Toward a Further Understanding of Homosexual Men

LEAVY'S PAPER, "MALE HOMOSEXUALITY RECONSIDERED," began with the observation that most psychoanalytic studies regard homosexuality as a developmental deviation, originating in a pathological context that can be reconstructed in the transference. Leavy reviewed Freud's ideas about the negative Oedipus complex and noted that subsequently: "The centrality of the oedipal development yielded to the finding of more and more preoedipal elements, the oedipal serving, as so often in psychopathological development, as a decisive turning point, in which precursor states become definitively summated." Many analysts assume that preoedipal influences also lead to global psychopathology, such as narcissistic or prepsychotic character structure. These analysts believe that homosexual men suffer from such pathology.

Leavy noted that the accepted models of homosexuality assume that heterosexuality "being normative for reproductive life, is generally normative too." Homosexuality is conceptualized as the effect of a failed heterosexuality. He suggested that the commonly held view that heterosexuality is normal would be understandably congenial to heterosexual analysts "for whom personally the kind of sexual experience homosexuals claim to enjoy would be grotesque as well as unsatisfying. The analyst along with the layman might see in the reported forms of homosexual union only frustrated mimicking of the intercourse 'normally' practiced by men with women. Consequently, since both partners are of the same sex, one at least must be engaging in an alien activity and holding to a spurious representation of himself. This judgment, springing uncritically from a heterosexual position, does not suddenly become neutral when the analyst reports confirmatory data from the patient's associations; selective emphasis may skew the data toward the side of the symptomatic, and away from