FREUD, MALE HOMOSEXUALITY, AND THE AMERICANS
Abelove, Henry
Anybody inquiring about Freud's attitude to homosexuality will soon come across a letter he wrote in April 1935. The letter is now almost famous. It was first printed in 1951; it has...
...To be sure, his primary rhetorical strategy in those five lectures was to flatter his hearers in the hopes of securing their favorable interest in what he had to say concerning psychoanalysis...
...While heterosexual pairings could make for "cooperation, solace, stimulation, enrichment, healthy challenge and fulfillment," homosexual pairings could bring only "destruction, mutual defeat, exploitation of the partner and the self, oralsadistic incorporation, aggressive onslaughts, attempts to alleviate anxiety, and a pseudosolution to the aggressive and libidinal urges which dominate and torment the individual...
...and E. Salomon, "Reactions to Reading the `Rundbriefe,' " Journal of the Otto Rank Association 8 (1973-74), pp...
...We feel that a decision in such cases should depend upon a thorough examination of the other qualities of the candidate...
...Right?' " Freud replied, 'For you certainly . . . ' and laughed...
...As for their despicable moralism, that was the rationale for the sublimation...
...He may also have held back partly out of a kind of indifference...
...Putnam went on to note that he was currently treating a "lady" who was "a great sufferer from morbid self-consciousness and blushing," that he was making "good headway" in tracing out the origins of her "symptoms," but that he had found himself confronted by the "difficulty" that she had "lost all interest in life and living...
...Yet again in Introductory Lectures (1917), he also had made much the same point...
...He told them that theirs was a "New World...
...7:145...
...In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), he criticized Ulrichs directly, referring to him by name as "a spokesman of the male inverts," and mentioning his notion of "a feminine brain in a masculine body" in order to brush it aside...
...Sincerely yours with kind wishes, Freud The American mother said that she was grateful for the letter, sent a copy eventually to the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, and told him that Freud was a "great and good" man...
...The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, J. Strachey et al., trs...
...But the militancy made no apparent impact on Putnam, who soon wrote back that patients need "more than to simply learn to know themselves," they need also to know the "reasons why they should adopt higher views of their obligations...
...That would be troublesome...
...Bayer, pp...
...He dropped all obliquity, all his tones except candor, and in one of the last few letters he wrote to Putnam, shortly before Putnam's death separated them forever, attacked his moralism straight on: Sexual morality as society.and at its most extreme, American society.defines it, seems very despicable to me...
...What was theoretically significant, what must never be forgotten or denied or elided, was that everybody's sexuality was homosexual in large part...
...Probably the most crucial unpublished source for the history of psychoanalytic thought, the "Rundbriefe" are still very little known...
...But there is one account of a single session with Freud, written by a patient who may fit into this category...
...Because they sublimated their sexual energy so completely...
...Just what the talk was we of course cannot now know exactly and fully...
...Freud died in 1939, four years after he had written his letter to the American mother...
...In my account of Rado, Bieber, and Socarides, I generally and gratefully follow Bayer...
...Uncertain how to respond, they turned for advice to a member of Freud's inner circle, Ernest Jones, the same who later wrote the standard biography...
...What happened to homosexuals who found themselves in treatment with American psychoanalysts of the era of Putnam and Jeliffe...
...I advised against it," he said, " and now I hear . . . that the man has been detected and committed to prison...
...This time he appeared as a cosignatory to a statement addressed to a joint Austro-German legal commission, which was considering the revision of the penal code...
...but he has left us no account of his dealings with any of them...
...In a certain number of cases we succeed in developing the blighted germs of heterosexual tendencies which are present in every homosexual, in the majority of cases it is no more possible...
...That view was not "illogical," but it was "non-operational" and should be discarded...
...Both, denying that homosexuality was an illness, described it instead as the sexual orientation of a minority...
...See, for instance, Freud's letter of April 13,1919 to Oscar Pfister, in The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oscar Pfister, H. Meng and E. Freud, eds...
...Among the other signatories were Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Werfel, and Moritz Schlick...
...For him they were not cases, and so there was no reason to write up a case history...
...No: the goal was cash, acquisition, accumulation...
...7 An excerpt from Goetz's memoir in English translation is printed in Freud as We Knew Him, H. Ruitenbeek, ed...
...One way of gauging the enduring force of American moralism may be to compare these results with those of a rather similar study done the same year in England...
...Summarized: that homosexuality is no advantage...
...I thank Professor Steakley for bringing this essay to my attention...
...So perhaps I should note that I cannot follow his treatment of Freud...
...He argued, in a series of pieces published mostly in the 1960s, that homosexuality was in fact a severe illness, accompanied often by such psychotic manifestations as schizophrenia or manic-depressive mood swings...
...The headaches disappeared, and he talked eagerly about his life and loves...
...Jung made no further comment.' So far as I can tell, only three analysts can be tentatively identified as sharing perhaps without reservation in Freud's viewpoint on homosexuality...
