Dr. Wood Replies

Professor Jonathan Goldberg has taken great pains to review my paper, “Evolutions of an Orientation Concerning the Nature of the Male Homosexualities” in detail and to spell out areas of agreement and especially those areas with which he disagrees or finds my views or discussions naive, misinformed, or limited. Since Professor Goldberg's comments are quite detailed, I shall try to respond to his individual points.

Professor Goldberg is indeed correct that the paper is more about me and my efforts to change than about my patients. That was my intent. I summarized a general statement of the development of the “protohomosexual” child from an earlier “classical” psychoanalytic viewpoint to establish a frame of reference. Such a formulation placed a major emphasis on the impact of a particular family constellation. In such formulations little was said about constitutional, hormonal, or genetic influences, though they were certainly implied in Freud's early writings. I tried to spell out my move from such a narrow position to indicate my recognition of recent psychological and biological research and the growing awareness that homosexual object choice is compatible with stable relationships, success in love and in work, and social acceptance.

Professor Goldberg criticizes me for not “repudiating” these formulations. I do not think such formulations are to be repudiated, but rather to be studied and assessed as to their relevance in each situation. What Professor Goldberg refers to as my “muddled attempts” are in fact my efforts to sort out how to think of developmental patterns that for some are not just socially “different” but also experienced by the growing child internally as conflictual, even independent, of social stigma. I do, indeed, contend that the family structure makes an enormous impact on the child in terms of sense of self, object-relating capacities, and the ability to express and modulate affects. I used the term skewed to indicate a difference that does no