AMERICAN PSYCHOANALYSTS AND HOMOSEXUALITY

...This analysis too was interrupted when, again for professional reasons, I moved away from New York...

...Further complications in our relationship arose when I happened to meet her stepdaughter socially on a number of occasions and, above all, when some close friends of mine told me that they had met the psychiatrist at a dinner party where he had described rather freely a number of cases of homosexuals that had come to his attention, including such a detailed description of my case that my friends immediately knew that he was speaking about me...

...For professional reasons, I then interrupted this analysis when I moved from San Francisco back to the Middle West for a year...

...That Abelove should not have mentioned Blitzsten as another such "dissident" doesn't surprise me...

...He was well aware of my homosexuality, but appeared to attach little importance to it...

...As I was about to move to California for professional reasons, Blitzsten recommended me to a San Francisco psychiatrist who might help me find a suitable local analyst...

...Finally, Abelove failed, as Freud did too, to investigate at all the very peculiar problem of American attitudes towards female homosexuality, the very existence of which appears to have long been ignored even in the laws of most states...

...On several occasions, in moments of extreme stress, I lost consciousness...

...As far as I know, Blitzsten refrained from writing or publishing, perhaps in order to avoid becoming involved in fruitless controversies on the subject of Freud's and his own views on homosexuality...

...A year later, however, as a student in Germany, I attempted on my own to undergo analysis with a German analyst, but very soon gave it up because I could not express myself fluently in German...

...I was able to be quite frank with her about my homosexuality until she told me one day that the psychiatrist who had recommended me to her had warned her that she was to report to him if I continued to go to Turkish baths, in which case he would insist that I undergo shock treatment...

...Meanwhile, I continued to suffer occasional losses of consciousness...

...But my father's understanding of analysis was so simple that, after almost every session, he asked, "Do you feel any better...

...370...

...Sullivan's publications are numerous and still deserve to be consulted...

...I nevertheless continued this analysis for a few months, although I was still experiencing occasional losses of consciousness, which were attributed for the time being, after a glucose tolerance test, to hypoglycemia...

...Although this treatment appeared to purge me of most residual anxieties or guilt feelings about my homosexuality and of much of the accumulated grief caused by the suicide of a very dear friend or the deaths of relatives or friends who had been victims of the Holocaust, it was interrupted because of conflicts of a very different nature in my professional life...

...I have even remained a close friend of four who left me to marry and start families...

...When, after a few weeks, I failed to "feel any better," this treatment was interrupted...

...SEVEN YEARS LATER, I was living in Chicago and was experiencing great anxiety which had little to do with my homosexuality...

...Lionel Blitzsten, a well-known pioneer American analyst, happened to be one of my close personal friends and was kind enough to discuss my problems with me in a couple of nonanalytical sessions...

...My father had discovered that I had engaged in a few casual homosexual relationships and was so shocked that he consulted our family physician, who decided that I should be analyzed...

...I first underwent analysis briefly in Paris, when I was twenty, with a French practitioner...

...In now reading Henry Abelove, I was thus surprised to note that he neglected to mention the late Harry Stack Sullivan among the few "dissident" American analysts who appear never to have considered that homosexuality is a disease...

...Edmund Bergler, however, deserved to be mentioned by Abelove, if only because Bergler, with his chutzpah and rash promises of being able to cure homosexuality, managed successfully for many years to exploit the anxieties of wealthy parents of homosexual sons...

...A close friend of Harry Stack Sullivan, he suspected, quite rightly, that my fits of extreme anxiety and 369 depression and consequent losses of consciousness had other causes, probably my sense of alienation from my Chicago environment and my difficulties in establishing satisfactory "interpersonal relations...

...In 1954, I then underwent in Paris another analytical treatment, though of a less orthodox Freudian nature, under a French therapist of the reve eveille dirige, or directed dream, movement...

...Ultimately, I found an analyst of European origin who appeared to be suitable but who, after a while, proved to be so inscrutably uncommunicative that I made little progress with him, especially after meeting him as best man at the marriage of one of my colleagues with whom I worked daily...

...Two years after interrupting it, I was living in New York and began to look for a suitable analyst...

...Appropriate medication was then prescribed and these seizures have occurred far less frequently ever since...

...This psychiatrist was horrified when, after admitting that I was homosexual, I also admitted that I occasionally went to Turkish baths...

...Most of my own lovers have been men who were otherwise apparently heterosexual, but who experienced with me, sometimes over a period of several years, a perfectly satisfactory homosexual phase...

...Among others, I consulted Edmund Bergler, who stressed so much my homosexuality and his own ability to cure me of it that he failed to inspire confidence in me, which he attributed, of course, to "resistance...

...I also agree with Abelove in distrusting, as Freud did too, all minority homosexual movements that tend to stress the "difference" of homosexuals...

...I indeed agree with him that most American analysts have tended to pervert Freud's views on homosexuality, whether male or female, and to have injected into them some very American notions of morality and, above all, of social conformism or integration into a middle-class society...

...In 1960, at the age of fifty, I happened to be hospitalized in Switzerland for a serious skin ailment when I suddenly suffered one of these losses of consciousness, after which I underwent an electroencephalogram that revealed that I had suffered a very slight brain injury, presumably at birth as a breech baby, and was subject to a mild form of epilepsy known as anterior temporal lobe seizures...

...I now know that the more extreme manifestations of my troubles have always been caused by my anterior temporal lobe trauma rather than by any emotional maladjustment which could be attributed to my homosexuality, although the latter could, in the past, cause the kind of stress that triggered my losses of consciousness...

...This might have complicated our relationship but, on the contrary, somehow made things much easier...

...My very extensive and varied experience of psychoanalysis as a patient in both Europe and the United States corroborates much that Henry Abelove writes in "Freud, Male Homosexuality, and the Americans" [Dissent, Winter 1986...

...He recommended me to a woman analyst, a recent refugee from Germany who had been analyzed in Vienna by Freud...

...She belonged to a family of which I had known several members in Berlin, and bore a striking physical resemblance to one of her cousins who had been, both in Berlin and later as a refugee in Paris, one of my closest friends...