...The movement was then based mostly in Germany, where it had originated during the latter part of the 19th century...
...it has been reprinted since many times...
...Having explained how to interpret the joke, Freud proceeded to ask: "Why" did the connoisseur "not tell the rogues straight out what he wanted to say...
...8 See Jtirgen Baumann, Paragraph 175: (Ther die Mbglichkeit, die einfache, nicht jugendgefahrdende and nicht Offentliche Homosexualitiit unter Erwachsenen straffrei zu lassen (Berlin/Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1968...
...but from the very beginnings of the transplanting of psychoanalysis onto these shores, American analysts have tended to view homosexuality with disapproval and have actually wanted to get rid of it altogether...
...Homosexuals, Freud insisted, were not "exceptions," and psychoanalysis was "decidedly opposed to any attempt" to separate them off "from the rest of mankind as a group of a special character.' 26 To do so would be to reject, in fact to repress, the psychoanalytic theory of sex...
...Whatever were the suggestions that Emerson made and Otis rejected, we can surely conclude that Otis's experience with his analyst was significantly different from Goetz's with his...
...If you make up your mind he should have analysis with me.I don't expect you will .he has to come over to Vienna...
...Their "thoughts" were that "homosexuality appears in many forms as part of a neurosis," that in such instances the homosexuality "should be analyzed," that neurotic homosexuals might and often did refuse to let their analysis go deep, and that when they so refused they could hardly turn out to be good analysts themselves...
...1910) and Robert Stoller (b...
...Rank and Freud wrote, of course, from Vienna...
...Freud replied that no analyst could "compensate" a patient for giving up an "illness...
...Later Freud responded again on a note less personal but still very naughty, gibing at the Christian rhetoric that lay just below the surface of Putnam's letters: You make psychoanalysis seem so much nobler and more beautiful: in her Sunday clothes I scarcely recognize the servant who performs my household tasks...
...K. R. Eissler, Talent and Genius (New York: Grove, 1971...
...In the German law code the number of the clause in which the penalities for homosexual practice were specified was 175.8 The term "175ers" meant homosexuals and was derogatory...
...Analysts only talked...
...He said that he had intended the essay for the Jahrbuch fur Sexuelle Zwischenstufen.another journal edited by the same homosexual who edited the Zeitschrift...
...See Philip A. Morris, "Doctors' Attitudes to Homosexuality," British Journal of Psychiatry 72 (1973), p. 436...
...In his notes he recorded the reason for his making so decisive and abrupt an ending: The patient "shows no adequate emotional reaction to my suggestions...
...Freud replied by saying that he had not intended the essay for the Zeitschrift, which might become the voice of the homosexual emancipation movement in Germany, and therefore might be too political...
...I quote from translations prepared, and kindly made available to me, by Professor James Steakley (Rank Collection Ha/238, IIa/243, and Ha/248...
...Putnam met Freud in 1909 and had on that occasion apparently been firmly told that he should not try to hold up before his analytic patients some ethical goal of his own...
...Emerson took notes that are still extant...
...As early as 1903 he had given an interview to the Vienna newspaper Die Zeit, which was doing a feature story on a local scandal: a prominent Vienna professional man was on trial, charged with homosexual practices...
...The answer is, in a general way, we cannot promise to achieve it...
...Their correspondence, stretching over a period of about seven years, was on Freud's part one long effort to get Putnam to relinquish his moralism (specific allusions to homosexuality, or indeed any sexuality, hardly came up, so elevated were Putnam's ideas, so obliging was Freud as a correspondent...
...142, 143, 144...
...His viewpoint was not wholeheartedly shared by most of his fellow analysts, though no analyst so far as I know directly and avowedly rejected it during Freud's lifetime...
...They are Rank, who cosigned the letter to Jones calling for the admission of qualified homosexuals to the practice of psychoanalysis, Isidor Sadger, whose position can be deduced from some essays he published," and Victor Tausk...
...and there is no difficulty now in making out his actual view...
...It gave him indigestion...
...All "psychoanalytic theories," he went on, effectually ignoring Freud, "assume that homosexuality is psychopathologic...
...The precious canvasses were shown for the first time at a large evening party, and the two hosts led the most influential connoisseur .. . up to the wall on which the portraits were hanging side by side...
...There are risks attendant upon insulting people who are one's hosts...
...1922) went farthest perhaps of any of the American analysts...
...Freud consulted with another member of the inner circle, Otto Rank, who was also a close friend...
...He could not always know in advance, and he must on occasion have had to see, if only for a single session, a patient who was homosexual and relatively unneurotic but forced to consult him by a psychiatrist, a family doctor, a friend, or a relative, like the American mother with whom Freud corresponded in 1935...
...It is a question of the quality and the age of the individual...
...I thank Timothy Lyman for his kindness in permitting me to read his excellent thesis...
...Freud had expressed himself on the subject before, often, and on occasion very publicly...
