Social unacceptability
Mental health practitioners were treated as a last chance for many patients at the time of Sigmund Freud. Going to meet a complete stranger to talk about what you wouldn’t even tell your family members, has to rate up there in anxiety with other unpleasant experiences, like waiting for a court verdict or preparing for surgery. Psychologists were viewed by the public, in Freud’s time, as not being quite as professional as medical doctors. But when a person was desperate, then all that was left was hope for someone in the professional class to solve what no one else could. In 1920, Freud had met such a man. He was a father who was very troubled by the condition of his daughter. “There was something about his daughter’s homosexuality that aroused the deepest bitterness in him, and he was determined to combat it with all the means in his power; the depreciation of psycho-analysis so widespread in Vienna did not prevent him from turning to it for help. If this way failed he still had in reserve the strongest countermeasure; a speedy marriage was to awaken the natural instincts of the girl and stifle her unnatural tendencies.”
His daughter had fallen in love with a woman a ten years older than herself. The love interest had a reputation for promiscuity with both men and women. She loved her so powerfully, and disappointingly for her parents, to the detriment of her further education and social functions. “[Her parents] had never remarked in their daughter any interest in young men, nor any pleasure at their attentions, and on the other hand, they were quite sure that her present attachment for a woman was only a continuation in a marked degree of the feeling she had displayed of recent years for other members of her own sex…”
The young lady hated pretense, and without care for her reputation, she continued to be seen in public with the desired woman. One day her father walked passed her, and saw his daughter was in the company of the detested woman. “He passed them by with an angry glance which boded no good. Immediately after the girl rushed off and flung herself over a neighboring wall on to the railway line.” The suicide attempt came to nothing and she recovered from the fall. After the attempt both parents backed off their criticisms, and being moved by the girl’s passion, her love interest became more friendly.
Homosexuality
The difficulty with patients, such as these for Freud, was their clear and undisguised desires. “The doctor who was to undertake the psycho-analytic treatment of the girl had several reasons for feeling uncomfortable. The situation he had to deal with was not one such as analysis demands and where alone it can demonstrate its effectiveness. The ideal situation is when someone, otherwise master of himself, is suffering from an inner conflict which he is unable to resolve alone, so that he brings his trouble to the analyst and begs for his help…Further unfavourable features in the present case were the facts that the girl was not exactly a ‘patient’ – her suffering had no inner source, nor did she complain of her condition…The removal of homosexuality is in my experience never an easy matter.”
Freud saw that psycho-analysis could only help patients release a desire that was already there. “I have found that success is possible only under specially favourable circumstances, and even then that it essentially consists in being able to open to the restricted homosexuals the way to the opposite sex, till then barred, thus restoring their full bisexual functions. After that it lay with themselves to choose whether they wished to abandon the other way, banned by society, and in individual cases they have done so. One must remember that in normal sexuality also there is a limitation in the choice of object; in general to undertake to convert a fully developed homosexual into a heterosexual is not much more promising than to do the reverse, only for good practical reasons that latter is never attempted.”
Freud found that inauthentic choices, coerced by social threats, were not sufficient to provide any long-term satisfaction. “It is only where the homosexual fixation has not yet become strong enough, or where there are considerable rudiments and remains of the heterosexual choice of object, i.e., in a still oscillating or in a definitely bisexual organization, that one may make a more favourable prognosis for the psycho-analytic therapy.”
When working with the girl, she had no such conflicts with her sexuality, but she did feel grief over how she made her parents feel. Freud thought to himself: “Did this homosexual girl show [bodily] characteristics plainly belonging to the opposite sex, and did the case prove to be one of congenital or of acquired (later developed) homosexuality?” Despite the typical stereotype of masculine looking women and feminine looking men, Freud still kept the analysis in the psychical realm because bodily features didn’t always explain the outcome. “What is certainly of greater import is that in her behaviour towards her love-object she had approximated throughout to the masculine type: that is to say, she manifested the humility and the tremendous over-estimation of the sexual object so characteristic of the male lover, she renounced all narcissistic satisfaction, and she preferred to be the lover rather than the beloved. She had thus not only chosen a female love object, but had also developed a masculine attitude towards the object.”
As Freud continued with the sessions he could see numerous problems with current beliefs in the general population, and even in doctors, about homosexuality. He found that…
- Masculine or feminine looks don’t necessarily predict sexual orientation.
- Intellectual prowess or emotional dominance didn’t predict sexual orientation.
- Many homosexuals have heterosexual libido at differing levels.
- Some people are bisexual.
