Homosexuality In Psychoanalysis - Yesterday And Today

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-15 16:05

This year, the American Psychoanalytic Association apologized for pathologizing homosexuality until the 90s of the last century, thereby contributing to discrimination against members of the LGBT + community. Previously, similar steps were taken by organizations focused on the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan.

It is worth noting that the pathologization of homosexuality, which has existed in psychoanalysis for decades, did not have sufficient roots in the theory of psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud supported Magnus Hirschfeld in his fight for gay rights and was the forefather of what we now call gay affirmative psychotherapy. The only reason why homosexuality began to be pathologized in psychoanalysis, c, was the struggle for respectability and its rapprochement with psychiatry and sexology at the beginning of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, due to this decision of Ernst Jones, psychoanalysis joined behaviorism and became a weapon of discrimination for decades.

How did this pathologization come about, which, in the words of the French psychoanalyst Elisabeth Rudinesco, caused "decades of psychoanalysis's dishonor"? And how did psychoanalysis get back to its roots and even transcend Freud's understanding of homosexuality? More on this later.

Freud on homosexuality

Let's start with Sigmund Freud. Although Freud often used the nosological coordinates of the sexology and psychiatry of his time and sometimes wrote about homosexuality as inversion and perversion, his views can hardly be called stigmatizing. Freud did not attribute homosexuality to "vices" and "anomalies", he believed that any subject can make such an unconscious choice, because from the point of view of Freudian psychoanalysis, man is bisexual by nature. Moreover, from Freud's perspective, sublimated, homoerotic feelings are at the core of same-sex friendships and camaraderie. These views led Freud to the conclusion that a certain degree of homosexuality is necessary for heterosexuality. Moreover, he did not think of homosexuality as a symptom of the disease. For him, those who actively expressed their homosexual attractions simply, unlike heterosexuals, expressed them in a conflict-free way. Since homosexuality was not the result of conflict, it could not be viewed as a pathology. At least in the psychoanalytic sense of the word.

Freud did not write a single major work on homosexuality. However, he has dealt with this issue for twenty years. This is why his theories of homosexuality are complex and often contradictory. At the same time, Freud never abandoned the idea of natural predisposition, but nevertheless all his life he was looking for the origins of homosexuality in the individual history of man. One can find Freud's thoughts that homosexual choice of an object is narcissistic and infantile in nature.

2. Freud's contemporaries

If Freud showed an incredible humanism for his time towards homosexuals, then his students showed an amazing intolerance towards homosexuality. In 1921, a kind of split occurred in the leadership of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Under the leadership of Karl Abraham and Ernst Jones, homosexuals were banned from becoming psychoanalysts. They were opposed by Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank. Their main message was that homosexuality is a complex phenomenon, that one should rather talk about homosexuality. Freud wrote: "We cannot refuse such people without some good reason." For Jones, the main goal in refusing homosexual people to be psychoanalysts was the question of the image of the psychoanalytic movement. At the time, gay, lesbian, or bisexual membership could indeed hurt the psychoanalytic movement.

3. After Freud

For nearly 50 years, the IPA continued the repressive tradition of Jones and Abraham. Freud's daughter Anna, who was herself suspected of having a lesbian relationship with Dorothy Burlingham, also played a significant role in this. Anna Freud forbade the publication of her father's letter to the gay mother, in which Freud spoke about the crime of persecuting gay people and that homosexuality is not a disease or a vice.

The Kleinians and other object relations advocates played a stigmatizing role as well as the ego psychologists led by Anna Freud. They believed that homosexuality was due to "identification with a sadistic penis," or "schizoid personality disorder, with or without a manifestation of protection from excessive paranoia." Then, proponents of object relations often viewed homosexuality as a symptom of the borderline organization of personality - between neurosis and psychosis.

When Lacan founded the Paris Freudian School in 1964, in spite of his IPA colleagues, he gave homosexuals the opportunity to become psychoanalysts. At the same time, he considered homosexuality in the categories of perversion, the understanding of which in structural psychoanalysis differs significantly from that used in sexology and psychiatry.

4 psychoanalysis today

So, homosexuality in psychoanalysis was not initially considered a pathology. Its pathologization was the result of attempts to increase the respectability of psychoanalysis in conditions of total homophobia.

The changes began in the 70s. Psychoanalysis does not exist in isolation from other sciences. When psychological studies of homosexuals were carried out, for example, the studies of Alfred Kinsey, Evelyn Hooker and Mark Friedman (which showed that homosexuality is not an epiphenomenon of certain psychological problems, but, like heterosexuality, occurs among people of different psychological organizations), discussions re-emerged in psychoanalysis. similar to the discussions of Freud's time. The result was a gradual move away from the stigmatizing and pathologizing models of homosexuality.

In 1990, homosexuality was removed from the International Classification of Diseases. In parallel, in the psychoanalytic environment, a consensus has developed that homosexuality can be in people of different levels of mental organization, or in other schools - in subjects of different structures.

Most psychoanalysts today admit that the psychoanalytic method cannot provide an explanation for the reasons for this phenomenon. Moreover, today the view on the nature of psychoanalytic research is radically changing. Spence suggests that psychoanalysts, together with analysands, work together to create narratives that are narrative constructs, rather than reconstructions of the historical past. In other words, the analyst and the patient generate a story that makes sense to both of them, rather than revealing an objective story based on memories of real events in the analysand's life. Thus, a “successful” analysis leads to a shared narrative that both the analysand and the psychoanalyst can believe.

Rather than viewing the analytic endeavor as a search for the causes of homosexuality, modern psychoanalysts argue that the patient's (or therapist's) theory of homosexuality is both a personal and culturally driven narrative about the meaning of homosexuality. The analyst who tells the analyst that he considers homosexuality to be a disease that needs to be changed to heterosexuality does so in a social context. Such beliefs are formed over the years, and they are culturally conditioned. Thus, an analysand who considers himself “bad” because of homosexuality may ask the analyst to make him a “good” heterosexual. Of course, it is impossible to do this in this way, but it is possible to see and get rid of attitudes that color homosexuality with negative connotations.

The article is based on the following works:

1. Sigmund Freud "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality"
2. Sergio Benvenuto "Perversions"
3. Elizabeth Rudinesco "Freud in his time and ours"
4. Elizabeth Rudinesko "Rozladnana sim'ya"
5. Jack Drescher "Psychoanalysis and homosexuality at the postmodern millennium"