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The interplay of social change and psychoanalytic understanding is demonstrated by how we have dealt with homosexuality, more than by any other issue—more, even, than female psychology. For example, Freud was a leading voice against the repressive forces of his day, in particular against laws that criminalized homosexual behavior (1930). In a newspaper interview in 1903, he stated categorically, “Homosexual persons are not sick.” By the 1980s, however, the American Psychoanalytic Association had become the most conservative and tradition-bound of the mental health organizations, our theories and our attitudes reflecting the thinking of decades past. Social change had left us far behind.
Consider, for example, the early homophile organizations, the Stonewall uprising that catalyzed the modern gay rights movement, the growing acceptance of gay men and lesbians in mainstream culture in the 1980s, the formation of a cohesive gay community to fight the AIDS crisis, and the rise in academia of gay and lesbian studies. Nothing in our professional literature nor any discussions at our national meetings would indicate an awareness of this social upheaval as a progressive current.
In the bitter 1973 fight over removing homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association's list of diagnosable disorders, the American Psychoanalytic Association took no official position. Nevertheless, a petition signed by many of our members, and a letter from our president urging the APA leadership to postpone any decision, left little doubt that “the psychoanalysts” opposed this change (Bayer, 1987).
Was it rigid adherence to our theories of neutrality and psychic reality, designed to prevent our clinical work from being too easily swayed by external reality, that kept us uninvolved and ignorant of social change? Were we too self-important