The proscription of male homosexuality in the history of the institutionalized psychoanalytic movement

Abstract:

This work aims to explore the historical proscription of gay candidates to the psychoanalytic training offered by the societies affiliated to the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). Through a research made in reports, archives and bulletins, it was found that the homosexual visibility movement that emerged in the 1970s brought into light both the institutional prejudice and the rationalizations that grounded it. The development of psychoanalytic theory and the model of psychoanalytical institutionalization are pointed out as key factors for the exclusionary practice.

Keywords:
homosexuality; psychoanalysis; history of psychoanalysis; homophobia

Resumo

Este trabalho visa explorar a história da proscrição de candidatos gays à formação em psicanálise oferecida pelas instituições afiliadas à Associação Psicanalítica Internacional (IPA). Por meio de uma pesquisa realizada em arquivos, relatos e artigos publicados, encontrou-se que o movimento de visibilidade homossexual que se iniciou a partir dos anos de 1970 trouxe à luz tanto as práticas de proscrição quanto as racionalizações que lhes serviam de base. O desenvolvimento da teoria psicanalítica que, desde a morte de Freud, progressivamente patologizava a homossexualidade e o modelo institucionalizado da psicanálise são apontados como fatores-chave para a prática exclusória.

Palavras-chave:
homossexualidade; psicanálise; história da psicanálise; homofobia.

An unwritten rule

Recently, most Western countries celebrated the 45-year anniversary of the "Stonewall Riots", a mark in the struggle for the rights of sexual minorities. In a June morning, a common police raid was countered by a growing riot which aggregated more people as time went by, in a cycle that lasted six days. The raids, which enforced the prohibition of public demonstration of "lewd behavior", represented the State forces that pushed homosexuality away from the limits of the sexual norm. The growing Gay Rights movement then targeted legislation, religion and medicine - more specifically psychiatry and psychoanalysis - in the United States, which ensured the reasonings for thinking male homosexuality as a pathology, adopting a globally influential ideology.

Psychoanalysis in the 1970s was practically indiscernible from medical psychiatry in the United States (BAYER, 1987). The influential "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (DSM), served then as witness to the close relationship between these two domains. In its first two versions, the DSM was entirely phrased in psychoanalytic nosology, which was challenged in several points when the third version was elaborated, one being exactly the point that defined homosexuality as a mental disorder. The pathologization of homosexuality was in this sense an expression of a psychoanalysis that was far from its progressive foundations and during this time prominent figures of the Freudian discipline engaged themselves in "conversion" practices and in the dissemination of degrading discourse on homosexuality. Bieber and Socarides were the representatives of the "state-of-the-art" psychoanalytic theory at the time, assuming that "every homosexual is a latent heterosexual" (BIEBER, 1973, p. 207) fixated in extremely primitive stages of their psychic development and inclined to immoral acts of violence, sometimes antisocial and always wrong, "incompatible with a reasonably happy life" (ibidem, p. 213) . Socarides (1968) even gives the example of how he conducted the analysis of gay men, adopting successive approximation to the alleged phobic object - sexual intercourse with a woman - showing optimism over the "cure" of his patients, no matter how resistant they were to his methods and goal.

Apart from that, the aforementioned psychoanalysts exemplify the historic procedure of dealing with homosexuality from an outside position. Therefore, one of the biggest changes that would emerge during the end of the last century was the beginning of homosexual public expression, taking control over their own lives and vicissitudes not only as a gesture of affirmation but also as a call to action. Visibility and public expression, strategies that became characteristic of minority movements over the second half of the twentieth century, would clash with the fundamentals of almost all institutions that regulated the moral parameters of Western countries through the voice of its protagonists.