...As late as 1971, just two years before the classification was rescinded, a study of a random sample of 163 such professionals in the San Francisco area (63 social workers, 50 psychiatrists, and 50 clinical psychologists) showed that only 64% overall were prepared to say that homosexuality wasn't an illness...
...the Dutch and Germans may also have felt some of his reserve...
...30, 31, 34, 35, 36, 37...
...In America, Freudianism continues as it began...
...The connoisseur had "excellent counter-motives working against his desire to say it to their faces...
...This translation, slightly modified by me, is Dr...
...The colleague was the Italian analyst Edoardo Weiss...
...By asking me if I can help, you mean, I suppose, if I can abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality take its place...
...But in fact he was...
...and Freud chose to be, or had to be, content with their response.' As a clinician, Freud refused to treat homosexuals, unless he thought them markedly neurotic, too.' Otherwise there was nothing to treat...
...1908) conducted a big study in the 1950s and published his results in 1962...
...This was no doubt meant 60 to remind Freud that the decision, at least in Berlin, was constitutionally theirs rather than his...
...He then asked whether or not Freud thought that always to refuse homosexual applicants would be "a safe general maxim to act on...
...Jones may have wanted to draw the line at having homosexual colleagues...
...He thought that analysis also showed that...
...He had added finally, and by way of qualification, that if, however, a homosexual molested a child below "the age of consent," then he should of course be charged in the courts, just as a heterosexual should be charged under analogous circumstances.' In 1930 Freud again spoke in the Vienna public press on the subject of homosexuality...
...and then Rank and Freud jointly wrote back to Jones and censured his propriety: Your query, dear Ernest, concerning prospective membership of homosexuals has been considered by us and we disagree with you...
...Hale, Freud and the Americans, p. 346...
...24 Standard Edition, 12:145...
...The point of the critique was that Freud was wrong to try to exclude "ethics" from psychoanalysis...
...Wouldn't that oblige us to characterize as sick many great thinkers and scholars whom we admire precisely because of their mental health...
...62 Still he argued with them, teased, parried...
...Finally Freud turned very direct...
...But sometimes he treated the question as serious and responded accordingly...
...I t was in America, however, that Freud's viewpoint on homosexuality was least accepted or maybe most resisted...
...Freud said (as Goetz reports), " 'And the matter with the sailors has never upset you?' " Goetz answered, " 'Never . . . I was very much in love...
...He found them sexually vapid, flavorless...
...Jones, in England, thought not...
...89-91...
...Why did he tell them only indirectly via the joke...
...11, pp...
...He talked about masturbating, about once loving a woman older than himself, about his fascination with the sea, about his attraction to sailors, whom he wanted "to kiss," and about his not marrying...
...Jeliffe, who thought that training and education should control homosexual feeling and reshape it into "normal, well-adjusted" sexuality...
...His moment came when he explained how jokes were to be interpreted psychoanalytically...
...9, 39, 33, 16, 17, 30, 31...
...If he is unhappy, neurotic, torn by conflicts, inhibited in his social life, analysis may bring him harmony, peace of mind, full efficiency, whether he remains a homosexual or gets changed...
...No doubt he had made up his mind at least tentatively before the trip had begun, largely on the basis of his reading and his personal contacts with individual Americans, partly probably on the basis of the prejudice against America that is always common in European intellectual circles...
...It was clear, certainly by the 1930s, that the movement was going to grow fastest in America...
...His object was to tell her, and everybody else, too, that her son could not be properly treated in America...
...2?‹ As we have seen, Freud willingly endorsed the movement's law reform objectives...
...23 Standard Edition, 16:304, 307, 308...
...Freud thought that analysis showed that all people were "capable of making a homosexual object choice" and that all had "in fact made one in their unconscious...
...The statement noted that the commission was reported as deadlocked over a proposal to repeal the laws penalizing homosexual relations between "consenting adult males...
...His letter had stipulated that homosexuality ought to be a neutral factor or a nonfactor in the evaluation of applicants...
...But he took his stand against their line anyway, just as he had also taken his stand against American moralism, and for the same reason: both line and moralism were, as he saw the matter, in effect repressions...
...66 Besides, groups can organize to advance their members' common interests...
...that it should neither be prosecuted as a crime nor regarded as a disgrace...
...But see Patrick Mahony, Freud as a Writer (New York: International Universities Press, 1982), pp...
...Its progenitor had been Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-95), a Hanoverian lawyer, who in a series of books had propounded the view that homosexuals constituted "a third sex," possessed of a "female soul" in a "male body...
...Almost as soon as he was cremated, a host of revisionist essays started rolling off the psychoanalytic presses, especially in America...
...and Neil Hertz, "Freud and the Sandman," Textual Strategies, J. Harari, ed...
...a Quoted by Herb Spiers and Michael Lynch, "The Gay Rights Freud," Body Politic, May 1977, p. 9. . Quoted by Spiers and Lynch, p. 9. . Quoted by Spiers and Lynch, p. 9. This set of letters is part of a group known as the "Rundbriefe," preserved in the Otto Rank Collection and deposited at the Columbia University Library...