- For people who have more fluidity, it was possible for abuse or obstacles towards one sex to motivate the brain to unconsciously look for same sex replacements.
- The behaviour of wanting to pursue or wanting to be pursued can be found in both heterosexual and homosexual relationships.
- Early templates and disappointments can influence later choices.
- To be or to have: The sex of those who we compete with, for the sex we want, tells us that wanting to be someone can be a rivalrous imitation that reduces sexual desire towards the rival, and their sex, and increases sexual desire for who is sought for. For example, when Freud released this patient, it was after seeing how she ultimately didn’t like her father and transferred that attitude towards him, another male. By suggesting a female psychoanalyst, Freud must have believed his presence was only increasing her desire for women and nothing he could do would change that.
- The patient suggested to Freud that she could obtain a false marriage as a solution to her problem. Of course a secret life could only produce the illusion of a conversion, and would be unfulfilling for both partners.
Authenticity
Freud eventually came to the conclusion that all these external influences, as powerful as they can be, are too weak to displace a very strong internal authentic desire. “Even supposing we thoroughly know the etiological factors that decide a given result, still we know them only qualitatively, not as to their relative strength. Some of them are so weak as to become suppressed by others, and therefore do not affect the final result….There must have been present in the girl special factors that turned the scale, factors apart from trauma, probably of an internal nature.”
Freud was already seeing, what he encountered in 1921 with his malpractice on Horace Frink, that the influence of the therapist in personal sexual choices can easily lead to resistance, revenge, failure, embarrassment and stress for the patient. Since psychoanalysis is about freeing repressed desires, there has to be a strong heterosexual desire that is inhibited in some way that needs freeing. Otherwise, any treatments to forcibly increase heterosexual desires would necessarily be just another repression, leading to the same neuroses that Freud was trying to cure in the first place.
Another difficulty I saw with these early attempts at conversion therapy was how much potential there was for shame and bullying. The question moves it’s target from the so called “patient” to the “therapist.” What kind of person would want to do a job like that? At best a therapist can help to relieve self-blame, and validate any authentic choices a client makes. Any forced attempts at changing people could involve sadism and contempt by the therapist. Any compassionate therapists would find it painful to force an outcome, and they would be more interested in what good can still be done, and if nothing can be found, then they would naturally terminate the sessions. Very easily, one can see narcissists or psychopaths being interested in a job like this. To be in a power position and to manipulate people, who are confused about their sexuality, or anything else for that matter, is a great place to be for a psychological predator. They can get paid and enjoy hurting people at the same time.
Abuse of power
In the early part of the 20th century, Homosexuality was moving towards a medical model. This was both good and bad depending on the angle. Some people took it as an explanation as to why a person couldn’t change orientations and should be accepted. Others took the theme of degeneration to the fullest extent to explain why homosexuality should not be accepted. Germany in the 1920s and 30s had both the acceptance and contempt co-existing. In A History of Homosexuality in Europe, Florence Tamagne described a freedom that was beginning where people could write accounts of how they felt, including early accounts of homosexual libido. “Reading these personal accounts, one can evaluate the degree to which each individual accepted his situation; of course, that varied enormously according to the personality and his education. Age, too, played a big part. Homosexuals of the first generation (born in the years 1870-1890) rarely felt serene about their inclinations, but that was less and less true for the following generation (born between 1900 and 1910). For many, the revelation of homosexuality came quite early, generally during childhood. Maurice Sachs says, ‘I passionately wished to be a girl, and I was so unaware of how grand it was to be a man that I went so far as to piss sitting down. Even better! I refused to go to sleep before [my nanny] had sworn to me that I would wake up to find my sex had been changed…..As this occurred when I was about four years old, one would have to believe that since my earliest childhood I had inclinations which very especially predisposed me toward homosexuality.'”
As you can imagine, some people embraced their homosexuality and others didn’t. Onlookers from the psychoanalytic point view probably watched with varying reactions. Imitation in psychoanalysis involves looking at people who are savouring, and then the brain imagines oneself in the shoes of the person enjoying themselves and assesses whether the identification would be worth savouring or not. People can be turned on or turned off. In psychoanalysis the question is, and no pun intended, “do you spit or swallow?” Projection and introjection can have an element of taking a picture of the savouring suggestion, feeding, chewing and swallowing or rejecting and spitting out. The mind samples the environment. Naturally some people will want to swallow the suggestion, others will want to spit it out, and some will swallow but be afraid of rejection from others if they found out that they like to swallow. Some of the feelings of being turned on or off would also have a variety of strengths, causing stronger or weaker reactions. Mixed reactions towards homosexuality would spread throughout society, and political choices around the subject would also polarize people. Because desire is political and involves an urge to imitate, there’s also an urge to want to regulate and control desires in the general public to limit imitative influence. This is especially true in environments where the general public feel it’s purely a choice, and a form of corruption.
