Sexual Politics And Scientific Logic: The Issue Of Homosexuality


Charles W. Socarides



A significant portion of society today is of the belief that
homosexuality is a normal form of sexual behavior different from but
equal to that of heterosexuality. Many religious leaders, public
officials, educators., social and mental health agencies, including
those at the highest level of government, departments of psychiatry,
psychology, and mental health clinics, have been taken in by a
widespread sexual egalitarianism, by accusations of being
"undemocratic" or "prejudiced" if they do not accept certain scientific
assertions thrust upon them, as if deprived of all intellectual
capacity to judge and reason. It is my contention in this paper that
this threat of revolutionary change in our sexual mores and customs has
been ushered in by a singular act of considerable consequence: the
removal of homosexuality from the category of aberrancy by the American
Psychiatric Association (December 1973). It is furthermore a fateful
consequence of our disregard for psychoanalytic knowledge of human
sexual behavior.

In what follows, I shall present a detailed account of social and
political forces both within and without our organization responsible
for this act and critically examine the spurious and pseudoscientific
reasons put forth for the removal of a diagnosis from the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual.

This act was naively perceived by many psychiatrists as the "simple"
elimination of a scientific diagnosis in order to correct injustices.
In reality, it created injustices for the homosexual as it belied the
truth that prevented the homosexual from seeking and receiving
psychoanalytic help. At the social, group, and community level, it
proved to be the opening phase of a two-phase sexual radicalization;
the second phase being the raising of homosexuality to the level of an
alternate life style, an acceptable psycho-social institution alongside
heterosexuality as the prevailing norm of behavior.

POLITICAL FACTORS LEADING TO DIAGNOSTIC CHANGE
In 1963, growing concern in the press and the medical profession
prompted the New York Academy of Medicine to entrust its Committee on
Public Health to study the subject of homosexuality. While the
Commit-tee in its report (1964) concluded that "homosexuality is indeed
an illness, the homosexual is an emotionally disturbed individual who
has not acquired the normal capacity to develop satisfying heterosexual
rela-tions," it sounded an alarm: it warned that "some homosexuals have
gone beyond the plane of defensiveness and now argue that deviancy is a
'desirable, noble, preferable way of life.'" Spokesmen for homosexual
groups argued that homosexuality was not an aberration; those so
oriented were merely a different kind of people living an acceptable
way of life, and, for one thing, they claimed it was the perfect answer
to the problem of a population explosion (!). Clearly a disturbing
trend was developing, with homosexuals banding together, not to demand
help from psychiatry and the medical profession and public recognition
of their condition (alongside those individuals with any form of
neurosis or emotional disorder) or simply to protest against legal
injustices, but to proclaim their "normality" and attack all opposition
to this view. Those who took this view in the past constituted a vocal
but very small minority of homosexuals compared to the large number of
homosexuals who desired more help, not less, or who remained silent. To
my mind just as alcoholism and drug addiction has become recognized as
illness over the past several decades, so was sexual deviation
increasingly to be understood as an emotional disorder and, similar to
other mental disorders, not to be penalized when practiced among
consenting adults. Freedom from persecutory laws as well as the
granting of full civil rights constituted an integral part of this
approach to homosexual individuals.

As a young analyst encouraged by the therapeutic response of my
homosexual patients to the freedom they found in being relieved of the
yoke of their homosexuality, I decided that the moment had come to act
directly on the behalf of the homosexual and anyone else suffering from
a sexual disorder, with the idea of making help available on request to
many. I wrote to Stanley F. Yolles, M.D., then Director of the National
Institutes of Mental Health, asking to meet with him to discuss some
suggestions for a national program for the prevention and treatment of
homosexuality and other sexual disorders. I wrote, "Of the whole range
of sexual disorders, homosexuality is the most misunderstood.
Homosexuality not only causes suffering for the individual but is
inimical to the preservation of the family unit. The psychological
conflicts which lead to the development of homosexuality, the anguish
of the homosexual himself and the damage to his family and close
associates produces tragic consequences. It should be the task of
psychoanalytically informed psychiatry and modern medicine to dispel
the mystery that surrounds homosexuality and dissolve the fear which
attends any attempt at free discussion. Homosexuality, I predicted,
could well be alleviated in many instances by fresh approaches to
therapy. Hope could then be offered to many who had often surrendered
in despair, the very real hope that a favorable prognosis was quite
possible in most cases when homosexuals voluntarily sought help,
Yolles' encouraging reply was that I meet with members of his staff
with the possibility of implementing such a program, but
representatives of our nation's central mental service (NIMH) dismissed
it out of hand at a meeting in Washington, D.C. (February 3,1965). I
went on, however, writing and publishing my findings (1968, 1978) and
was invited by my colleagues to address the Adult Psychiatry branch of
the NIMH on the problem and treatment of homosexuality in 1967. Shortly
thereafter, NIMH appointed a Task Force on homosexuality. In October
1969, this Task Force submitted its final report in which it
acknowledged at least in part the validity of my earlier proposal by
recommending "the coordination of NIMH activities in the broad area of
sexual behavior for the establishment of a center for the study of
sexual behavior."

