Ego Psychology -vs- Homosexuality in 'One Nation Under God' ~b/w~ What's Lacan got to do with it?

The other night I watched Teodoro Maniaci & Francine Rzeznik's 1993 documentary One Nation Under God which is about the "ex-gay" movement, a rather bizarre conjunction of the religious right's sexuality panic and some really pathologizing psychobabble soundbites and even nastier meat-fisted behavioristic aversion therapies. "Psychoanalytic" soundbites though, and to be precise distinctly American formulations of analytic thought which derive it seems largely from what is called Ego Psychology. And one of the things that anyone who reads much Lacan will figure out is that he loves to heap scorn upon Ego Psychology and does so for many years, tackling along the way many of its basic ideas and generally (this is a huge reduction of his issues) faulting it for being stuck in the Imaginary in various ways, this perhaps being a consequence of its focus on the ego. Basically the way the story told by Ego Psychologists ('psychoanalysts'?) played heavily on a developmental sequence that had become somewhat rigidly monumental since Freud's initial observations of it (perhaps as codified by his daughter Anna to a large degree - Lacan being quite wary of "Anne Freudianism" too) and so the idea was that symptoms, thought explicitly as pathological in a way that (again) connects more to American cultural values I think than to Freud's own practice, were a product of the child not going through the stages in just the right way. As if there were a just right way to become a desiring subject. Even here we see how unlike Lacan's thinking this is, that we are split subjects is because there is no just right way, no guaranteed or homeostatic relationality as such - not simply with others - but with ourselves - relationality always fails. Language and body are always at odds. Etc. So the Ego guys proposed that the analyst would act as a sort of surrogate parent, a strong ego, with which the suffering person should identify with so as to embody similar qualities, strength of ego being the grand accomplishment aimed at in much of what I've seen. Beneath his amazingly snarky and devastating critiques of Ego Psychology, I can't help but feel Lacan's horror at a clinical practice whose ethos might be stated as "Be like me, and be well." As if we all desire in the same ways or could. And how could this hope to stand up to even a gesture at its normativizing assumptions? When one adds in all the talk of defenses (a cold war metaphor? a way of discounting all disagreement?), mother blaming (are you a CBI mom? "close-binding intimate mother" - careful your boys'll all turn out fags!) lesser father blaming (distant, remote, unproductive relationship, etc) and recognizes that in the States, this form of "psychoanalysis" was tied right into the APA and hence falls under the Psychiatric ISA and is thus intimately involved in decisions about people's institutionalization in looney bins, the Arkham Asylum, etc. … 

the gates at Arkham Asylum

It is very hard 

to see

Ego Psychology

positively 

it seems

to me. 

So, back to the documentary… Martin Duberman gets a good amount of screen time and has some interesting things to say. Here is my (hopefully) accurate transcription of some of his dialogue (not presented in the same order necessarily);

"I did spend ten years of my life in psychoanalysis trying to cure myself of my homosexuality."

"There was nothing else available in the culture in those years. (…) I was a thorough believer, I was very much imprisoned by the going psychoanalytic model and that model told me that, I was, the mild word was a 'character disorder' but often I was simply described as 'diseased', my 'condition' and it was always called a 'condition', was pathological."

"The good news according to the psychoanalytic model was that my disease could be cured, that is, if I presented myself for psychotherapeutic treatment and if my determination to change was strong enough to overcome this faulty family configuration that I happened to have been born into it didn't work for anybody that I knew personally, and I don't think it works for anybody who I don't know either." 

"In terms of the therapeutic process and how I was supposed to be cured, what Carl, who was the man I was in therapy with (…) What Carl would say, first of all, was that my innate heterosexuality had been blocked through unfortunate childhood experiences, and so what I had to do was, unblock them and sort of re-do my childhood, central to that would be forming a good relationship with Carl so that he could become a substitute father, the good father that I had never had when actually growing up in my own family."

"The assumption of therapy in general in those years was that everybody is innately heterosexual. The only time there is a homosexual outcome is when there is some disturbance in the family configuration."

Duberman is just the right age to have seen what all of this was like during the period of Ego Psychology's hegemony, though we also see in the accounts of various aversion therapies that the Behaviorist paradigm was sharing or taking power as well in psy-I.S.A.. But showing people gay porn and then poking them with a cattle prod somehow fell out of favor over time. (But thank God for the religious right or we wouldn't even be able to beat our kids!)

These comments also further contrast Lacan's position to Ego Psychology as the latter asserts an innate heterosexuality, and clearly seems to be depending on a "natural" correlation of anatomy, gender presentation and sexual behaviors none of which would Lacan support in my view. & how is it that we get from "Come to Daddy" to "Be like me and be well"? Oh, I guess that is obvious. My bad. 

"Jacques just refused to call me Daddy"
~ Rudy Loewenstein

A scan of the wikipedia article on Ego Psychology is sort of amusing and when one reads through its primary tenants and aims one can so easily imagine how Lacan might have responded to each point, and it's never good. Ego Psychology reads like normativity as therapy, or "straighten up and act right" as an ethic. But beware the final paragraph about Lacan's criticisms, it is poorly written and not that accurate. But, curious factoid (for those who don't know); Lacan's own analyst, whom he disliked, Rudolph Loewenstein, is one of the main egos in Ego Psychology.

So, one thing which this documentary provides evidence of is how this conception of "treatment" is entirely pathologizing through and through, functioning as a way for the "analyst" as arm-of-the-law to punish perceived deviance of whatever sort. Charles Socarides is shown in the film saying "Homosexuality is in fact a mental illness, which has reached epidemiological proportions." Bad Analyst Behavior (it could have been a reality show back then). Anyway, all of this ties back to that post about structures and diagnosis.

It's on Netflix if that helps.