As from the 1970s, a current practice in the American Army would also be denounced in educational institutions and in the professional training of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. The so-called "don't ask, don't tell" policy was used to label the situation of those unwanted in the armed forces but nonetheless had the audacity to enlist, and there remained subject to both a self and other imposition of silence and submission. A gay psychoanalyst that reflected on the parallel between the army and psychoanalytic institutions stated that:

If a lesbian or a gay man managed to bypass the initial screening procedure and managed to enter the system, they lived in constant fear of discovery and expulsion. In addition, both groups reviled homosexuality as a danger to values they were trying to perpetuate. Although closeted gay members served admirably in the military and psychoanalysis, once discovered they had to be extruded in order to reinforce shared heterosexual values and to perpetuate heterosexual stereotypes about homosexuality. (DRESCHER, 1995, p. 233).

A psychoanalyst would later replicate the gesture of the psychiatrist John Fryer, who went disguised to an American Psychiatric Association (APA) convention in 1972, and reported that "there are practicing psychoanalysts among us who completed a training analysis without mentioning their homosexuality to their analyst. Those who are willing to speak out openly will do so only if they have little to lose" (BAYER, 1987, p. 110). Richard Isay, the psychoanalyst in question, would admit his homosexuality and historic admonition to silence in favor of gay activism inserted into institutionalized psychoanalysis, invoking his biography and the fate of his peers in order to gain political force. In 1983, Isay publicly accused psychoanalytic institutes of excluding homosexual candidates right in the early stages of admission interviews or during the course of their training analysis, in case they did not hide their erotic preferences for years, as he himself had done. Isay recounts that in his second year of analysis, insisting on heterosexual relationships, Isay found himself completely impotent, "a symptom that Dr. Samuels [his training analyst, who guided him in that insistence] interpreted as a symbolic auto-castration that expressed my anxiety about becoming increasingly heterosexual" (ISAY, 1996, p.18).

Isay would later become a prestigious psychoanalyst, at the same time as he lived out his erotic preferences in the underground circuits of sexual commerce. The active influencing analysands to counter homosexual tendencies, a very convenient ideological exception to the rule of psychoanalytic neutrality, had already been under criticism by psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell a few years back. Also American, Mitchell illustrated two possible outcomes for candidates in these procedures: rebellion or resistance and consequent abandonment of treatment, or compliance and obedience to the analyst (MITCHELL, 1981). This latter outcome, which we shall deal with at the end of this paper, is key to understand how the norm of compulsory heterosexuality in psychoanalytic institutes is closely connected to the historic operations of the normalization of candidates for psychoanalytic training. Ralph Roughton, a training analyst and gay man like Isay, also in favor of the adoption of non-discriminating policies in a global IPA scope, states his testimony among the same lines: "I was heterosexual as far as the world could see", that is why he started a second analysis, "again trying to get rid of homosexual feelings after a first analysis had failed to accomplish that. (...) in the 1970s that is what we did. We tried to become straight, and our analysts told us we could" (LYNCH, 2007, p. 263).

Through Richard Isay, the "social issues that was not of direct relevance to psychoanalysis" (ISAY, 1996, p. 157), in the words of Homer Curtis, former APsaA president, would force entry into psychoanalytic institutes, which had formerly been protected against issues overturned by labeling them "political" or "social". The biggest example of this is the threat of civil cases against the APsaA by the American Civil Rights Union (ACLU), which had become known as a solid advocate for gay rights in American territory. The outcome was that, in 1991, the APsaA was the first representative of psychoanalytic institutions to vote and approve a clear policy of non-discrimination against homosexual candidates (ROUGHTON, 2003).

Nevertheless, the results of this strategy in the rest of the psychoanalytic world, would be limited to discrimination reports, most of them made off-record (DRESCHER; LINGIARDI, 2003). Outside the United States, psychoanalysts were extremely critical of Isay's objectives (ATHANASSIOU, 1993; DIATKINE, 1999), in the sense that sociopolitical and institutional conditions did not yet stimulate the IPA to take a clear stand about the issue. In any sense, some of the testimonies and researches unanimously point toward the general proscription of gay men in psychoanalytic institutions.

