Auxiliary Genes for Determining Sex As Contributory Causes of Mental Illness

Abstract

The strong association between psychosexual anomalies and mental illness was first brought out by the work of Krafft-Ebing (1902) and Freud (1905). Freud (1911) demonstrated the existence of a latent homosexual element in the structure of the paranoid reaction. He also held the view that, to some extent, every person is psychologically bisexual. A preponderance of instincts concordant with physical attributes of sex, however, would be expected in normally developed adults. The experimental analysis of masculine and feminine traits, carried out by Terman and Miles (1936) with an attitude—interest test, led to conclusions which were in accordance with this viewpoint. Terman and Miles were also able to show that frankly homosexual males and females had mental preferences which corresponded with those of the simulated sex. Thus, from the psychological standpoint, sex is a graded character with a bimodal overlapping distribution. That is to say, although most males and most females have mental attributes which are in agreement with their sexes, many also are mentally intermediate and lie between the two normal modes. Furthermore, some are excessively masculine, some excessively feminine, and a few, who can be said to be “inverted,” possess mental attributes, which belong normally to the other sex. No mental disability has so far been shown to be associated with excessive mental masculinity or femininity, though Terman and Miles found that “supermales” were, on the whole, poorly developed physically. On the other hand, a marked degree of sex inversion is known to be unfavourable to mental stability. Indeed, a significant trend towards sex inversion as measured by the Terman and Miles test has recently been demonstrated by Bosselman and Skorodin (1940) in psychotic patients. A somewhat similar result was obtained by Neal and Penrose (1941), who used a classification test.