This task force did not by any means represent the forefront of
knowledge on the issue of homosexuality. Only three psychiatrists were
participants. One of them, Dr. Judd Marmor, had for years espoused the
view that homosexuality was "normal." The Chairperson was psychologist
Evelyn Hooker, Ph.D.,(1) who was of the same long time conviction. The
Kinsey-Hopkins faction was represented by Dr. Paul Gebhardt, Ph.D.,
Director of the Institute for Sex at Indiana University, and John
Money, Ph.D., from Johns Hopkins, an early proponent of transsexual
surgery and the acceptance of homosexuality as normal. The law was
represented by the Honorable David M. Bazelon, who at one point during
the Task Force deliberations resigned. Psychoanalytic clinicians such
as Bieber, Hadden, Bychowski, Rado, Lorand myself and others who had
worked for many years in depth therapy with homosexual patients were
pointedly left off the committee. On a subsequent occasion I was told
by Gebhardt that this action was taken as Bieber, I and others were
considered "professionally biased" because of our "Freudian approach."
The NIMH report concluded: "Some of the primary goals of the NIMH
service study of sexual behavior should be to develop knowledge,
generate and disseminate information, mollify taboo and myths, provide
rational basis for intervention, and provide data to policy makers for
use in their efforts to frame social policy." The report asked for
society's toleration and understanding of the homosexual condition and
the gradual removal of persecutory laws against such activities
be-tween consulting adults. These positions were good and well taken,
but where the report failed abysmally was that it never concluded that
exclusive homosexuality was a form of emotional illness, arrested
psychosexual development, or a pathological condition of any kind,
thereby lending tacit approval to emerging concepts of deviancy.

Meanwhile, militant political homosexual groups continued to disrupt a
number of scientific programs both at the national and local level in
which findings as to the psychopathology of homosexuality, its origins,
symptomatology, course, and treatment, were going to be discussed,
e.g., national meetings of the American Psychiatric Association;
Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine (Columbia University); Panel on
Homosexuality: "A Current Controversy," New York Academy of Medicine
(November 27, 1973). Psychiatrists who dared to speak of their clinical
findings were "discredited" even in the pages of the official newspaper
of our own organization, e.g., "Psychiatrists Blast Colleagues'
'Prejudice' Against Homosexuals" Psychiatric News, June 7, 1972).(2)
Some of these public attacks were augmented by hate-filled letters,
threatening attacks over the telephone, and even threats of terrorist
action against those who continued to speak of their scientific
findings. Marmor, utilizing the nationwide distributing capacity of the
newsletter distributed by SIECUS(3) (Scientific Information and
Education Council of the U.S.), a private non-governmental organization
heavily in favor of "new liberal concepts of sexuality" including
homosexuality, denounced a Journal of the American Medical Association
article entitled "Homosexuality and Medicine (1970) by this author as
"an unfortunate potpourri of prejudice and misinformation [which] stems
... from obvious personal prejudices."

As a counter to such tactics, which tended to silence all scientific
debate, I proposed to the New York County District Branch of the
American Psychiatric Association that it should establish a task force
as an official committee of that organization in order to shed light on
the nature, meaning, and content of homosexuality to psychiatry and an
increasingly bewildered public. Thus the first all-psychiatric task
force on homosexuality was born. It was and has been the only such
medically oriented body in the country. After two years of
deliberations and sixteen meetings the task force, composed of a dozen
experts affiliated with the major medical centers of New York City,
attempted to submit its report on homosexuality to the Executive
Council of the New York City District Branch, a report which
unanimously documented the fact that exclusive homosexuality was a
disorder of psychosexual development and simultaneously asked for civil
rights for those suffering from the disorder. The report was "not
acceptable" to the new members(4) (and some old) of the Executive
Committee. Other business took its place in the Executive Committee
meeting and although general statements were accepted as to its content
it was not accepted into the minutes of the meeting. The message was
coming through loud and clear: the only report acceptable would have.
been one which was not only in favor of civil rights but one which
declared homosexuality not a psychosexual disorder. The committee was
then dissolved. Its members, determined that the report see the light
of day, eventually published it as a "study group" report in the late
Spring of 1974 (New York City District Branch APA Task Force Report).

In mid-1973, Vice President Judd Marmor of the APA and John Spiegel,
President, APA, and other psychiatrists met with the Gay Activist
Alliance, the Mattachine Society and its female ancillary, the
Daughters of Bilities, and the Nomenclature Committee of the American
Psychiatric Association at Columbia University, New York City, to
discuss the deletion of "homosexuality" from the diagnostic
nomenclature (New York Times, Spring 1973).