...Emerson saw Otis for six therapy sessions...
...Marmor put his rejection tactfully: Freud had held that homosexuality was a "universal trend...
...I am even of the firm conviction that homosexuals must not be treated as sick people, for a perverse orientation is far from being a sickness...
...On the one side, Bieber and Socarides...
...In 1973 the Association removed homosexuality from its official list of illnesses...
...It seemed to him, he said, somehow wrong to focus on dreams in a country so admirably "devoted to practical aims...
...I stand for a much freer sexual life...
...His purpose was not, he said, to establish that homosexuality was an illness...
...One of the subjects most eagerly canvassed was homosexuality...
...To return to Freud's letter to the American mother...
...296-321...
...Most analysts had room for other thoughts...
...97, 125,126...
...This request gave Freud an opening that he gleefully took: On the whole I see that you are suffering from a too early and too strongly repressed sadism expressed in over-goodness and self-torture...
...What analysis can do for your son runs in a different line...
...I have no intention of leaving here...
...Of course, the corollary of the humane ascription of minority status was this: that people outside the minority need no longer think of themselves as in some important way homosexual, too...
...What Americans said and thought was less important to him than what his fellow Europeans said and thought...
...He knew perfectly well that the letter would be noticed...
...Here the word to note is minority...
...on Putnam's part it was one long refusal...
...He said that homosexuals "through the mouth of their scientific spokesmen" were endeavoring to "represent themselves as a special variety of the human species.a 'third sex...
...and presumably he could have cut off the offending American analysts, just as he eventually cut off such Europeans as Adler and Jung...
...This representation was, however, mistaken...
...A small fee for the joy you have brought me with your poems and the story of your youth.' " When Goetz left and opened the envelope, he found that it contained money, 200 kronen, more than enough to buy a big steak dinner.' Freud was perfectly consistent on the subject of homosexuality...
...As early as 1916, when Freud was still very active, Smith Ely Jeliffe, a prominent New York analyst and a founder of the Psychoanalytic Review, declared that "individual training" and "education" should control the "homogenic" tendency and "direct it" to a "normal, well-adjusted sexual life" so that there need be no homosexuality...
...2, 3, 4. " Robert Stoller, Sex and Gender (New York: Science House, 1968), pp...
...Freud then handed him a sealed envelope, told him it was a " 'prescription,' " and then turned "shy" as he concluded the session by saying: " 'Please accept this envelope and allow me to play your father this time...
...He told them that he had originally planned to speak chiefly about "dream interpretation" but upon consideration had rejected the plan...
...But the deadlock should be broken...
...What he rejected was the theory that lay behind them, the theory of the "third sex," of "sexual intermediates...
...Influenced perhaps especially by Rado, the American Psychiatric Association in 1952 formally classified homosexuality as an illness...
...He assumed as much both because the gay liberation movement was predictably saying so and because their psychoanalytic allies were loudly agreeing...
...libidinal attachments to persons of the same sex play no less a part in normal mental life, and a greater part as a motive force for illness, than do similar attachments to the opposite sex...
...and eds., 24 vols...
...Following Rado's lead, Irving Bieber (b...
...He then wrote back yet again, "As I study patients and try to relieve them of their symptoms, I find that I must also try to improve their moral characters and temperaments...
...Why he never succeeded may require an explanation...
...and he argued that it derived primarily from a certain sort of bad family situation: a domineering mother, a cold father...
...Should he not try, in a hortatory way, to provide her with such an interest...
...All the energy that was not loosed sexually was going toward making money and toward very little else...
...If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis...
...privately he took a similar line...
...Freud's position turned out to be objectionable to most of his associates...
...B. Honors Thesis, Harvard College, 1980...
...One of Tausk's colleagues reported him as saying this in about 1914 on the treatment of a particular neurotic homosexual: " . . . his therapeutic goal for the patient was to rid him of feelings of guilt about his homosexuality so that he could be free to satisfy his homosexual needs.' But if Rank, Sadger, and Tausk stood in this matter firmly with Freud, they were the exceptions...
...Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University 68 Press, 1971), pp...
...Behind the fantasy of a happy family life, you would discover the normal repressed fantasies of rich sexual fulfillment...
...He then answered his own question...
...He hated the food...
...As his Viennese colleague Paul Federn tactlessly reported years later when in 1947 he spoke in New York at the dedication of a Freud bust in the headquarters of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, Freud had always held that in America there was not "enough libido actually to be found and felt by him.' 14 Why were the Americans such nonentities sexually...
...32 Sexual Inversion, ed...
...London: Hogarth, 1966-74), vol...
...Next, undaunted, Putnam wrote to say that he wanted to compose something rather big on the subject of "sublimation," with special reference "to the work of Dante and Emerson...
...But that was not the analyst's fault...
