homosexuals, and that homosexuals have used Kinsey's statistics to argue in defense of homosexuality. Bergler maintains that homosexuality is "a neurotic distortion of the total personality", involving an "unconscious wish to suffer". He supports his claims about the personality of homosexuals with transcripts of interviews with his homosexual patients and prospective patients. He dismisses the idea that homosexuals would be as happy as heterosexuals if society tolerated homosexuality, as well as the idea that homosexuality has biological or hormonal causes. The "popular definition" of a male homosexual is understood by Bergler to be "a person who derives his sexual excitement and satisfaction from a person of his own sex in contradistinction to a heterosexual, who is sexually attracted only to members of the opposite sex." Bergler rejects this definition, which also separates exclusive homosexuals from bisexuals, as incorrect, maintaining that it wrongly "accepts the parity between homosexuals and heterosexuals as a matter of fact", "ignores the fact that homosexuality is a neurotic disease", "neglects the fact that specific neurotic defenses and personality traits that are partly or entirely psychopathic and specifically and exclusively characteristic of homosexuals, and that these defenses and traits put the homosexual into a special psychiatric category." Bergler maintains that heterosexuals, unlike homosexuals, have diverse clinical profiles, ranging from normality to any of a variety of different neurotic conditions. He relates homosexual men's "psychic masochism" to the oral stage of development. Bergler denies that homosexuality is caused by the Oedipus complex, or having a dominant mother and a weak or absent father. Bergler considers the "negative Oedipus complex", a variant of the Oedipus complex in which a boy rejects his father but also admires for his perceived strength and power, and identifies with his mother, one of the great discoveries of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, but sees it as having no importance in the psychology of homosexuals. He criticizes the analyst Sándor Ferenczi for maintaining otherwise. In Bergler's view, male and female homosexuality have pre-Oedipal origins, beginning in "an unsolved masochistic conflict with the mother of earliest infancy", to which the behavior of parents is largely irrelevant. Homosexuality is an unconscious response to the difficulty children experience in reconciling their objective dependence on their mothers with their subjective feeling of omnipotence, derived from the experience of life in the womb, where they felt entirely self-sufficient. While most children resolve this conflict, which inevitably ends in