Henry Abelove's "Freud, Male Homosexuality, and the Americans" - qbq

Henry Abelove

Henry Abelove

"Freud, Male Homosexuality, and the Americans"

in Deep Gossip  Minneapolis MN: U of MN Press, 2003. (1-20)

Abelove begins with some discussion about and the entire text of Freud's 1935 "Letter to an American Mother" which reads as follows;

I gather from your letter that your son is a homosexual. I am most impressed by the fact that you do not mention this term yourself in your information about him. May I question you, why you avoid it? 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. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis.

By asking me if I can help, you mean, I suppose, if I can abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality take its place. The answer is, in a general way, we cannot promise to achieve it. 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. It is a question of the quality and the age of the individual. The result of treatment cannot be predicted.

What analysis can do for your son runs in a different line. 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. 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.

Sincerely yours with kind wishes,

Freud

…and while this short letter is frequently cited and quite familiar to many already, Abelove brings out interesting details and situates it within a context which underlines much that a decontextualized reading cannot provide. 

Noting that Ernst Jones had called the letter a "kindness", Abelove generally agrees with him, noting that "Freud had no previous acquaintance with the woman, yet he took the time to write to her when he was himself deathly ill" (2). But he goes on to write,

But the letter was more than just a "kindness". It was also the considered expression of a viewpoint that Freud had long deeply felt and tenaciously held. Everything about homosexuality that he says in the letter had been an article of conviction with him for more // than thirty years. Summarized: Homosexuality is no advantage; it is also no illness; it should be neither prosecuted as a crime nor regarded as a disgrace; no homosexual need be treated psychoanalytically unless he had also, and quite incidentally, happened to be neurotic. (2-3)

In 1903, Freud had been asked by a Vienna newspaper to comment on a then current scandal—"a prominent professional man was on trial, charged with homosexual practices" (3). This is what Freud is quoted as saying,

I advocate the standpoint that the homosexual does not belong before a tribunal of a court of law. 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. Wouldn't that oblige us to characterize as sick many great thinkers and scholars whom we admire because of their mental health? (…) Homosexual persons are not sick, but they also do not belong in a court of law! (3)

Freud co-signs a statement with Schnitzler, Werfel and Schlick in an attempt to influence an "Austro-German legal commission" which was deadlocked over the question of repealing laws that criminalized homosexual relations. This statement claimed that homosexuality had "been present throughout history and among all peoples" and that criminalizing it would be an "extreme violation of human rights" that refused them "their very sexuality" (qtd 3). That was in 1930.

Earlier, in 1920 Freud had clashed with his psychoanalytic colleagues about this very issue

(…) the Dutch Psychoanalytic Association had an application for membership from a doctor known to be "manifestly homosexual." Uncertain how to respond, they turned for advice to a member of Freud's inner circle, Ernst Jones (…) Jones kept Freud informed by letter. "I advised against it," he said, "and now I hear . . . that the man has been detected and committed to prison." He then asked whether of not Freud thought that always to refuse homosexual applicants would be "a safe general maxim to act on." (4)

Freud and another close collaborator, Otto Rank, responded to Jones jointly, 

Your query, dear Ernst, concerning prospective membership of homosexuals has been considered by us and we disagree with you. In effect we cannot exclude such persons without other sufficient reasons, as we cannot agree with their legal prosecution. We feel that a decision in such cases should depend upon a thorough examination of the other qualities of the candidate. (qtd 4)

…news of this exchange and of Freud's views spread and the Berlin Psychoanalytic Association's members were "alarmed" and wrote Freud in criticism of his position. [n.b., this is the same Berlin group which—to Freud's dismay also excluded Magnus Hirschfeld which I wrote briefly about already here] The upshot of the Berlin response was simply that they were inclined to see homosexuality as a mark against, regardless of what Freud thought, that it was in effect "a neutral factor" (5), and they may have been more definitive about this had he not been so clear about his refusal to stigmatize or pathlogize.