In November 1973, I was asked by a Newsweek reporter if I would care to
comment on the upcoming celebration/cocktail party to take place at the
APA headquarters in Washington, D.C. in December com-memorating the
"greatest of gay victories"-the "purging" of homosex-uality from the
realm of psychiatry. Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, a psychiatrist at the
Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, and Secretary
of the APA Committee on Nomenclature and Statistics, had been made
chairman of the Nomenclature Task Force on Homosexuali-ty, apparently
setting it apart from the Nomenclature and Statistics Committee itself.
Dr. Henry Brill, a respected and dignified psychiatrist embodying the
best traditions of the state hospital system, had been removed from a
position of authority in respect to the issue. Spitzer, who to my
knowledge had never previously published a single article on
homosexuality or the sexual deviations, had composed a position paper
on the meaning and content of homosexuality. It was upon his rationale
that the Nomenclature Committee (or the task force part of it) had
proceeded. His new definition was sent to the Council on Research and
Development. The head of the group, in a telephone call I made to him
soon thereafter, stated: "After all, homosexuals must be protected and
this might be the best way to do it." I argued that we were all for
protecting the homosexual against persecution, but this was a different
matter.

Should we dismiss our scientific findings for social/political reasons?
Joseph Stalin's insistence on substituting Lamarckian concepts in place
of those of Mendelian inheritance for political purposes and the
serious consequences to the science of genetics immediately came to my
mind. We psychoanalytic clinicians had long been and continue to be in
the vanguard of protecting our homosexual patients against assertions
of degeneracy and unfair laws. After all, it was Freud who first
admitted homosexuals and others were sexually deviant into the
consultation room as respected and worthy patients on a par with till
those suffering from emotional disorders of any kind. Psychoanalysis
had begun to understand homosexual condition: was the homosexual to be
"buried" by stating that this was a "non-condition?" Such an action
would constitute a repudiation of all we have learned about sexual
deviation. I said that homosexuals were individuals who out of inner
necessity must engage in homosexual practices or otherwise experience
anxiety. This was clearly a psychiatric disorder. We got nowhere.

From the Council on Research and Development the proposed change in the

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual went to the Assembly, thence to the
APA Reference Committee. "Minor changes" were made in these committees,
it was later announced. These "minor changes" were hardly minor, e.g.
"heterosexual orientation disturbance" was to be included along with
homosexuality as a "sexual orientation disturbance" to signify those
people who were "disturbed" at the knowledge that they were
heterosexual(!) (Minutes, APA Council, 11/3/73). It was decided a few
weeks later that this was unwise, and therefore "heterosexuality as a
disorder" was deleted. The new position favoring deletion of
homosex-uality was obviously clinically untenable and scientifically
fallacious, even to a first-year resident in psychiatry. There was no
scientific ex-planation for this deletion except the statement that the
homosexual did not experience "suffering"; those who disliked being
homosexual and "suffered over it" or "complained" were to be considered
to have a "disorder." We persisted that respect for the tradition of
open scientific debate as well as professional ethics and morality
required that we be given a hearing on this matter.

Our group of dissidents consisting of three members of the APA out of a
committee of twelve received a hearing immediately preceding the Board
of Trustees vote on December 14, 1973. I reviewed before the Board the
serious consequences(5) of this change during an allotted five- minute
presentation by stating that as a result of this position: [1] An
alteration of theoretical concepts of healthy versus abnormal sexual
development would have to "logically" take place; [2] Sex education in
our schools would in all likelihood include homosexual sex education
(this has already come to pass); [3] Despair would be created within
the individual homosexual who wished help. The homosexual would forfeit
his mammalian heritage, the chance to engage in the male-female design;
[4]Homosexuals would not enter therapy or be dissuaded for long periods
in doing so: tremendous resistances to therapy would result, injuring
the patient's progress; [5] Suicides among those with gender identity
disorder might well increase.(6) Where would individuals get help if
they could not turn to psychiatry? The individual homosexual who wished
to be helped, to rid himself of his condition, would be doomed by
pronouncements of the Board of Trustees, family and friends would
despair. [6] would confuse other medical disciplines such as
pediatrics, to whom families and youngsters turned for advice, to say
nothing of 'the rest of the medical profession; [7] Homosexuals were
already giving lectures on the value of homosexuality as an alternative
life style to some of our public schools and in our colleges; [8]
Psychiatric residents would be reluctant to enter an area of
psychiatric research where they would only receive attack,
belittlement, and demeanment. Thus there would be a decrease in both
our knowledge and psychiatric research in this condition. We strongly
urged postponement of voting by the Board of Trustees.

The Board of Trustees voted practically unanimously against us, with
two abstentions. It is interesting to note that only two thirds of the
members of the Board of Trustees were present, barely enough to
constitute a quorum for this important decision. Were some members
simply avoiding a confrontation with the majority view already
determined and adamant in their conviction? Otherwise, how could one
explain their absence on such a critical issue?

