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For a number of decades, the history of psychoanalysis has been a special interest of mine. In 1968, I coauthored a book entitled The Revolution of Psychoanalytic Technique and in 2000, a book entitled The Hartmann Era. To my knowledge, I am the only person teaching a course in the history of psychoanalysis within an academic frame of reference (New York University postdoctoral program in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy). I would like to participate in this discussion of homosexuality and psychoanalysis with a historical perspective in mind. One of the questions that has been of special interest to me is the question to what extent psychoanalysis develops from within by its own inner logic of development and to what extent it is responding to forces acting upon it from the outside world. Three such outside forces seemed to me of special significance: The pharmacological revolution and its impact, the feminist movement and its influence, and the effect of the gay liberation movement on the thinking of psychoanalysts about the nature of homosexuality.
The classical psychoanalytical position regarding homosexuality rests on the work of Karl Abraham (1924), who linked the stages of libidinal development with stages of object love. Human development, as Abraham saw it, went through six stages of development, beginning with the preambivalent oral phase and going through four ambivalent stages to end in a postambivalent capacity for genital love. In Abraham's table, the final genital phase was the sixth stage of libidinal development (p. 496). It corresponded to the highest stage that object love can reach and was labeled postambivalent. Almost ex definicio homosexuals were excluded from this highest stage of human development. The entire human development was conceptualized as aiming to reach this stage. Abraham's table was a great feat of organization and such feats of organization have a tendency to be cherished and held on to for a long time to come.