Abelove also reveals that in his practice, Freud refused to treat homosexuality as something to be cured and regularly refused referrals from others who assumed that he would do so. Because he did not seek to pathologize homosexuality he also did not keep notes about patients sent to him for the wrong reasons, but Abelove has unearthed a piece of writing by someone who saw Freud only once and might have been homosexual. This man's name was Goetz, who had one session with Freud, and spoke of his fantasies about sailors and his desires to kiss them and about his disinterest in marriage.

Freud said (as Goetz reports), "'And the matter with the sailors has never upset you?'" Goetz answered, ""'Never … I was very much in love. And when you are in love,, everything is fine. Right?'" Freud replied, "For you certainly…' and laughed." (6)

Freud kept no notes of this single session and upon sending Goetz from his office, gave him an envelop with enough money to get a good meal as Freud could see that he was not wealthy or well taken care of. 

Freud's views about homosexuality seem to have been quite consistent across the span of his professional life, but "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. But his colleagues did show some hesitation about it, some edginess." (7)

Abelove gives some evidence of Jung's homophobia, but as that is well established I'll move along…

As a contrast to Jung and the other homophobes amongst the early psychoanalytic associations, he are given a quote from a colleague of Victor Tausk who had commented on his analysis with a neurotic homosexual, saying that  "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" (8).

With the above portrait of the conflicts between Freud and what feels like the majority of the psychoanalytic movement in Europe, we then turn to the other significant subject focus of the article - American Psychoanalysis.

It was in America, however, that Freud's viewpoint on homosexuality was least accepted or maybe most resisted. (…) 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. 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.

Jeliffe's declaration is perhaps distinctly American; it reflects the outlook that historians usually call moralistic and that has always dominated psychoanalytic thinking in this country. It is an outlook that Freud knew, despised, and opposed, but never succeeded in overcoming or even mitigating. (8)

Then Abelove turns to the correspondence between Freud and James Jackson Putnam for an in depth look at how Freud responds to the ever-present moralizing that Putnam seems to assume is what psychoanalysis is all about. Putnam argued in a variety of ways across their correspondence that "the psychoanalytic method needs to be supplanted by methods which seek to hold up before the patent some goal toward which he may strive" (qtd. 9) to which Freud says, in essence, absolutely not.

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? She is quite right, and we stand helpless before her, for we cannot make her young again. 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. (qtd. 9)  

This made no impression on Putnam seemingly as he wrote back not long after saying "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 temperments" (qtd 10). Freud was not swayed to his position and later, poking some fun at Putnam's all-but-Christian moralism he wrote,

You make psychoanalysis seem so much nobler and more beautiful: in her Sunday clothes I scarcely recognize the servant who performs my household tasks. (10)

As their correspondence went on Freud turned somewhat bitter writing to Putnam, 

a chemistry-themed tie, titled
"Sublimation is my specialty"

"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." (10-11)

Then in one of his last letters to Putnam, Freud writes,

Sexual morality as society—and at its most extreme, American society—defines it, seems very despicable to me. I stand for a much freer sexual life. (qtd 11)

In Abelove's gloss "That, too, made no apparent impact on Putnam, and in his next letter he ignored altogether Freud's remark about America" (11).

So analysts in the States operated very much at odds with Freud's position. Louville Emerson published a critique of Freud arguing that "he was wrong to try to exclude 'ethics' from psychoanalysis" and that, in Abelove's summation, "All analysts must try to tell which social relations were, and which were not, 'righteous'" (14). The general view of American analysts was that their task was to "control homosexual feeling and reshape it into 'normal, well-adjusted' sexuality" (14). 

To return to Freud's letter to the American mother. 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. He wanted also to hit back at us Americans, at out moralism and our misuses of psychoanalysis. He knew perfectly well that the letter would be noticed. 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." Freud had no need of more patients, and the woman was a stranger. His object was to tell her, and everybody else, too, that her son could not be properly treated in America.  (15)

Abelove then reviews Freud's disagreements with the early homosexual emancipation movement, these hinge primarily on Hirschfeld and Ulrichs insistence that homosexuals comprised a specific type, distinct from others. Freud firmly rejected such "third sex" arguments, though he "willingly endorsed the movement's law reform objectives" (15). In disputing the notion of homosexuals as a separate type of human from the rest, Freud, says Abelove, countered to the effect that "everybody's sexuality was homosexual in large part" (17).

