In these Pages …

Three years ago, in the pages of this journal, psychoanalyst Edwin C. Wood (1995) charted how his own attitudes toward homosexuality changed over decades. Our commentator on his essay, Jonathan Goldberg (1995), writing from the perspective of queer critical theory, effectively argued that Wood's attitudes had not changed nearly as much as Wood believed. In the current issue, Richard C. Friedman and Jennifer I. Downey take up Wood's theme, but ask more generally just what were the reasons for belief in the pathological model of homosexuality by American psychoanalysts in the three decades following the Second World War.

While agreeing with Goldberg and others, who regard psychoanalysis as having possessed a homophobic bias, Friedman and Downey argue that this bias arose from within a larger system of beliefs that deserves scrutiny. They show how this system of beliefs can be traced to the effectiveness of psychoanalytically oriented psychiatrists during the war years, the influx of European psychoanalysts to America, the rigid bureaucratization of American psychoanalysis, and—most significantly for the authors—a total, unquestioned reliance on the clinical case approach rather than on the scientific method as the means for advancing psychoanalysis. These factors had a stultifying impact on the field. Meanwhile, some of the same areas of concern to psychoanalysts were investigated by nonpsychoanalytic researchers or by psychoanalysts in nonpsychoanalytic settings. It was largely through the influence of these workers, according to Friedman and Downey, that underlying attitudes affecting clinical psychoanalysis would change—and then, only partially and incrementally. They contend this is most evident in attitudes among psychoanalysts about women, homosexuality, and psychopharmacology, attitudes that continue to remain hidebound within many psychoanalytic circles. Only through ongoing efforts to base its theories on empirically validated databases and other kinds of legi