A few weeks later, the "rationale" for 'the deletion of homosexuality
as a psychiatric disorder was presented to the medical community. The
"rationale" for this change was to be found in two items: The first was
an official position paper presented by Robert F. Spitzer, Chairman,
Nomenclature Task Force on Homosexuality, before the Board prior to its
decision (Spitzer, R.L. [1974], "The Homosexual Decision-A Background
Paper," Psychiatric News, pp 11-12). According to Psychiatric News, it
was "essentially upon the rationale of Dr. Spitzer's presentation that
the Board made its decision" (p. 11). This paper in essence repeated
Kinsey's earlier assertion that exclusive homosexuality was a normal
part of the human condition at one end of the Kinsey "homosexual -
heterosexual scale."(7) It did not meet the requirements of a
psychiatric disorder since it "does not either regularly cause
subjective distress or [isj regularly associated with some generalized
impairment in social effectiveness or functioning" (Spitzer). The
second item consisted of conclusions supplied by Drs. Marcel T. Saghir
and Eli Robins in their book Male and Female Homosexuality (1973).
Saghir and Robins' "scientific" evidence did not employ any
psychoanalytic methodology, but was a descriptive survey from which the
conclusion that homosexuality was a normal condition was derived from
one structured lengthy interview with homosexuals (recruited through
homophile organizations) and "unmarried heterosexual controls"
(solicited by mail and paid for the interview) and coincided with the
position paper above.

The term "sexual orientation disturbance (homosexuality)" was now to be
substituted for homosexuality. It was defined as follows:

This is for individuals whose sexual interests are directed primarily
toward people of the same sex and who are neither disturbed by, in
conflict with, or wish to change their sexual orientation. This
diagnostic category is distinguished from homosexuality, which by
itself does not constitute a psychiatric disorder. Homosexuality per se
is one form of sexual behavior, and with other forms of sexual behavior
which are not by themselves psychiatric disorders, are not listed in
this nomenclature" (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders) July 1974).

This diagnostic category underwent several metamorphoses in several
editions of the DSM III, including establishing a separate category of
"ego-dystonic homosexuality" (for those who were "unhappy" that they
were homosexual) to the ultimate elimination of the word "homosexual"
from the DSM III Revised 1987 as a scientific category (APA Diagnostic
Criteria DSM 'Ii; American Psychiatric Association, Washington, D.C.)

A reversal of the decision by the Board of Trustees would require two
hundred members requesting a referendum. It was for this purpose that a
referendum was asked for. Fortunately, the American Psychoanalytic
Association was holding its midwinter meeting in New York City at the
time and two hundred and forty-three signatures from psychoanalytic
practitioners (members and fellows of the APA who were familiar with
the clinical problems of the homosexual) petitioned for a reversal of
the Board of Trustees vote. It was a credit to psychiatrists in general
that in the voting of the general membership (April, 1974) that was to
follow on this issue (voting marred by hidden lobbying by homosexual
activists)(8) held months later, forty percent of the psychiatrists who
voted (10,000) took issue with the Board of Trustees' action, asserting
that there were no legitimate scientific reasons for the APA's change
in fundamental psychiatric theory. It is fallacious to conclude from
this vote that the ma-jority of psychiatrists in the United States were
in favor of the action, for only 25% of those eligible to vote out of
more than 25,000 psychiatrists sent in their ballots. Despite this
fact, the decision stood.(9)

By declaring a condition a "non-condition," a group of practitioners
had removed it from our list of serious psychosexual disorders. The
action was all the more remarkable when one considers that it involved
the out- of-hand and peremptory disregard and dismissal not only of
hundreds of psychiatric and psychoanalytic research papers and
reports(10) but also of a number of other serious studies by groups of
psychiatrists, psychologists, and educators over the past seventy
years, for example, the Report of the Committee of Cooperation with
Governmental (Federal) Agencies of the Group for the Advancement of
Psychiatry (1955); the New York Academy of Medicine Report (1964); the
Task Force Report of the New York County District Branch of the APA
done in 1970-72 (Socarides, et. al., 1973).

To the psychoanalyst, this was psychiatric folly. Psychoanalysts
com-prehend the meaning of a particular act of human behavior by
delving in-to the motivational state from which it issues. Obviously
these decision makers had not viewed individuals in this manner. When
individuals with similar behavior are analytically investigated, we
then arrive at objective conclusions as to the meaning and significance
of a particular phenomenon under examination. Thus is insight achieved.
To form conclusions as to the specific individual meaning of an event
simply because of its frequency of occurrence (the number of
homosexuals was often alluded to as indicating that it was normal)(11)
is to the psychoanalyst scientific idiocy only in the consultation
room, using the technique of introspective reporting and free
association, protected by all the laws of medicine, psychology, and
psychiatry, will an individual reveal the hidden (even from himself)
meaning and reasons behind his act. The meaning of a particular act of
piece of behavior can only be decided on the basis of the motivational
context from which it arises.