The ‘Wolfman’ Pt. 3: https://rumble.com/v1gtqk5-sexuality-pt-3-homosexuality-sigmund-freud-and-beyond.html
These political splits also influenced Psychoanalysis. Henry Abelove described Freud’s views of American sexuality, and he found that “…Americans were extraordinarily over-repressed. He found them sexually vapid, flavorless…” He felt that American Psychoanalysts had the tendency to see pathology “wherever they encountered what they believed to be immorality.” Freud eventually signed a petition in 1930 to decriminalize homosexuality in Germany and Austria. After Freud died, psychoanalysis continued in America with the disease mentality towards homosexuals, which justified discrimination and abuse, until the later part of the 20th century.
Towards the end of Freud’s life, persecution heated up in Germany against Jews, but also homosexuals who were grouped with political non-conformists. The modern world has a particular abuse pattern where science is used as an excuse for scapegoating behaviour. If I already hate a group of people, and there are scientific theories that justify my hatred, then it will be easier to dehumanize and act on those sadistic feelings. We will see this over and over again throughout the 20th century. The many deaths caused by Nazism and Communism are a painful lesson that whatever so called scientific discoveries cannot be used to justify abuse, murder, and political power-grabbing. Robert Franklin described this change in Germany in 1933. “The Nazi regime was focused on the economic and cultural revival of Germany, a Germany that under their rule became a twisted abomination marked by militaristic aggression and conquest, economic renewal and the imposition of Aryan superiority over all other races. It is the latter that the Nazis are best known for–this idea of superiority led the Nazis to try and exterminate what they considered undesirables: Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies, Slavs, and homosexuals…Heinrich Himmler, reserved a special hatred for homosexuals, and the Nazi party moved against them almost immediately after assuming power. While to the Nazis homosexuality was perceived as a threat to their male-dominated organization, it was also used as a tool: charges of homosexuality were often enough to send the perceived offender to jail or to a concentration camp. In the camps, homosexuals suffered abuse from not only the guards, but the other prisoners as well, and were segregated to keep them from forming into groups.”
Male homosexuality was criminalized in Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code. Because women were capable of having children “the text does not mention women; in fact lesbianism was never criminalized in Germany. The male dominated German society viewed lesbianism as a casual outgrowth of female bonding that manifested itself during adolescence and usually subsided as women joined or were forced into patriarchal households. During the Nazi controlled years lesbianism was not seen as a threat to the perpetuation of the German race as lesbians could be forced to have children.” The obsession with procreation in Nazi Germany was partly the need to out breed opponents, and male homosexuals were targeted for their non-conformity. “The young Himmler’s diary mentions two influential books which are at the core of this hatred, The Priest and the Acolyte by John Francis Bloxam and The Role of Eroticism in Male Society by Hans Blüher. To Himmler the ideas presented…on homoerotic bonds between men and boys, and the focus of homoeroticism as the crucial element in men’s organizations…combined in his mind to produce an idea of homosexuality as pederasty, with young boys as the main victims. To the Nazis and Himmler the estimated two million homosexuals in Germany were a threat to the Nazi ideal of propelling the Aryan race to such an overwhelming degree that it could take over the world. Himmler viewed homosexuals as ‘propagation blanks’ that preyed on boys and subverted Himmler’s goal of a worldwide German master race…The Nazi regime can be seen as a ‘Biocracy’, subverting and twisting medical science to serve state policy.”
As Paragraph 175 was intensified, mere accusations of homosexuality were enough to get one arrested and sent to a concentration camp. “Close to 100,000 men arrested for P175a convictions, around 5,000 to 15,000 were sent to concentration camps, mainly Mauthausen in southern Germany. Homosexual prisoners comprised one of the smallest groups sent to concentration camps; however they suffered the highest rate of death of all groups of prisoners at over sixty percent. Camp inmates had to wear a triangle on their coat and pants to distinguish their offense: homosexuals wore a pink triangle. Life in the camps was especially cruel for homosexuals; they were mistreated by both the guards and prisoners. Many guards took special pleasure in torturing homosexual prisoners. One account tells of a man who had his testicles held in boiling water until the skin peeled off, after this he was sodomized with a broken broomstick, while the assembled SS guards drank and engaged in mutual masturbation. Homosexual prisoners were also punished by other prisoners for homosexual actions by camp guards against other inmates in a twisted association between the two. Homosexuals were not assigned to blocks; they were spread out among the camp in order to prevent their organization. This lack of protection and social structure made them more vulnerable than other prisoners, contributing to their high death rate. Homosexuality was still prevalent among other prisoners; many young homosexuals were taken under the wings of ‘Capos’, prisoners selected by the SS to be in charge of cell blocks. Capo protection often meant extra rations and a lighter work detail and these could be the difference between life and death for homosexuals. Another survival method for homosexuals in the camps was to declare revulsion for homosexuality and accept castration. German prisoners who took this option were often put in a penal division and sent to the Russian front. While these units were deemed expendable and suffered high casualties, it was often preferred to life in the concentration camps.”
