Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [17]
In The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman, he explains: “In general, to undertake to convert a fully developed homosexual into a heterosexual does not offer much more prospect of success than the reverse.”
Freud also questioned whether gays should be converted, even if they could be. In his letter to the American mother, he contends that “homosexuality is assuredly no advantage but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness.” He put it more bluntly in a newspaper interview: “Homosexual persons are not sick.”
Yet just as Freud never relinquished the belief that homosexuals could sometimes convert, he never surrendered the belief that homosexuality was a form of erotic immaturity. Usually cited for its tolerance of homosexuality, his 1935 letter also describes homosexuality as “produced by a certain arrest of sexual development.” Even more disturbingly, Freud stated elsewhere that homosexuality should not necessarily be expressed in homosexual acts, but directed to more “social” ends.
Despite the ambiguity of his views, I find it hard not to cast Freud as the great white father raising his staff against the advance of darkness. I am not alone in my romance. Psychologist Kenneth Lewes’s history of psychoanalytic approaches to homosexuality describes how completely contemporaries fell in with Freud’s model in his lifetime, yet began to mold his teachings into a more sinister form before his body was cold. Insofar as homosexuality was concerned, psychoanalysis in 1939 “moved from the humane and cosmopolitan system of investigation it had been with Freud and his circle to a rigid and impervious set of values and judgments.” The new generation of therapists—Irving Bieber, Albert Ellis, Sandor Rado, and Charles Socarides—challenged each of Freud’s premises.
The year after Freud’s death, Rado delivered a lecture that reads like an Oedipal tantrum against the originator of that concept. In it, he denounced Freud’s belief in universal human bisexuality. His proof for the innateness of human heterosexuality was that male orgasm was simultaneously the most pleasurable and the most procreative sexual act.
In Rado’s view, gays were driven from this innate heterosexuality by bad parenting. He believed antisex views expressed by parents could lead their daughters to fear the penis as a “destructive weapon” and their sons to fear the vagina as a symbol of castration. Other conversion therapists expanded on this theme. Bieber worked up the popular model that male homosexuality arose from close-binding mothers and distant fathers. (Bieber’s model is presumably culturally specific—otherwise practically every Japanese man I know would be gay.) Socarides added that female homosexuality arose from malevolent mothers and rejecting fathers.
The therapists also rejected Freud’s view that conversion therapy was ineffective. The most systematic study of conversion therapy for gay men was conducted by the New York Society of Medical Psychoanalysts in the 1950s. Published in 1962 under the primary authorship of Bieber, it cheerfully concludes that “a heterosexual shift is a possibility for all homosexuals who are strongly motivated to change.” Through this typical move, the study defends conversion therapy by ascribing failures to a lack of patient motivation. Yet even this hedged conclusion is not well supported. Of the seventy-two exclusive homosexuals in the study, 19 percent converted to heterosexuality, 19 percent converted to bisexuality, and 57 percent remained unchanged. Why did those 57 percent put themselves through “conversion” therapy if they weren’t “strongly motivated to change”? Despite such flaws, Bieber’s is still among the most cited studies on the viability of conversion.
Finally, the conversion therapists assumed homosexuality was a mental illness. Rado declared it a “deficient adaptation.” Ellis and Bieber described it as “psychotic”