In 2008, a debate carried out by the Jornal de Psicanálise (Journal of Psychoanalysis), published by the Brazilian Psychoanalytic Society of São Paulo (Sociedade Brasileira de Psicanálise de São Paulo - SBPSP) can be used as an illustration of the issue in Brazil, but also in Argentina and Italy. The debate regarding changes that occurred in IPA policies in the professional training of psychoanalysts ended up in the matter of homosexual candidates. Abel Fainstein, an Argentinian psychoanalyst, supported the social pressure against an analyst in his country who considered homosexuality a perversion and highlights the "change in imaginary about homosexuality" (BOLOGNINI, et al., p. 38), being that over 30 years ago, when he began his professional training, "homosexuality was clearly within the list of perversions that had to be cured" (ibidem, p. 39). This occurred exactly during the 1970s. Luiz Carlos Menezes, from São Paulo, recalled the discomfort that the training analyst from his city, Luiz Meyer, had caused fifteen years ago when during a meeting of interviewers that dealt with selection criteria, he said that, in his opinion, a gay man who he had interviewed should be accepted. "There was a certain attitude of the IPA in regards to that" (ibidem, p. 39), Menezes stated. Participating in the discussion, Meyer consented to that and mentioned the saga of North-American homosexual psychoanalysts mentioned above to illustrate how wrong the theories were on male homosexuality considered at the time of the application process and of the training analysis. Stefano Bolognini, from the Italian Psychoanalytic Society, commented on two gay men who were going through the application process. One of them had his application denied since it was concluded that he was someone deeply disturbed. The second one, who had already not been accepted at his first application because of the fact that he was gay, applied for the second time, and Bolognini accepted his application because he seemed to be "a reflexive and creative person (...) who had an uncommon ability of internal and interpersonal contact" (ibidem, p. 42).

Mary Lynne Ellis, bearing testimonies of gay candidates who were barred from interviews in British psychoanalytic institutions, in 1993 directly interviewed a training analyst from The Institute of Psychoanalysis, headquarters to the British Psychoanalytical Society (BPS). During the interview, the training analyst stated that the institution would definitely be more concerned if the candidate "had a firm homosexual lifestyle or object choice", strong enough for them to "wonder about that person´s capacity to work in an intensive way with a lot of issues of a heterosexual nature, relationships with children and so on" (ELLIS, 1994, p. 511). Their concern fell majorly upon those applicants who, during their professional training, did not concur with their analysts in the effort to investigate deeply what led them to make "that kind of choice" (ibidem, p. 512). The tone in the concern with "being firm" on their homosexual choice and the idea to "deeply investigate it", disguised the intention of converting this "choice" to a heterosexual one (which was certainly excused from this compulsory investigation) and shows how much this impulse to cure was not only a North American reality. Asked if the theoretical base for this positioning was backed up by a Kleinian vision that the success of the analysis implies the heterosexual choice, the psychoanalyst interviewed seemed reluctant and uncertain, although very sure that they "would feel that [the person´s sexual adjustment] would coincide with a heterosexual orientation" (idem).

It is possible to see that heterosexuality as a norm backed up interpretations about male homosexuality that, although imprecise and vague, served as reasons for the proscription of gay men in the formal psychoanalytic training processes. Allegedly, only a heterosexual analyst would have access to issues of a heterosexual nature that their analysands would bring, settled in their solid psychosexual development that enabled them to delve as deep into the psychoanalytic process, which gay men could not. Therefore, an analysis made by a homosexual psychoanalyst would be potentially iatrogenic for patients, given that their homosexuality hid serious comorbidities in his personality, which would affect the competencies expected from a psychoanalyst, an opinion that took on different forms according to the theoretic dominance of each institution. Rachel Cunningham (1991) illustrated how this positioning was outlined in the British Kleinianism:

It seems that a pivotal factor militating against analytic training of homosexuals is the assumption of the presence of anti-parents, anti-baby fantasies at the centre of unconscious homosexual life. It is one of the tenets of psychoanalysis, particularly in the Kleinian school, that the hallmark of mental health and emotional maturity is the tolerance of the notion of the parental couple in reproductive sexual intercourse (…). The worry seems to be that the homosexual, in wanting to be like the parent of the opposite sex, is actually enviously usurping the identity and position of that parent and falsely claiming it as his/her own, at the same claiming the remaining parent as love object. (CUNNINGHAM, 1991, p. 53-54).

