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As the founder of psychoanalysis, Freud entertained complex and inconsistent views about homosexuality. In a famous letter to the mother of a homosexual, he stated that homosexuality is neither a vice nor an illness (Freud, 1935). He spoke out against persecution of homosexual people and pointed out that many great men, among them Plato, Michelangelo, and Leonardo DaVinci, were homosexual. He also observed that it was generally not possible to change sexual orientation with psychoanalysis. In a letter to Ernest Jones, he affirmed the right of homosexual people to become psychoanalysts (Freud, 1921).
In other writings, however, he took a different stance that critics have suggested stemmed from a number of biases (Friedman, 1988; Lewes, 1988; ; Domenici and Lesser, 1995). For example, Freud based generalizations about all people on psychoanalytic case studies of individual patients. This led him to discuss “primitive” mental mechanisms found in “inverts” and to suggest that they compulsively fled from passionate relationships with people of the opposite sex (1905).
Freud's giftedness as a writer lent weight to ideas which, had they been expressed by someone of less stature, might not have been so influential. Most psychoanalysts, until quite recently, accepted that generalizations about human behavior could validly be based on psychoanalytic studies of a few individuals. Most seemed to agree with Freud's tendency to regard psychoanalysis as a tool that allowed clinicians to study the structure of the psyche in similar fashion as histologists used microscopes to observe the structure of single cells.
As many critics have pointed out, Freud also had a phallocentric anti-female bias. He felt that women were more “primitive” than men. He