...Sachs, Abraham, and Eitingon then concluded: "We agree that we only should accept homosexuals into our membership when they have other qualities in their favor...
...The issue surfaced in 1920...
...Yet he took the time to write to her when he was himself deathly ill...
...At the Association meetings that had led up to the eventual decision to rescind the classification of homosexuality as an illness, all of the major protagonists had been analysts...
...Then, too, he believed that the American analysts' outlook was not accidental but necessary, derived directly from what he took to be the root conditions of American life...
...They also gave a wide opening to "blackmail" and indirectly drove some homosexuals to "suicide...
...There was yet another bad consequence of these laws...
...Stoller said much the 67 same: By sticking to Freud's view we could never have clear grounds for saying of anybody that he was not homosexual...
...712ff...
...and it is conveniently available in Ernest Jones's standard biography...
...Freud wrote it in English as a courtesy to his correspondent, who was an American, a mother, distressed and embarrassed because her young son was homosexual...
...Jones, who got their letter, was in London...
...Later, in the 1919 edition, he inserted in a footnote a firmer critical comment: " . . . those who speak for homosexuals in the field of science have been incapable of learning anything from the established findings of psychoanalysis...
...Zeitschrift feu Sexualwissenschaft 1 (1908), pp...
...It is hard to be entirely sure...
...15 Ernest Jones, Free Associations: Memoirs of a Psychoanalyst (London: Hogarth, 1959), p. 190...
...and some analysts referred relatively unneurotic homosexuals to Freud for treatment, though he of course thought there was no need...
...During the sixth Emerson ended their connection...
...Soon after, he told Freud one of his childhood fantasies.it was of a happy family life.and asked for an interpretation...
...No doubt, homosexual men would on the whole tend to have sex with men, while nonhomosexual men would on the whole tend to have sex with women...
...Everything about homosexuality that he says in the letter had been an article of conviction with him for more than 30 years...
...M. Grotjahn, "Notes on Reading the `Rundbriefe,' " Journal of the Otto Rank Association 8 (1973-74), pp...
...I am most impressed by the fact that you do not mention this term yourself in your information about him...
...Jung too may have felt rather differently from Freud on the subject of homosexuality...
...In Leonardo da Vinci (1910), he again took note of the movement's line: Homosexual men, who have in our times taken vigorous action against the restrictions imposed by law on their sexual activity, are fond of representing themselves, through their theoretical spokesmen, as being from the outset a distinct sexual species, as an intermediate sexual stage, as a "third sex...
...He had called them "sexual intermediates...
...He studied the works for a long time, and then, shaking his head, as though there was something he had missed, pointed to the gap between the pictures and asked quietly: "But where's the Savior...
...So Marmor and Stoller both saw homosexuality as belonging to homosexuals alone, who were therefore different from everybody else, and thus a minority...
...27 Quoted by Ronald Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis (New York: Basic Books, 1981), pp...
...Instead he made a remark which seems at first sight strangely inappropriate...
...His viewpoint, during the years when he was still associated with psychoanalysis, is hard to reconstruct fully...
...Only the British knew how to speak English right...
...15 Freud himself put the point still more delicately, but nonetheless very definitely, while actually speaking to his one American audience at Clark...
...For they denied homosexuals "their very sexuality...
...Freud went on: Clearly what the connoisseur meant to say was: "You are a couple of rogues, like the two thieves between whom the Savior was crucified...
...264ff...
...It was also the considered expression of a viewpoint that Freud had long deeply felt and tenaciously held...
...The laws that penalized it represented an "extreme violation of human rights...
...A photostat of the holograph letter is reproduced here...
...In a parliamentary culture, as the Germany of Freud's day in some measure was, or as modern-day America is, group-organizational strength can often translate directly into political influence...
...A random sample of 300 health-care professionals (150 general practitioners, 150 psychiatrists) showed that 94.3% overall were prepared to say that homosexuality wasn't an illness...
...On one important matter he disagreed adamantly with the line taken by the movement, and he expressed the disagreement in his psychological writings on three separate occasions...
...He intended it to be noticed...
...J. Marmor (New York: Basic Books, 1965), pp...
...With these findings in mind, he could hardly accept that homosexuals were "a distinct sexual species" or "a special variety of the human species...
...But his colleagues did show some hesitation about it, some edginess...
...But in the midst of the flattery, Freud also managed to say what he thought...
...Ruitenbeek, p. 220...
...This disaster sometimes overtook homosexuals in nonanalytic treatment...
...Presumably she found the letter helpful, maybe also comforting, even though it had probed her fearfulness and prejudice...
...87, 90, 91, 95, 117, 130, 137, 152, 153, 161, 168, 171, 189...
...But the letter was more than just a "kindness...
...James Jackson Putnam and Psychoanalysis, N. Hale, ed...
...There Bayer goes wrong...
...1924...
...t may be surprising, in the light of what this paper has said so far, to find that Freud was very much at odds with the homosexual eman65 cipation movement of his own day...
