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Over the past ten years my interest in the nature and therapy of homosexuality has been set forth in a series of articles appearing in The American Journal of Psychoanalysis.1 To discuss the use of dreams in this therapy, let me first recount briefly the basic premises of my understanding of homosexuality, as well as the nature of the dream process. Then I will turn to the actual use of the dream in the therapy of homosexuality — that is, the significance of the initial dream as a diagnostic aid, the dream as an indicator of progress or retrogression in therapy, and finally, just before the termination of therapy, the dream as a prognostic index of the resolution of the homosexuality.
In “Reflections on the Nature of Homosexuality” I considered homosexuality an illness with surface manifestations that are sexual but with roots relating to the problems of gender identity. In this paper I explained my conclusion that the homosexual ritual is essentially a reparative process by which the homosexual male or female attempts to mitigate his or her deep feeling of inadequacy through fusion or incorporation with another person of the same gender. By this maneuver the individual strives to integrate those qualities or attributes that he feels are lacking in himself, but which he perceives in a real or fantasied manner in his partner.
My contention is that homosexuality starts early in life and is a consequence, in the male, of an unduly close relationship with the mother and the presence of a predominantly emotionally detached father. This results in the child's inadequate gender image of itself. For the lesbian, the process is no different. Here, the failure of the girl child to form a sound indentification with an appropriate female results in deep fears and doubts about her femininity. Accordingly she shuns men, particularly in an emotional relationship, because she is basically convinced that she is an inadequate female.
In a later article on “Evolution of Gender Identity”