We have until now a general notion of how homosexuality was considered within the thoughts of some North-American writers - mostly positioned under the tradition of the Ego Psychology -, and Melanie Klein and her followers' points of view. In other psychoanalytic geographies, it would not be much different, and descriptions, which were mainly pathologizing and accusatory, were highlighted in authoritative journals that circulated widely, like the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. A thorough exhibition of the subject can be seen in the review made by Kenneth Lewes (1988) through hundreds of psychoanalytic writings on male homosexuality, a work to which we refer the interested reader. For now, let us limit ourselves to the question of how close the psychoanalytic legacy was to Freudian thinking regarding male homosexuality, following Freud's death.

Freud and male homosexuality

It is difficult to summarize the Freudian thought regarding the issue of male homosexuality, and every effort to find a forceful univocal comprehension has resulted in something biased, be it with the objective of drawing a conservative or a gay-friendly Freud. According to what we find on "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" (FREUD, 1905/1996), Freud thought that exclusive homosexuality was - same as exclusive heterosexuality - a result of the original bisexuality, product of a number of restrictions in psychosexual development. The belief in "perverse-polymorph" sexuality is the matrix of Freud's thoughts regarding the limitations that result in the expressed preferences of some for having sexual relations with people of the same biological sex. From the Greek and their ephebes (FREUD, 1905/1996) until fleeing from competition with the father (FREUD, 1922/2011), going through Leonardo da Vinci's narcissism (Freud, 1910/2013b), homosexuality in Freud does not assume an ultimate diagnostic, nosological or descriptive nature. Additionally, Freud always took great precaution in pointing out the conventional nature of trying to classify sexual desire in relation to a supposed biological or social norm: "(…) it is not scientifically feasible to draw a line of demarcation between what is psychically normal and abnormal; so that that distinction, in spite of its practical importance, possesses only a conventional value" (FREUD, 1905/1996, p. 195).

At the end of his life, in response to a mother of a presumably gay young man who asked for his aid in that matter, he wrote that

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 certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too. (FREUD, 1951, p. 787).

The same letter, wrote by Freud in 1935, also brings some information to what his thoughts were on homosexual cure, in the form of an answer to the mother's desire of having her son "reinstated". After stating that psychoanalysis cannot promise to substitute homosexuality for heterosexuality, he wrote that psychoanalysis could help her son in another way: "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” (FREUD, 1951, p. 787).

The multifaceted and many times contradictory aspect of the Freudian theory serves as an indication of how his legacy does not offer an ultimate comprehension of male homosexuality, always thought and rethought according to the issues that presented themselves in the turns of his theory and especially in stemming from his clinical cases. Therefore, if we consider only his works, it is not possible to safely determine what his opinion would be regarding the entry of gay men to psychoanalytic institutions, especially if we consider that his last statement on the subject referred to homosexuality as an "arrest of sexual development". However, Freud's opinion about the possibility of training a gay man becomes clear in a letter from 1921, in which he discusses with Ernest Jones, his disciple and main agent in the expansion of psychoanalytic societies, the destiny of a doctor rejected from psychoanalytic training because of his sexual preference. Jones writes:

The Dutch asked me some time ago about the propriety of accepting as a member (in the Psychoanalytic Association) a doctor known to be manifestly homosexual. I advised against it, and now I hear from Van Emden that the man has been detected and committed to prison. Do you think this would be a safe general maxim to act on? (JONES, 1921 apud SPIERS; LYNCH, 1977, p. 9).

To which Freud replied:

Your query dear Ernest 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. (RANK; FREUD, 1921 apud SPIERS; LYNCH, 1977, p. 9).

