The Malady of Sexual Inversion

...But it is on persecution that he thrives, as Bergler makes clear...

...to the second, an equally unequivocal no...

...It has, he insists, underestimated the chances of effecting psychoanalytic cures in cases of homesexuality...

...Byron once expressed a yearning for TB, but that was in one of his less responsible, more Byronic moments...

...Bergler still feels such great need for the hotter Klieg lights of personal publicity that he is forever writing books on whatever is uppermost in the layman's mind —frigidity, marriage and divorce, Kinsey, the middle-aged man and his past-bloom mistress...

...Dozens of other great figures in the pageant of arts and letters have suffered from chronic and sometimes vile diseases...

...I do not think so...

...Yet none of them, so far as I can recall, has ever rated his disease as a badge of pride, or sought deliberately to spread it among those who, happily, were uninfected...

...There are, he says flatly, "no healthy homosexuals...

...But when we have examined the man and questioned his motives, we are left with a discomfiting body of facts, which remains valid even if we were to put Bergler's opinions aside—and I don't think they should be put aside...

...Having read Freud and some of the post-Freudians who have dared to analyze Freud himself, we are entitled to wonder what intimate psychodynamic need Bergler satisfies by his all-out attack on homosexuality...

...Angered by the tactics of McCarthy during his State Department witch hunt, many of us must have felt unwonted sympathy for the persecuted homosexual...

...But neither should we let the practitioners and advocates of a deviation (or perversion, as you will) deceive us and gain license to seduce more of the innocent...

...Along the line, Bergler has to make a distinction between the homosexual whose disease has determined his "life style" and the ignorant, hetero-sexually frustrated adolescent who stumbles into homosexuality for a single "outlet," in Kinsey's laboratory-refrigerator term...

...I remember clearly my own allocked surprise, in the days shortly after high school, on learning that some of my best "male" friends were practicing homosexuals...

...Much of this argument would seem academic were it not for the fact that admitted homosexuals have, in recent years, launched a drive not only to be accepted as the equals of normal men, but honored as a special breed, the repository of most of the world's artistic talent, and entitled to cut moral coiners right and left...

...He has no hesitation in branding homosexuality as a perversion—though he must know that his use of that word will lose him the agreement of many supposedly open-minded readers...

...He should also know the great (if not absolute) truth in the late Jimmy Walker's saying that nobody was ever corrupted merely by reading a book...

...Intellectually gifted, he has written whole books which could be far more seductive of the near-innocent than any mere Kinsey statistics...

...Fortunately, and redeemingly, Bergler has the good grace to be critical of his own profession...

...To the first, Edmund Bergler, a Manhattan psychoanalyst, answers an unequivocal yes...

...They did not try to make converts...

...The shoots are well sprouted by adolescence...

...For all its excesses, this book is a timely reminder of that worthwhile truth...

...Bergler gives his own prescription for treatment, and though many analysts will disagree with some of its components, it makes sense...

...Is Bergler, in condemning this most recent trend, turning the clock back...

...It is against Cory and his ilk—who are now coming out of the woodwork with increasing insolence and in increasing numbers—that Bergler is polemically most effective...

...He believes, as do virtually all authorities on the subject (whether sociologists, anthropologists, biologists, psychologists or psychiatrists), that homosexuality is not an hereditary trait and that nobody can be born with it...

...The question before us in this book is twofold: Is homosexuality a disease, and is it permissible to try to spread it...

...it branded all deviates as perverts and suggested that flogging at the tail of a cart was too good for them—they should be machine-gunned and buried in quicklime...

...The seeds of homosexuality are usually sown, as he has shown, in infancy...

...It is well to recognize at once that Dr...

...The number of men in Kinsey's locked files who had one or two homosexual experiences but who are now happily ensconced in the bosom of heterosexuality must vastly outnumber those who have slid all the way into lifelong deviation—probably in exactly the same proportion as heterosexuals outnumber homosexuals in the whole population, which completely destroys Bergler's argument Those who blame Kinsey for their deviation are rationalizing, as Bergler should know...

...I remember just as clearly my surprise (as an immigrant) to discover that this tolerance was unfashionable in the United States: The American Legion mentality prevailed...

...Robert Louis Stevenson had tuberculosis...

...Here I think Bergler's hostility (of which he has a surprising amount for a thoroughly analyzed analyst) is pushing him so far so fast that he ignores his own best evidence...

...We are entitled to take cognizance of the fact that, while basking in the limelight from his Broadway analysands, Dr...

...This leads Bergler into a violent attack on Kinsey for having, he alleges, encouraged homosexuality—and perhaps pushed many borderline cases across the divide—by demonstrating the statistical normality of an occasional homosexual episode...

...The worst offender in this obscene propaganda drive is a confused Madison Avenue pervert who hides behind his wife's skirts and the pseudonym Donald Webster Cory...

...It is, therefore, not a natural way of life, but a deviation which develops in the branch as the result of some twisting of the twig in childhood...

...Bergler is far from being either an unimpassioned or impartial witness...

...Equally fresh in memory is the glow of righteousness that I felt on deciding that this was a permissible and tolerable deviation since these people kept their private affairs private and asked only to be left alone on a "live and let live" basis...

...We need join in no witch hunts...

...Since World War II, there has been a marked increase in overt homosexuality, and homosexuals are openly seeking to make converts to their abnormal pattern of life...