The concept of "disadvantage" was introduced as a reason for declaring
homosexuality a "non-disorder" by the Nomenclature Committee two years
after the deletion (1976). The view that the homosexual of the
obligatory type is at "no social disadvantage" is a denial of the
realities that surround us when one considers that a society governs
the behavior of its members from birth to death through its laws,
mores, and other institutions. A human being is born with responses
that constitute his mammalian heritage (a product of evolution). He is
then introduced into a web of social institutions, a product of
cumulative tradition which con-stitutes his cultural heritage. The two,
mammalian and cultural heritages, lead man to his sexual
pattern-heterosexuality. Heterosexuality has a biological and social
usefulness. It creates the family unit and allows men and women to live
together under conditions where there is likely to be the least amount
of fear, rage, and hate. It furthermore regulates this relationship
through a series of laws, penalties, and rewards.

Additional proof of the politicization of American psychiatry was to be
provided later from an unexpected source: a book by Ronald Bayer, a
fellow of the Hastings Institute of New York. He stated that Spitzer
was "sympathetic to the viewpoint of the gay liberation group"
(pp.130-131) and Brill was suffering from "indecision and discomfort
with Spitzer's aggressive assumption of leadership on this issue." Even
more important was the revelation (never previously acknowledged) that
the Council on Research and Development of the APA did not officially
investigate or study the issue thoroughly before it gave formal
approval to the deletion of homosexuality from the DSM II.

It was to Monroe's council, comprised of five senior psychiatrists who
were responsible for providing the APA with advice on matters of policy
and with information on current issues in psychiatric research, that
Spitzer's proposal [for deletion] was first under consideration. Though
officially coming from the Committee on Nomenclature, in fact it had
never been formally approved by its members and thus presented
Spitzer's own effort to resolve what many APA leaders considered "a hot
potato" (Bayer, pp.130-131, emphasis added).

Bayer laid bare developments that took place in December 1973. He
states that the Board of Trustees "satisfied the formal requirements of
providing a fair hearing [and proceeded] to render its verdict," but he
omitted the fact that the requests for such a hearing had to be
aggressively pursued (there was no invitation" to appear and permission
to address the Board of Trustees was granted most reluctantly by its
chairman, Dr. John Spiegel). Furthermore, this "fair hearing" consisted
of a five-minute allowance for each person testifying, including Drs.
Irving Bieber (Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, New York Medical
College), John McDevitt (Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry,
University of Cincinnati), Armand Nicholi of the Harvard Medical School
Student Health Service-and myself. The time limit was strictly adhered
to and no time was allowed from discussion. The suggestion by the Ad
Hoc Committee Against the Deletion of Homosexuality (the "psychiatric
dissidents"), headed by myself, that a pro-civil rights statement be
made but that the question of scientific merits of the diagnosis(12) be
left for further study and reflection, was peremptorily dismissed. Our
proposal was unacceptable. For the next 18 years, the APA decision was
to serve as a Trojan horse, opening the gates to widespread
psychological and social change in sexual customs and mores. The
decision was to be used on numerous occasions for numerous purposes
with the goal of normalizing homosexuality and elevating it to an
esteemed status.

To some American psychiatrists this action remains a chilling reminder
that if scientific principles are not fought for they can be lost - a
disillusioning warning that unless we make no exceptions to science, we
are subject to the snares of political factionalism and the propagation
of untruths to an unsuspecting and uninformed public, to the rest of
the medical profession, and to the behavioral sciences.

Beyond the disservice to homosexual patients and their families, the
confusion in the mind of the public, and the pushing back of the
fron-tiers of our knowledge, what is the fate of society in all this?
Abram Kar-diner, psychoanalyst, former Professor of Psychiatry at
Columbia University, recipient of the Humanities Prize of The New York
Times in 1966, warns:

There is an epidemic form of homosexuality, which is more than the
usual incidence, which generally occurs in social crises or in
declining cultures when license and boundless permissiveness dulls the
pain of ceaseless anxiety, universal hostility and divisiveness. Thus
in the Betsileo of Madagascar the incidence of homosexuality was
visibly increased at a time when the society was under a state of
col-lapse. Supporting the claims of the homosexuals and regar-ding
homosexuality as a normal variant of sexual activity is to deny the
social significance of homosexuality. To do this is to give support to
the divisive elements in the community. Above all it militates against
the family and destroys the function of the latter as the last place in
our society where affectivity can still be cultivated.

Homosexuals cannot make a society, nor keep ours going for very long.
Homosexuality operates against the cohesive elements in society in the
name of fictitious freedom. It drives the opposite sex into a similar
direction. And no society can long endure when either the child is
neglected or when the sexes war upon each other (Kardiner, personal
communication to the author, 1973).

THE PSYCHOANALYTIC POSITION
The psychoanalyst's compassion and concern as regards the external
conflicts faced by the homosexual due to societal disapproval should
not blind us, however, to the internal conflicts, conflicts which occur
between various conscious and unconscious tendencies within the
individual which are causative of this disorder. The homosexual, no
matter what his or her level of adaptation and function in other areas
of life, is severely handicapped in the most vital area-interpersonal
relations.