Paragraph 175 continued on after the war in Germany until 1994. “Many homosexuals were afraid to speak out even after homosexuality was decriminalized. A lifetime of discrimination had taken its toll – of 1,000 known homosexual concentration camp prisoners alive in 1980 only 15 have spoken of their experience and all of them anonymously. Homosexuals were also not able to receive reparation payments until 1982, long after many had died from injuries they received in concentration camps.”
Slow shift towards acceptance
By the 1970s, the American Psychiatric Association begin changing their ethical guidelines based on that “homosexuality is not a mental disorder.” Because of this, the world of mental health had to adjust to a world that wasn’t ready for the main insight that Freud found, that if there’s no increase in pathology to society coming from homosexuality, then the reason for persecution is baseless. They simply were scapegoats, and many in authority were the ones with the pathology. It’s possible for the inmates to take over the asylum and project their ideas of disease without observing reality. Many of the later “conversion therapies” betrayed that kind of bias where science took a backseat to philosophy and religion.
Freud even 100 years ago was able to see that any fluidity would require a person to have enough craving, or libido, to work with. Essentially they would have to be bisexual to some degree. Without that, you are reinforcing internalized bigotry, or self-hatred, which is the opposite of therapy. Therapy has to be done with a light enough touch so that what is authentic can be unrepressed. Low self-esteem is self-destructive, and for many people, satisfaction is what allows for the healing. Without satisfaction, people turn to self-harm and addictions. A former gay conversion therapist John Smid saw that treating homosexuality like treating an alcoholic was the wrong approach. “People who finally accepted their homosexuality, many, many times, they dealt with their alcoholism, they dealt with their chemical dependency, they dealt with unhealthiness. Many times they dealt even with emotional and psychological illnesses, because so many of those things were caused out of this huge load of shame, and suppression they had to live in, and when they finally found freedom to be who they were, they were able to remove the real cause of many of those dependencies.”
Former gay conversion therapist says practice does not work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdzgqRGdzUY
Gay life – Being Gay in the Thirties: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzPzb3exfVc
What is key that opens the door to relationship happiness is again what Freud pointed out, and that was tenderness. Where people fight over what is a disease or what is healthy, they are leaving out the emotional aspect of sexuality. If sexuality is a cold monetary exchange, a short-term release followed by disregard, a way to regulate emotions like substances, or a form of engulfing and domination, it’s not Love. You’re treating people as a means to an end. The perfume of tenderness is what allows for a sense of caring for your partner. For Freud our tenderness examples start with family, and often we are attracted to people who have those same expressions of tenderness. To consciously look for those expressions of tenderness in others, and to return the favour of course, takes love beyond lust. When lust is satiated and bored, tenderness is the bridge across the desert of emptiness, that has the patience to wait for lust to regenerate.
Love – Freud & Beyond: https://youtu.be/tVxjMP83ajo
Spiritual Bypassing & Inner Bonding: https://youtu.be/JVrkwqUdKE8
Power differences
Since the time of Freud, the early complexities of relationship theories only grew more complex. With more tolerance, came a large variety of possible sexual and emotional combinations. With advances in research on the origins of homosexuality, the myriad possible causes still left people to decide for themselves what they really wanted to do. In Sexual Orientation and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, Friedman and Downey found that despite all the biological indicators, they concluded that “at present there is no biological test that distinguishes people on the basis of sexual orientation.” Stephen O. Murray in Homosexualities, also found many patterns and had to loosely categorized them. In particular, one category he lists is trending today: egalitarian defined relationships. Modern relationships in particular investigate the role of power differentials. Regardless of sexual orientation, power for modern people is increasingly something to consider before a person engages in a long-term relationship. For many, undesirable power positions are deal-breakers. Ilka Quindeau in Seduction and Desire: The Psychoanalytic Theory of Sexuality since Freud says that “traditional sexual morality has yielded to a negotiated morality, which presupposes partners more or less equally strong and neither emotionally nor economically dependent on one another. This new morality presupposes sensitivity to the wishes and limits of the other, and demands high reflective abilities which cannot be assumed to be self-evident…A democratization of sexual relationships is underway.”