...From them we learn that Otis described himself as having never had intercourse with a woman, as having more than occasionally had sexual contact with boys, as having long felt both persecuted and sure that he could never become heterosexual...
...For it took no account of the findings of psychoanalysis...
...By stigmatizing homosexuality as "criminal," they often forced homosexuals into "antisocial" postures and attitudes...
...that it is also no illness...
...Freud replied that he looked forward to it "with great interest...
...they were the thieves...
...their letter, on the other hand, suggested that homosexuality might well make for a presumption against an applicant but that he should nevertheless be admitted if he were judged good enough...
...The Dutch wondered whether or not a 61 homosexual should be admitted to practice analysis...
...They were the unscrupulous businessmen...
...This difference, though of "practical significance," was of small "theoretical" significance...
...It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime and a cruelty too...
...What would you have us do when a woman complains about her thwarted life, when, with youth gone, she notices that she has been deprived of the joy of loving for merely conventional reasons...
...And was the goal of American sublimation the production of art, science, law, architecture, music, literature...
...9 The Freud.Jung Letters: The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, W. McGuire, ed...
...In so describing it they of course rejected the view that Freud had thought theoretically crucial...
...A strange spectacle: two sets of moralistic analysts, each opposing the other, each claiming to stand in the tradition of Freud, and each espousing a position that Freud had himself rejected as wrong and repressive...
...Psychoanalytic allies...
...Freud replied this time with bitterness rather than irony: "As soon," he wrote, as analysts take on "the task of leading the patient toward sublimation, they hasten away from the arduous tasks of psychoanalysis so that they can take up the much more comfortable . . . duties of the teacher and paragon of virtue...
...But," they went on, "we have had some thoughts on this matter...
...Homosexuality," the statement continued, had "been present throughout history and among all peoples...
...Sandor Rado (1890-1972) of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Clinic in New York was the first to declare himself...
...So Freud argued, but the movement was not much interested by his argument...
...We would probably be well advised to revert to a "less complicated definition of homosexuality" and think of it as just the preserve of homosexuals, as "that state in which sexual practices are performed by preference, in conscious fantasy or in reality, with a person of the same sex...
...See Freud.Jung, p. 423...
...What he told the American mother in his letter of 1935, that it was neither advantage, crime, illness, nor disgrace, he had long believed and long acted on...
...but there is a suggestive comment in one of his letters...
...During the '60s and '70s, both these analysts clashed repeatedly with the Bieber.Socarides set...
...Notes ' "A Letter from Freud," American Journal of Psychiatry, April 1951, p. 786...
...First he gave an example of a joke: Two not particularly scrupulous businessmen had succeeded, by dint of a series of highly risky enterprises, in amassing a large fortune, and they were now making efforts to push their way into good society...
...25 Standard Edition, 16:308...
...For the full text in the original German, see Bruno Goetz, "Erinnerungen an Sigmund Freud," Neue Schweizer Rundschau, May 1952, pp...
...the account is moving as a portrait of the psychoanalyst but disappointingly sparse about the patient himself, whose name was Bruno Goetz...
...Yes: the movement had such allies, of whom the two most influential were Judd Marmor (b...
...it reflects the outlook that historians usually call moralistic and that has always dominated psychoanalytic thinking in this country...
...they ran no risk, so long as they were in the hands of the analysts, of getting castrated...
...Jung may in a careless moment have let slip a prejudicious slur...
...Ruitenbeek's...
...Jones is probably right to describe the letter, in his biography, as a remarkable "kindness...
...This was Freud at his most militantly political...
...If the `175ers' are in charge, that will hardly be a guarantee of its scientific attitude," Jung wrote...
...All this was flattery, and thickly applied, too...
...However, don't neglect to give me your answer...
...Still the trip was brief, the itinerary limited, and his conclusions were exceptionally positive and firm...
...Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp...
...The Zeitschrift fur Sexualwissenschaft, a journal edited by a homosexual, had been mentioned, and Jung advised against using it...
...he added that in the old, benighted European world there was unreasoning prejudice against psychoanalysis...
...First of all he thought that Americans were extraordinarily overrepressed...
...In a series of pieces published in the 1940s, he argued that malefemale pairing was healthy, that it was moreover the "standard pattern," that homosexuality was an illness based on a fear of women, and that it could often be cured in psychoanalysis...
...Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness, we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual development...
...I thank my student Andrew Tully, who made a comment in classroom discussion that helped me to focus my ideas about the Five Lectures...
...Notions like the "third sex" or, to glance ahead for a moment to modern-day America, "gay people," can play an important role in enabling homosexual assertiveness...
...Once Goetz got to Freud's office, he began to feel better immediately...
...He goes on to say more: Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them...
...What the president assumed was that homosexuals were indeed a minority, a group of a special character...
...97-98...
...the view that everybody's sexuality was in large part homosexual...
...He told them that "hysteria" might perhaps be best understood as analogous to a kind of overinvolvement in history...