After his death, the complexity and contradictory nature of the Freudian thoughts on male homosexuality gave room to a false sense of safety and assertiveness, ensured by the power and social influence that psychoanalysis had gained. Therefore, an "evolution" in psychoanalytic theory was not seen in the sense of a better comprehension of male homosexuality. On the contrary, before that there was a growing intensity of old preconceptions and errors to the point where they became the rule, and with that the respect for human beings in their polymorphic and extended instincts slowly disappeared, causing the impossibility of these individuals to fit into imaginary categories and social norms. Most statements regarding homosexuality were built on parochial or simplistic tones, when not openly hostile, being very different from other subjects that were carried on by psychoanalysts who developed the Freudian heritage in much more interesting directions. It was not only the ambiguity in Freud's writings that guided the post-Freudians towards a derisory concept regarding male homosexuality. There was another determining force in this direction, represented by the institutionalization of psychoanalysis itself, which developed at the same time that homosexuality was progressively criminalized and persecuted by moral and normative standards of Western civilization, prevailing the point of view of the aforementioned Ernest Jones, who believed that in the eyes of the world: "homosexuality is an abhorrent crime the committal of which by one of our members would discredit us seriously" (JONES, cited by LIEBERMAN, 1985, p. 175).

The rise and fall of the of the golden age in sexual liberation

We have mentioned before that male homosexuality was progressively harassed in the Western world as psychoanalysis moved on to a greater propagation and consolidation of its institutions. However, there concurrently was a change in the imaginary of the Western world regarding male homosexuality, and the gay militancy that emerged in the seventies can be considered a recovery of the sexual liberation movement that took place in Europe between the two World Wars (TAMAGNE, 2006).

The period called the golden age of homosexual liberation was a time of numerous specialized magazines, of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komitee, WhK) and of the Institute for sexual Research (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) and their almost successful struggles for ruling out the paragraph 175 from the German penal code, which criminalized homosexual practices and served as a model for all Germanic countries. Even more remarkable, it was a time in which in major European capitals, especially Berlin, Paris and London, there was a sense of freedom in living a homosexual life and places of gathering and free expression of sexuality emerged in a way never seen before. A Thomas Mann essay, written in 1925 gives a picture of the ambience of that time:

And if our young people - and we congratulate them! - experience a more serene and calmer attitude with respect to sexual problems than former generations were able to achieve, if this field is stripped of its most terrifying taboos, it all has to do with, and is in harmony with, the fact that the new generation is more detached and familiar with the homosexual phenomenon, and are more tolerant. (…) Without any doubt, homosexuality, the loving tie between men, sexual friendship, enjoys a certain favor today due to the climate of the times and it no longer appears to cultivated minds solely as a clinical monstrosity. (MANN, 1925/1970, p. 53-55).

It was exactly in this context that the pioneer of the homosexual liberation movement and founder of WhK and the Institute for sexual Research, Magnus Hirschfeld, founded in 1907, along with Karl Abraham and other pioneers, the Psychoanalytical Association in Berlin, making him the first openly gay man to practice Freudian psychoanalysis with the blessing of the master² himself (MANCINI, 2010). The homosexual issue blended well with the impulse for sexual liberation that marked the 1920s, along with other items on the agenda like sexual hygiene, gender equality, the acknowledgement of female sexuality, the right to divorce, the access to contraceptive methods, and the right to abortion. All these fronts were resonant with the reformism that characterized psychoanalysis at the time, especially in the spirit of Freud and his disciples, which were in line with Hirschfeld's research and political action platforms, who in turn and for those reasons, saw in psychoanalysis an interesting theory and technique.

The arrival of the Third Reich and the horrors of World War II brought a wave of conservatism that pushed animosity towards homosexuals to its limits - which although in times of more freedom, had never ceased to exist - forcing them back into hiding, when not put into prison or sentenced to death in concentration camps. The WhK and the Institute for Sexual Research were invaded and destroyed by the Gestapo, and Hirschfeld's books and files were burnt in the same flames that consumed Freud's works. The slaughter of hope for long-lasting liberal times for homosexuals would go beyond space and temporal boundaries, lasting beyond the territories struck by the Nazi regime and far later after its defeat.

