any more about the intrinsic factors that account for homosexuality in one person and not in another than we do about symptom choice in any other psychic aberration. This homosexual adaptation can be overt and conscious, or it can be latent and either conscious or unconscious. In the former, the person accepts his heterosexual failure and overtly acts out his homosexual impulses; in the latter, he refuses to accept it and either consciously suppresses his homosexual impulses or represses them to the unconscious.

So far, the homosexual mechanisms here described in no way differ from those worked out by Freud, except that they are restated in an adaptational frame of reference without recourse to constitution. It would be simple if this were all there was to the homosexual conflict, but the problem is vastly more complicated. Inhibitions do not stay confined to the behavior area in which they are originally laid down. Unfortunately, the lack of confidence and the drop in self esteem coincident to any inhibition tend to spread to other activities, and new inhibitions appear. This is particularly true if discipline in general is severe. The end result of such failure in growth is the unconscious retention in adulthood of a dependency adaptation.