A typical family constellation is that in which there is a
psychologically crushing mother (in extreme cases) and an absent or
abdicating father who does not assume his appropriate masculine role in
relation to his son that allows the son to identify with him. In the
female homosexual there is a corresponding inability to identify with
what is viewed by the girl as a malevolent, malicious mother and a
father who does not respect the femininity of his daughter. The female
homosexual seeks femininity in the body and personality of her female
partner.

Pathology, organically and psychologically, may be defined as a failure
to function, with concomitant pain and/or suffering. It is this
failure, its significance and manifold consequences that are so obvious
in obligatory homosexuality-a failure in functioning which, if carried
to its extreme, would mean the death of the species. Beneath this
obvious failure of function and the secondary external conflicts it may
provoke, lie the agony, sorrow, tragedy, fear and guilt of a both
conscious and un-conscious nature which pervades the homosexual's life.
Psychiatrists who treat such individuals in depth know this very well.
Those who do not practice depth psychotherapy or psychoanalysis often
do not observe or may tend to minimize the degree of suffering the
homosexual en-dures-suffering induced by internal conflicts-inasmuch as
the homosexuality also provides temporary relief from severe anxiety.
Fur-thermore, obligatory homosexuality (in contrast to episodic,
situational, or variational homosexual behavior, which is not
considered a pathological condition per se) may cause such disruption
in the equilibrium of the individual that all meaningful relations in
life are damaged from the outset and are peculiarly susceptible to
breakdown. Attitudes toward the opposite sex are often filled with
distrust and fear as to render them incapable of any relationship at
all, except on the most superficial and brittle basis. The obligatory
homosexual is unable to function in the most meaningful relationship in
life: the male-female sex-ual union and the affective state of love,
tenderness and joy with a part-ner of the opposite sex.

The homosexual engages in a compromise adaptation, "choosing" a
same-sex partner for sexual gratification in order to save the self
from anxiety. The ability of the homosexual to neutralize anxiety
motivates the homosexual to use this as a face-saving
rationalization-that is, that he or she is not suffering from an
emotional disorder at all, especially if one is convinced that there is
no help for changing their condition. Despite the appearance at any
given time of an adequate life perfor-mance, internal conflict
threatens to disrupt this fragile adjustment.

Major breakthroughs have been made in psychoanalytic knowledge leading
to the conclusion that oedipal-phase conflict in certain homosexual
patients is always superimposed on deeper, basic preoedipal nuclear
conflicts. In certain cases of homosexuality, h is apparent that object
rela-tions pathology contributes more to the development of
homosexuality than the vicissitudes of the drives-in other words, that
the central con-flict of the homosexual is an object relations one
rather than a structural one. These views apply to relatively
pronounced cases in which the perverse development is clear and
definite.

The combination of infant observational studies and developmental
theories in the psychoanalytic material derived from the study of adult
homosexuals helps to explain that the fixation of the homosexual lies
in all probability in the later phases of the separation-individuation
process, producing a disturbance in self identity as well as in gender
identity, persistence of a primary feminine identification with the
mother (in the case of the female homosexual, an identification with
the mother perceived as malevolent and hateful), separation anxiety,
fears of engulfment (restor-ing the mother-child unity), and
disturbance in object relations and associated ego functions.

The homosexual has no choice as regards his or her sexual object. The
condition is unconsciously determined, is differentiated from the
behavior of a person who deliberately engages in same-sex sexual
contact due to situational factors or a desire for variational
experiences. As noted above, these constitute non-clinical forms of
homosexual behavior. The nuclear core of true homosexuality is never a
conscious choice, an act of will; but rather it is determined from the
earliest period of childhood, in terms of origin, of course, not in
practice. The homosexogenic family environment has been noted above.
The presence of external conflicts which complicate the lives of
homosexuals should not be allowed to obfuscate the valid clinical data
secured through in-depth psychoanalytic studies, for this misinforms
psychiatrists, the general reader, and, unfortunately, a vulnerable
public.

Lastly, it should be stated that it is obvious to some psychoanalysts
that the requirements for definitions of a condition or disorder on the
basis of conscious anxiety and suffering ran counter to everything we
knew dynamically about the mechanisms involved in this serious
distur-bance. For example, the enactment of any sexual deviation helps
to keep the individual in equilibrium and neutralize anxiety. It has
been un-consciously specifically fashioned for this purpose. Therefore,
the presence or absence of anxiety cannot be an adequate criterion to
use when determining whether the condition is a disorder or not. Some
of the most severely disturbed homosexuals have no anxiety because of
their constant enactment of the homosexual act. Furthermore, Spitzer's
proposal, as noted above, disregarded the following: [I] the presence
of a specific need, desire, compulsion, or other symptom formation may
so circumscribe pathology that a patient may appear to be functioning
well in every other aspect of his life; [2] fully developed neurotic
symptoms can mask illness as well as express it; and [3] the mechanism
of sexual deviation results in the production of an ego-syntonic
symptom, namely, one that allays and neutralizes anxiety.