The institutionalization of psychoanalysis and the production of normality

Notwithstanding, it is not possible to say that Hirschfeld was the first gay psychoanalyst, and not because he did not fulfill the requirements for psychoanalytic training according to the current requirements, but because these requirements at that time did not exist as well as they were not necessary for oneself to be authorized as a psychoanalyst. Hirschfeld was among psychoanalysts at a time when psychoanalysis operated in what Kupermann (2014) called a theoretical-clinical register, to which later was added another register, one of authorizing a social practice. This occurred after the IPA's consolidation as the guarantor for psychoanalytic transmission and of the institutional adoption of the tripartite (supervised clinical work, theoretical training and personal analysis of a fixed timing) Berlin model. Roudinesco (2002) highlights the first register as being characteristic of a golden age in psychoanalysis, in which differences were tolerated in the name of the cause, not eliminated in order to maintain a certain status quo for the psychoanalyst, considering his image in the eyes of society. Hence, the golden age in psychoanalysis and the golden age in homosexual liberation overlap in history.

When the shadow of Nazism was cast over Europe, while the psychoanalytic world signed agreements³ with Third Reich officials in order to not be completely destroyed in the midst of terror, psychoanalysts - mostly Jewish - persecuted in Europe, migrated to the United States, a territory in which psychoanalysis would find a new center of power that would ideologically influence the structure of transmission and psychoanalytic training as a whole (ROUDINESCO, 1989). The criticism towards Ego Psychology is well-known, especially the one formulated by Jacques Lacan (1988). Ego Psychology was a branch of psychoanalysis that emerged in the United States as from post-World War II and described as, in general terms, a psychoanalysis which valued the adaptation of the individual to social norms, aligned to the great institutions that sustained life in society. The key point behind Lacan's criticism was that Ego Psychology, as a symptom, was inseparable from the structure of training and psychoanalytic transmission promoted by the IPA, what Roudinesco (2010) summarized by saying that IPA's own structure had turned into something similar to Ego Psychology. In this sense, the tension that was characteristic of psychoanalytic relations with culture was resolved by shifting positions, from the margins towards the center, from underground to mainstream (KUPERMANN, 1995).

One of the facets of this shift in position would also be recognizable in the characteristics of the candidates that applied for psychoanalytic education. Maxwell Gitelson (1954) was inquisitive over the qualities shown by many candidates with whom he had contact. The majority of them being men who saw in psychoanalysis a promising Medical specialization, with a moderate degree of neurotic suffering, conformists and well-adapted to society, characteristics put together under the rubric of "normal candidates".

However, Gitelson (1954) treated the advent of the "normal candidate" as a symptom of the social field, namely of the diffusion of psychoanalysis in the social tissue, which ended up becoming a new type of superego which previously molded the desirable characteristics of candidates who aspire to be educated and ends up normalizing them. Therefore, he puts in a way that the structure of the psychoanalytic transmission comes through as immaculate in his diagnosis, although the author already detects a submission and consent to authority in those same candidates. However, since these characteristics were considered the basis of character resistance of those who desired training, i.e., something of an individual or narcissistic nature, the structure of training itself was preserved from criticism.

In turn, the Hungarian Michael Balint (1948) moved away from the tendency to think of the development of psychoanalysis in a naturalized way, disturbed only by external factors like medical-social norms or individual narcissism. Balint regarded dogmatism, inhibition of thought, and the general passiveness of candidates towards their analysts as symptoms of the standardization of psychoanalytic training and in its limits, the institutionalization of psychoanalysis itself. By adopting a wider gaze into the history of the psychoanalytic movement, Balint retraces the origins of such symptoms in the genealogy of authority since Freud (1914/2013a), who desired to incorporate to the leadership of the psychoanalytic movement, an authority willing to instruct and admonish, until after his death, when the training psychoanalysts - responsible for the analysis which would promote the candidates to certified analysts - would assume that exact position of authority. "To achieve all that", Balint stated, "became the esoteric aim of our training system and the way to it was to train the new generation to identify themselves with their initiators, and especially with the analytic ideas of their initiators" (BALINT, 1948, p. 170). In other words, the identification with the ideas and with the ideology of those who are positioned higher in the hierarchy of psychoanalytic institutions is the main key to normalizing the process that struck the psychoanalytic field.