In 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. Freud understood all of this, and he cannot have been surprised when the homosexual emancipation movement ignored him. But he took his stand against their line anyway, just as he had taken his stand against American moralism, and for the same reason: both line and moralism were, as he saw the matter, in effect repressions. (17)

Freud dies in 1939. "Almost as soon as he was cremated, a host of revisionist essas started rolling off the psychoanalytic presses, especially in America. One of the subjects most eagerly canvassed was homosexuality" (17). Abelove turns next to look at the work of a number of American analysts, and here I will try to be schematic…

Sandor Rado - circa the 1940s - "argued that male-female 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" (18).

Irving Beiber claims that (apparently "all") "psychoanalytic theories," (…) "assume that homosexuality is psychopathologic" and he pushes for the now infamous mother-blaming account of its origin "a domineering mother, a cold father" and as Abelove notes "He too was relatively optimistic about achieving cures" (18). 

Charles Socarides' position was that "homosexuality was in fact a severe illness, accompanied often by such psychotic manifestations as schizophrenia or manic-depressive mood swings." [And that, in contrast to heterosexual pairings] "homosexual pairings could bring only 'destruction, mutual defeat, exploitation of the partner and the self, oral sadistic incorporation, aggressive onslaughts, attempts to alleviate anxiety, and a pseudo-solution to the aggressive and libidinal urges which dominate and torment the individual'. Socarides also said that cures were possible." (18)  

See here for a bit more about Charles Socarides.

Abelove notes that "Influenced perhaps especially by Rado, the American Psychiatric Association (APA in 1952 formally classified homosexuality as an illness" (18). This classification was rescinded under much pressure in 1973 (and soon after many other gender-related "disorders" began to populate the DSM, acting, or so it seems, to continue to allow gender "deviance" to be pathologizable). Abelove notes that when it was declassified as illness that the then president of the APA hoped that this woudl be a good thing for "the homosexual minority". "What the president assumed was that homosexuals were indeed a minority, a group with a special character. He assumed as much both because the gay liberation movement was predictably saying so and because their psychoanalytic allies were loudly agreeing" (19). 

He then introduces those "allies" … Judd Marmor and Robert Stoller, both of whom he presents as at odds with Beiber and Socarides and analysts of their opinion about these matters. "Both, denying that homosexuality was an illness, described it instead as the sexual orientation of a minority. In so describing it, they of course rejected the view that Freud had thought theoretically crucial—the view that everybody's sexuality was in large part homosexual" (19).  Marmor claims that Freud's view is "non-operational" and, that it must be set aside (19). Stoller was troubled that with Freud's view it would be difficult to tell who was and who was not a homosexual. "So Marmor and Stoller both saw homosexuality as belonging to homosexuals alone, who were therefor different from everybody else, and thus a minority" (19). Abelove adds that "the corollary of the humane ascription of minority status was this: people outside the minority need no longer think of themselves as in some important way homosexual, too" (19). 

Abelove's conclusion gathers the threads of the discussion thus far very nicely…

At the APA meetings that had led up to the eventual decision to rescind the classification of homosexuality as an illness, all of the // major protagonists has been analysts. On the one side, Bieber and Socarides; on the other, Marmor and Stoller. 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. In America, Freudianism continues as it began. (20)

Though I much enjoy Abelove's style throughout and this article is peppered with many great sources which I'd not seen cited elsewhere. I am somewhat dismayed that here at the end—in this battle of analysts at the APA meeting—that he provides no citation at all. I'd very much like to see much more information about this meeting, a transcript in fact would be handy. Likewise I'd be interested to see what documentation there is of the initial classification of homosexualty as illness too, if only to see how many and precisely which analysts were involved in this decision, the degree to which they offered a "psychoanalytic" justification, etc.