...that no homosexual need be treated psychoanalytically unless he 59 also, and quite incidentally, happened to be neurotic...
...We may here review briefly and in a very foreshortened way what the American analysts said about it once they could be sure that Freud was gone...
...New York: Basic Books, 1963), p. 68...
...What the letter tells her is that she has less cause for distress than she may think and none whatsoever for embarrassment...
...His purpose was rather to come to understand the etiology of the illness...
...Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), pp...
...The wording of both letters is, however, close...
...The audience laughed...
...29 This classification was also reflected in the attitudes of a substantial number of American health-care professionals...
...Like Ulrichs, Hirschfeld had also thought of homosexuals as a biologically and psychically distinct group...
...He was after all a domineering leader, with little patience for any deviationism...
...But how did psychoanalysis prove it wrong...
...Humanity, justice, and reason" all required the repeal, and it should be agreed to immediately...
...Freud had no need of more patients, and the woman was a stranger...
...See Joel Fort, Claude M. Steiner, and Florence Conrad, "Attitudes of Mental Health Professionals toward Homosexuality and Its Treatment," Psychological Reports 29 (1971), p. 349...
...Goetz did not want to go, but the professor's authority was sufficient to make him, and he went...
...And when you're in love, everything is fine...
...He tends to accept that Freud believed what American analysts have said he believed...
...3ff...
...But the recognition of our therapeutic limitations reinforces our determination to change other social factors so that men and women shall no longer be forced into hopeless situations...
...On the contrary, Freud held that all people were psychologically like the ones called homosexuals...
...16 It takes but a moment's reflection to realize that at Clark, Freud himself was the honored guest, the Americans were his hosts, and that he was insulting them, though indirectly, with the joke he told...
...Some eight years later Emerson published in the Psychoanalytic Review a brief and courteous critique of Freud...
...He visited America only once, in the fall of 1909, when he came here to deliver five introductory lectures on psychoanalysis at Clark University to an audience that, incidentally, included both William James and Emma Goldman...
...Martin Duberman, "The Therapy of C. M. Otis: 1911," Christopher Street, November, 1977, p. 33ff...
...May I question you, why you avoid it...
...and he intimated that in the New World no such prejudice was likely...
...First of all, such patients could feel physically safe...
...Jones, in his biography, put the point delicately: Freud had an "unfavorable impression" of America...
...One of his professors, who was worried about Goetz, had arranged for the consultation and sent Freud some of the man's poems as well...
...During his stay he got to see New York, New Haven, Boston, Worcester, and Niagara Falls, and he also spent some time in the Adirondacks...
...psychoanalysis proved it wrong...
...Jung and Freud were corresponding about where a certain essay of Freud's was to be published...
...In announcing the declassification, the president of the Association said that he hoped the result would be a "more accommodative climate of opinion for the homosexual minority in our country...
...Jung's comment, in substance, was also, of course, prejudicious...
...When the gay liberation movement grew strong in America in the 1960s, this classification, still very much on the books, 29 became a major issue for its members and they devoted much effort to getting it rescinded...
...I gather [Freud says] . . . that your son is a homosexual...
...the Berliners said maybe yes, maybe no, but were probably inclined to say no...
...Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 3 vols...
...He was writing about a man named Rtimer, who was homosexual, and said: "He is, like all homosexuals, no delicacy...
...One method, which struck them as a likely one, was to have their portraits painted by the most celebrated and highly paid artists in 64 the city...
...2 After all Freud had no previous acquaintance with the woman...
...He had then repeated himself, apparently for the sake of emphasis: "Homosexual persons are not sick, but they also do not belong in a court of law...
...Perhaps he was afraid that too much severity on the American front would put the whole future of psychoanalysis at risk...
...If that were true, what good could come of cutting off particular analysts...
...Putnam then wrote more about his personal commitment to sublimation and to the task of helping his patients achieve it satisfactorily...
...All analysts must try to tell which social relations were, and which were not, "righteous...
...But we can know partially, fragmentarily, a small sample of it, a sample that concerns an American homosexual named C. M. Otis, who in 1911 found himself in successive consultations with two different Boston analysts, Isador Coriat and Louville Emerson...
...26 Standard Edition, 16:307...
...Freud understood all this, and he cannot have been surprised when the homosexual emancipation movement ignored him...
...That too made no apparent impact on Putnam, 63 and in his next letter he ignored altogether Freud's remark about America...
...9 See above, Note 1. 20 I follow John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement, 1864-1935 (New York: Times Change, 1974...
...Goetz said four weeks before...
...But he did not say this...
...i f Freud thought that American sexual morality was despicable, he also thought he knew how it had come to be that way...
...I imagine," Jones said, "that the aversion had something to do with a feeling that commercial success dominated the scale of values in the United States...
...She is quite right, and we stand helpless before her, for we cannot make her young again...
...But about three years later in their correspondence, Jung let slip another slur...