The official position of the American Psychoanalytic Association is
indicated by its definitions of homosexuality which appear in A
Glossary of Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts, edited by B.E. Moore,
M.D. and B.D. Fine, M.D. This glossary, first published in 1968,
underwent its third printing in 1983. It states:

In the male homosexual there is, as a rule, an overly strong attachment
to the mother up to and including the oedipal phase, which is not
resolved by identification with the father but rather by partial
identification with the mother. Object choice is narcissistic in type,
i.e., the loved person must be like the self, and sexual excitation is
experienced in regard to men instead of women. Due to strong castration
fears, the homosexual man cannot tolerate a sexual partner without the
tremendously valued male organ. Another common motive for homosexual
object choice is the avoidance of rivalry with fathers and brothers.

In female homosexuality (lesbianism), the woman retains a strong
original preoedipal attachment to the mother, which is displaced onto
the homosexual partner. As a result of an unsatisfactory outcome of
oedipal conflicts, her identification with the mother is incomplete and
she holds onto mother as an object of love [p.48].

EPILOGUE
In the material cited above, I have described a movement within the
American Psychiatric Association which through social/political
activism has accomplished the first phase of a two-phase radicalization
of a main pillar of psychosexual life: the erosion of heterosexuality
as the single acceptable sexual pattern in our culture. The motive
force for this movement was the wish to protect the homosexual against
injustices and persecution which could to all intents and purposes have
been removed by the demand for equal rights for the homosexual, a
demand that could well have been fulfilled through humanitarian
motivations so deeply embedded in our humanistic science. Instead, the
false step of removing homosexuality from our Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual was substituted. This amounted to a full approval of
homosexuality and an encouragement to aberrancy by those who should
have known better, both in the scientific sense and in the sense of the
social consequences of such removal. (The relationships between social
approval and homosexuality as a developmental disorder will be dealt
with in a subsequent paper.) The devastating clinical fallout from this
decision was to follow. Those who would wish to retain homosexuality as
a valid diagnosis have been practically silenced by lectures, meetings,
and publications, both originating within our association and from
other sources. Political par-ties and religious leaders have been
utilized to reinforce this silence. The press has been influenced as
well as the media;(14) television and movies promote homosexuality as
an alternative life style as well as censor movies which might show
homosexuality as a disorder. Homosexual sex education has entered our
schools and colleges-and pro-Gay activists, homosexual or otherwise,
portray their way of life as "normal as apple pie" and intimidate
others with different views. In essence, this move-ment within the
American Psychiatric Association has accomplished what every other
society, with rare exceptions, would have trembled to tamper with, a
revision of a basic code and concept of life and biology: that men and
women normally mate with the opposite sex and not with each other.

Forces adamantly insisting that homosexuality is an alternative life
style have not been stopped by appeals to tradition, enlightened
self-interest or even the findings of psychoanalysis.(15) Threats about
what would happen to society do not have much effect: nobody considers
himself society's guardian. The average citizen says he doesn't quite
know what these social interests are and, after all, aren't personal
decisions about sex a private matter? The answer to that question,
contrary to popular opinion, is NO.

Psychoanalysis reveals that sexual behavior is not an arbitrary set of
rules set down by no one knows who for purposes which no one
understands. Our sexual patterns are a product of our biological past,
a result of man's collective experience and his long biological and
social evolutionary march. They make possible the cooperative
coexistence of human beings with one another. At the individual level,
they create a balance between the demands of sexual instinct and the
external realities surrounding each of us. Not all cultures survive;
the majority have not, and anthropologists tell us that serious flaws
in sexual codes and institutions have undoubtedly played a significant
role in many a culture's demise (Kardiner, A., 1939). When masses of
people think similarly about previous sexual customs, their collective
behavior will, in the last analysis, have a profound impact on the
whole of society.

Scientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, political leaders, public
officials and others with vested interests today ransack literature for
bits of fact and theory which can be pieced together into a
pro-homosexual or bisexual concept of nature, man and society. Some of
the individuals say that homosexuals are healthy, society is sick and
that science should cure society. Others raise false or outdated
scientific issues in their war with traditional values. Many of our
values could use change, but polemical pseudoscience is not the way. No
society has accepted adult preferential homosexuality. Nowhere is
homosexuality or so-called bisexuality a desired end in itself. Nowhere
do parents say: "It's all the same to me if my child is heterosexual or
homosexual." Nowhere are homosexuals more than a small minority at the
present time. Nowhere does homosex-uality per se place one in an
enviable position (Karlen, A., 1971).

Some pro-homosexual proponents within the behavioral sciences state
that mental illness is simply a product of social definition and that
sexual behavior considered normal in one society may be deviant in
another. Examination of the facts shows that this is not true of all
illness and all behaviors. Some behaviors are universally deviant, and
every society thinks them disruptive. Incest, rape, psychopathic
(apparently unmotivated) violence are considered taboo in all
societies. So is predominant or exclusive homosexuality or even
bisexuality.