Let us remind ourselves here of what Mitchell (1981) said about the psychoanalytic treatment of gay men in his time. Conformity and obedience towards the analyst, according to him, were one of two possible outcomes for those analysts who actively influenced them towards a conversion to heterosexuality, on the other extreme were rebellion and resistance. Conformity and obedience towards the analyst is superimposed on the homosexual candidate, not only as a result of training analysis, but also as the characteristics produced by psychoanalytic institutions, detectable as from the second half of the last century, as observed by Gitelson and Balint. Even more so, if we take into consideration that rebellion and resistance are impossible in a situation where hostility and non-conformity towards the training analyst would represent the end of the investment in a career as a psychoanalyst, in a context where there would be no alternative possibilities of psychoanalytic training other than those offered by the institutions affiliated with the IPA.

There are two fundamental conditions for the proscription of male homosexuality in the institutionalized psychoanalytic movement. On the one hand, a historical change that buried any outlook of widening the libertarian achievements of gay men in the years 1919 to 1939 - with the arrival of Nazi-fascism - and the wave of conservative thinking that stroke upon Western countries after the end of World War II. On the other hand, the structuring of psychoanalytic institutions around an authoritarian and dogmatic axis, in which prohibition of thought would replace the defiance and non-conformism of the Freudian pioneers, symptomatically stemming theories and techniques that aimed to adapt the individual to moral and normative standards of the dominant culture and producing normal candidates. As Hélio Pellegrino wrote, regarding how psychoanalysis and the prevailing political order of the military dictatorship in Brazil were in tune with each other “it is possible to know the giant by its finger; micro-institutions reproduce, in Lilliputian scale, the structural vicissitudes and the illnesses of macro-institutions” (PELLEGRINO, 1982, p. 31).

The rule, at last, written

Not coincidentally, the most effective criticism to the psychoanalytic training system happened concurrently with the public expression of the exclusion of gay candidates. French psychoanalytic societies, for example, went to the point of abolishing training analysis and, according to one French psychoanalyst, supposedly eliminated homophobia as a result of this measure (BOTELLA, 2001). Both spheres are intimately connected and began to change also along the lines of a global psychoanalytical crisis, impairing the power and influence it had once enjoyed. In this context, North-American psychoanalysis, which was formerly the soundest example of psychoanalytic homophobia, quickly became a flag holder for homosexual liberation and, after establishing clear non-discrimination rules for homosexuality, through the figure of an openly gay training analyst, Ralph Roughton, put pressure on the IPA board to the point that it issued a non-discrimination policy. Adopted in 2002 and visible in its set of rules and procedures, the Non Discrimination Policy was enounced:

On the basis of its commitment to ethical and humanistic values, the IPA opposes all unlawful or unjustifiable discrimination of any kind. The IPA is committed to a policy of equality, including in employment, on all the grounds laid down in relevant UK legislation including age, disability, gender or gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, race, religion or belief, and sexual orientation. Selection of candidates for psychoanalytic training is to be made only on the basis of qualities directly concerned with the ability to learn and to function as a psychoanalyst. This same standard will be used in the appointment and promotion of members of educational faculties, including training and supervising analysts. (INTERNATIONAL PSYCHOANALYTICAL ASSOCIATION, 2002).

Currently, North-American IPA societies, through different vehicles and through the trained homosexual psychoanalysts themselves, boast the wide acceptance of gay men and lesbians in the list of their graduated psychoanalysts (ROUGHTON, 2002; ROUGHTON et al., 2001). The fact that the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research - affiliated with the IPA and based in New York - has today the first out transgender in psychoanalytic training can be considered a direct result of the process that was initiated in the turbulent seventies that we mentioned at the beginning of this article. Jack Pula applied for psychoanalytic training in 2010, at the time a lesbian woman who was accepted without any resistance from the interviewers and neither from her training analyst. However, as a result of profound explorations and transformations expected from analysis, Pula progressively discovered and assumed a male gender identity, a fact that also halted his training analysis -the analyst being opposed to the physical transformations longed by his analysand - and jeopardized his chances of remaining in psychoanalytic society. However, unlike the former gay candidates, he found support in influential people from inside the institute, including gay men and women, and was able to choose a new training analysis and proceeded with his education in psychoanalysis.