...Jeliffe's declaration is perhaps distinctively American...
...At the time Goetz consulted Freud, he was a student at the University of Vienna, an aspiring poet, poor, afflicted with eye trouble and bad headaches, and apparently sexually unconventional, too...
...See, for instance, Isidor Sadger, "1st die Kontrare Sexualempfindung heilbar...
...Toward the end of the consultation, Freud asked Goetz when he had last eaten a steak...
...Or he might say he hated the accent...
...His motive in writing it was by no means just "kindness," nor was it just a determination to restate a position he had long held...
...It is an outlook that Freud knew, despised, and opposed, but never succeeded in overcoming or even mitigating...
...The Dutch Psychoanalytic Association had an application for membership from a doctor known to be "manifestly homosexual...
...on the other, Marmor and Stoller...
...It was a deliberate provocation, and perhaps the heart of it was the passage where he ended: "If you make up your mind he should have analysis with me.I don't expect you will.he has to come over to Vienna...
...This conclusion both restated Freud's position and modified it subtly...
...New York: Basic Books, 1953-57), 3:195...
...In effect we cannot exclude such persons without other sufficient reasons, as we cannot agree with their legal prosecution...
...It is bracing to think of oneself as part of a group...
...One feels less odd, maybe less vulnerable, maybe even prouder...
...The criticism was put tactfully but firmly: "We have not yet decided," they began, "about the question of admitting homosexual analysts to our Society...
...It would be interesting to know how he handled such patients...
...12 Quoted by Nathan Hale, Freud and the Americans: The Beginning of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876-1971 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 339...
...Homosexuality was not in his view an illness, and whenever associates who assumed that it was an illness tried to refer homosexuals to him for treatment, he turned them away, if he knew in advance that they were merely homosexuals...
...Imagine, Freud said, a "Londoner" unable to live joyfully in the present because he could not escape from the clutch of the past and so spent all his time mourning at spots like "Charing Cross" or "the Monument," consecrated to ancient losses...
...28, 29...
...He too was relatively optimistic about achieving cures...
...and as consequently also sexless and despicably moralistic.Freud never budged...
...In developing this analogy, Freud was hinting broadly and quite mendaciously that since Americans had much less history than, say, Londoners, they were much better off...
...For instance, he held that there was no good reason why homosexuals should necessarily be refused permission to become psychoanalysts...
...21 Standard Edition, 7:142...
...When asked once he returned to Vienna what exactly he thought was wrong here, he would usually treat the question as unserious and respond lightly...
...He wanted also to hit back at us Americans, at our moralism and our misuse of psychoanalysis...
...He added that this representation should be viewed with "some reserve...
...Bayer, p. 136...
...The statement concluded with the "demand" that homosexuals be allowed the same "rights" as everyone else.' These were Freud's public interventions...
...31 Quoted by Bayer, p. 138...
...American moralism always brought it out in him...
...The result of treatment cannot be predicted...
...From this opinion of them, or rather of us, as thieves...
...22 Standard Edition, 11:98, 99...
...It still appears to me," he wrote later that year, "that . . . the psychoanalytic method needs to be supplemented by methods which seek to hold up before the patient some goal toward which he may strive...
...Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), pp...
...and Timothy Roe Lyman, "Homosexual Movements in Perspective: The Emergence of Homosexual Identity in Germany, 1900-1933" (A...
...but which we recognize later as an allusion to the insult that he had in mind...
...Ulrichs's spiritual successor and the movement's first great leader had been Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), a Jewish doctor in Berlin, who as publicist, organizer, lobbyist, and clinical investigator had worked long and tirelessly for the repeal of the laws penalizing homosexuality and for public recognition of its widespread incidence...
...Within about a month news of the exchange had reached the analysts of Berlin, whereupon three of them, Hanns Sachs, Karl Abraham, and Max Eitingon, all alarmed, wrote to Freud in criticism of his position...
...A reporter had come to get Freud's reaction, and Freud had said: . . . I advocate the standpoint that the homosexual does not belong before the tribunal of a court of law...
...He did not specify what the suggestions were...
...35-38...
...See Edoardo Weiss, Sigmund Freud as Consultant (New York: Intercontinental Medical Book Corp., 1970), p. 9. On Tausk and his relation to Freud, see Paul Roazen, Brother Animal (New York: Knopf, 1969...
...Jones kept Freud informed by letter...
...Charles Socarides (b...
...Socarides also said that cures were possible...
...Putnam, who thought he should inspire his patients with his own ethical vision...
...His most frequent butt was James Jackson Putnam of Harvard, the American analyst whom he liked most or maybe disliked least...
...But homosexuals were not necessarily ill any more than was any other minority.blacks, Hispanics, Jews.and they were entitled to be free of the stigma that official psychiatry had placed on them so unfairly...
...Through a mix of agitation and argument, they eventually succeeded...
...Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc...
...James Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany (New York: Arno, 1975...
Vol. 33 • January 1986 • No. 1