The counter to such forces is the knowledge that heterosexuality has
self-evident adaptive values: decades and even centuries of cultural
change are not likely to undo thousands of years of evolutionary
selection and programming. Man is not only a sexual animal but a
care-bonding, group-bonding, and child-rearing animal. The male-female
design is taught to the child from birth and culturally ingrained
through the marital order. This design is anatomically determined, as
it derives from cells which in the evolutionary scale underwent changes
into organ systems and finally into individuals reciprocally adapted to
each other. The male-female design is thus perpetually maintained and
only over-whelming fear or man's false pride and misdirected individual
enterprise can disturb or divert it.

APPENDIX A Digital Archive of
PSYCHOHISTORY
Articles & Texts

Spitzer's rationale for removing homosexuality relied heavily on the
work of Alfred Kinsey and his belief in the normality of homosexuality.
For that reason, it shall be commented on in some detail.

The Kinsey Report of 1948 has been likened in importance by some to
man's radically altered view of himself initiated by Darwin's
discoveries. His conclusions are accepted even among some
well-intentioned and educated people. The Kinsey Report has had in
several ways a severe and damaging delayed impact on our sexual mores,
especially as they pertain to homosexuality. Alfred Kinsey, a Ph.D. in
zoology, made a valuable statistical survey between 1939 and 1948 of
the sexual behavior of twelve thousand American males. His figures are
still widely cited as there are no others of comparable scope to
contradict them. In general, there is no reason to dispute his data as
to incidence. The value of the exhaustive and informative survey was
that it enumerated the manifold forms taken by a force so powerful it
cannot be denied expression. The enormous public curiosity about
Kinsey's figures blinded most people to some of the erroneous
interpretations to which some of the figures gave rise, especially in
the area of homosexuality. The Kinsey conclusions and in-terpretations
have become a banner under which the gay liberationists and similar
pleaders have rallied, citing them as sexual gospel. Kinsey, however,
erred in attempting to interpret his statistics, a fault which was
perpetuated by his followers. Kinsey concluded that homosexuality is
present in ten percent of all males in a persistent (obligatory) form
and in thirty-five percent of all males in the transitory form. He
believed this was due to the fact that homosexuality is a biological
variant. Kinsey in-vented a scale based on the incidence revealed in
his own studies of homosexuality-heterosexuality, representing a
continuum between homosexual and heterosexual behavior. To him this
connoted that ex-clusive homosexuality was a normal part of the human
condition, of normal sexuality, and simply existed at one end of the
"homosexual-heterosexual scale." Exclusive heterosexuality was
purportedly at the other end for apparently the same reason, because it
was a "biological given." Conscious and unconscious motivations in the
causation and/or expression of homosexuality, whether of the exclusive
(obligatory) type or not, were completely disregarded.

The statistical studies of the type Kinsey offered ignored the concepts
of repression, unconscious mind, and motivation. While they supply
in-cidence rates 6f certain phenomena, they do so as if behavior has no
con-nection with motivation. Since neither conscious nor unconscious
motivation is even acknowledged, these studies arrive at a disastrous
con-clusion that the resultant composite of sexual behavior is the norm
of sexual behavior. The next step was to demand that the public, the
law, medicine, religion, and other social institutions unquestioningly
accept this proposition. Even intelligent laymen, gulled by the false
interpretation of these statistics, were taken in and continue to be
so.

In contrast to the psychoanalytic method of investigating behavior
(motivational analysis), the only differentiation Kinsey and his
followers admitted to is a quantitative one. For example, among the
various forms of homosexuality, Kinsey was opposed to considering a man
homosexual in whom the "heterosexual-homosexual balance" was only
slightly or temporarily shifted to the homosexual side.
Psychiatrically, this is incorrect, for the quantitative approach
cannot replace the psychogenetic one.

Edmund Bergler, a psychoanalytic pioneer into understanding
homosexuality, was fond of comparing this quantitative approach to the
situation that would exist if someone invented the idea of subdividing
headaches entirely according to quantitative principles, rating them
from one to six according to severity.

Medically speaking, a headache is only a symptom indicating a variety
of possibilities: from brain tumor to sinus infection, from migraine
attack to uremia, from neurosis to high blood pressure, from epilepsy
to suppressed fury. Instead of the causal (what causes the headache)
viewpoint, we would have in this new order only quantitatively varying
degrees of big, middle-sized, and small headaches (1969).

The Kinsey yardstick omits differentiation of the underlying
condi-tions. Moreover, as Bergier notes, "in the previously mentioned
rating of headaches, at a specific moment a headache produced by a
sinus attack could be more severe than one produced in certain stages
of a brain tumor." The homosexual "outlet" covers a multitude of
completely dif-ferent genetic problems. Hence a causal yardstick is
necessary for the dif-ferentiation and therapy of the confusion and
many-faceted types of human relationships.

From the beginning, when Kinsey's figures were made known, few