Freedom 90 – George Michael: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diYAc7gB-0A
As freedom increases, and people are able to explore what they like, there’s an increased complexity of desires making an unpredictable self that conflicts with traditional social and economic power structures. “What is decisive for these diversifications is a market-like demand for greater flexibility in all areas of life, including in the sexual realm. Rigid social roles and psychological identities, as well as stable life-plans, are scarcely compatible with this general increase in flexibility. Instead, what is demanded is a ‘modular self that functions like a tool-box whose parts can be taken out as needed, augmented and linked to one another.'”
This fluidity also has a chance to break some LGBT stereotypes. In my interview of narcissistic abuse of LGBTIQA victims, labels weren’t always welcome. Individuals want to check how they feel and think before acting sexually, and they don’t want to consult a chart or follow a random suggestion from somebody. Historian Jeffrey Weeks said “we’ve all become obsessed with sharp definitions of what people are. We begin to define people around their sexual activity. We begin to define people as normal or abnormal, around their sexual activity. I think lots of people are finding that these rigid definitions don’t actually correspond to the range of desires, of wishes, of needs, that they actually have.” Friedman and Downey concluded that “neither homosexuality nor heterosexuality nor bisexuality is a unitary entity.” Ilka Quindeau notes that “[This increase in flexibility] is also evident in sexual orientation, for example, which often no longer remains the same throughout life, or by which individuals no longer wish to be defined. Thus, after having a family, a woman may opt for a lesbian relationship, or a man who has lived as a homosexual may indulge his wish to have children and marry a woman. In an earlier era, this might have been taken as evidence that these individuals had repressed their ‘genuine’ sexual orientation, but now it is seen as a sign of increasing liberation. Since previous boundaries are becoming increasingly permeable, and identities ever more fragile or even fluid, the conventional rigid division into homosexual, heterosexual, and bisexual is losing its significance, too.”
LGBTIQA victims of Narcissistic Abuse: https://psychreviews.org/lgbtiqa-victims-of-narcissistic-abuse/
Despite Freud’s theories being a century old, his early analyses of sexual fluidity continued to be influential during this entire time. Ilka still preserves some of Freud’s insights for today’s world. “Freud’s pioneering work on sexuality, which decisively influenced the twentieth century, contains a number of significant insights that, despite all the criticism leveled against them, have lost none of their relevance. 1) the expanded notion of sexuality that is not only confined to [the genitals]; 2) a non-normative concept that allows for a fluid boundary between the normal and the perverse, and between what is healthy and what is diseased; and 3) the assumption of an [independent] infantile sexuality [that can influence throughout life].”
Instead of social structures dictating what should be desired, individuals are increasingly changing the social structures to allow their authentic desires. If inauthentic relationships naturally crumble, due to an empty foundation lacking desire, then people are free to create the structures they want to live in using authentic desire as a foundation. Both traditional and modern relationships can co-exist, with people changing only when they really feel like it, and not because of suggestion or coercion.
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The Psychogenesis of a case of female homosexuality – Sigmund Freud: https://www.lacan.com/The.Psychogenesis.of.a.case.of.female.Homosexuality.pdf
A History of Homosexuality in Europe, 1919-1939 – Florence Tamagne: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780875863559/
Seduction and Desire: The Psychoanalytic Theory of Sexuality since Freud – Ilka Quindeau: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781780490892/
Sexual Orientation and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: Sexual Science and Clinical Practice – Professor Richard C. Friedman M.D., Professor Jennifer I. Downey M.D.: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780231504898/
Homosexualities – Stephen O. Murray: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780226551951/
Cheuvront JP. Henry Abelove’s “Freud, Male Homosexuality, and the Americans.” Studies in Gender & Sexuality. 2016;17(2):80-85.
Drescher, J. Queer Diagnoses: Parallels and Contrasts in the History of Homosexuality, Gender Variance, and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual . Arch Sex Behav 39, 427–460 (2010).
Warm Brothers in the Boomtowns of Hell: The Persecution of Homosexuals in Nazi Germany Robert Franklin: https://hilo.hawaii.edu/campuscenter/hohonu/volumes/documents/Vol09x08WarmBrothersintheBoomtownsofHell.pdf
Resolution on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation: https://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/resolution97_text.html
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/