We are left, however, with some open and important issues regarding this apparent welcoming attitude of contemporary institutional psychoanalysis, especially in the United States. First, the flagship status of the APsaA gender and sexuality groups organized around Ralph Roughton´s initiatives (ROUGHTON, 2002), although encouraging open discussions and changes of attitudes, does it in quite a naïve flavor and in favor of a certain normative framing, even if it is the inverted, specular image of the former homophobic framing. Naïve because it seems to simplify the very complex mechanisms operating in prejudicial stances, leading Roughton to state, for example, that they “have already overcome discrimination. This part is finished” (ROUGHTON, 2002, p. 758). We suggest that there are still some fundamental questions to be asked before this statement can even be thought of: what kinds of gay candidates - or trans candidates - do the institutions favor? Would not be those who are fit under a heterosexist frame, married, i.e. capable of sustaining long term relationships, free from the “theaters of gay promiscuity” (BOLLAS, 1992, p. 148), cruising circuits or other not-so-intelligible sexual and bodily performances… alas, tamed former rebel sexualities and genders celebrating a not so open openness?

This critique should not, again, diminish the importance of opening the grounds to uprooting former bigoted consensuses and practices. But we do suggest that there are still institutional mechanisms that do not favor the radical politics of psychoanalysis, seeming to drive psychoanalytic transmission and its subjects to a kind of acritical subjection to silent norms and power structures, be it in the private day-to-day clinical practices, public expressions and identitarian conventions. These mechanisms should not in any way be seen as restricted to the IPA currents of psychoanalytical transmission, since the domestication/elimination of difference seems to be a ubiquitous kind of violence stemming even from those who were supposed to be endowed to refrain from it⁴ (BUTLER, 2005). Further research is necessary, in effect, for a broader and deepened understanding of the prolonging of the normative backcloth of the contemporary psychoanalytic scenario.

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• 2
  Magnus Hirschfeld, in fact, did not stay for long within the field of psychoanalysis, but his exit from Freudism is revealing of the homophobia that started to emerge in psychoanalytic institutions. In 1911, during the III Psychoanalysis Congress, in Weimar, in which he was greeted by Freud as the “Berlin authority in homosexuality” (MANCINI, 2010, p. 71), Hirschfeld hears insults from Carl Jung and his opposition to his presence among psychoanalysts, apparently for the fact of being homosexual, according to FALZEDER (2002). For a more detailed discussion on the subject, see Bulamah; Kupermann (2014).
• 3
  In Nazi Germany, psychoanalysis, or what was left of it, “was seen by the Nazis as the main form in viable rehabilitation" (TAMAGNE, 2006, p. 384) of gay men, being actively used by psychoanalysts associated to the German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy (DPG) in order to rescue the reproductive potential of men who were deemed ill. The effort for rehabilitation was quickly abandoned by the Nazis due to their insignificant results, what didn't prevent, as we've seen, other psychoanalysts from searching for a "cure".
• 4
  It should be noted that, although we have highlighted here the Lacanian critique to the conformist and adaptive trends of the major forms of institutional psychoanalysis, many Lacanians in the beginning of the XXI century expressed opinions as violent, bigoted and conservative as what used to be the target of Lacan´s attacks. Regarding these expressions, see Maya (2008) and Perelson (2006).

• Traduzido do português por Karla Isolda dos Santos Buss/Translated from Portuguese by Karla Isolda dos Santos Buss, Associação Alumni (tradutora e intérprete plena), São Paulo/SP, Brasil.
• 1
  Bolsista do CNPq - Brasil.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  Sep-Dec 2018

History

• Received
  19 Oct 2016
• Accepted
  05 Sept 2017