Response

My view of homosexuality in current psychoanalytic theory, practice, and training, is just one of several important areas where my thinking has evolved from what I was taught when I trained as a candidate from 1967 to 1972. Then it was felt that one should not attempt to analyze a person who was taking or required psychiatric medication, anyone whom you had treated in psychotherapy, a patient who was not basically a symptom or character neurotic, nor homosexuals who were not conflicted about and also desired to change their sexual orientation. Through my own experience and growth as an analyst and the changing climate in psychoanalysis, my thinking about all of these areas of psychoanalytic practice has changed.

I was similarly reminded that when I was in training, I had the experience of listening to Muriel Gardner, one of my teachers, reminisce about her own experience when she was in her training analysis in the 1930s with Ruth Mack Brunswick. Then too, what was common and accepted practice in psychoanalysis has since changed so that some of the technical interventions from those earlier days would later be considered either as a countertransference enactment, a boundary violation, or a lack of appreciation of significant aspects of transference. For example, when Dr. Gardner mentioned during one of her analytic hours that she wanted to learn Russian, Dr. Brunswick said that she had another patient in treatment, who turned out to be Freud's famous Wolf Man patient, who was eager to earn extra money as a tutor, and then put Dr. Gardner in contact with him. Also, when Dr. Brunswick traveled by ship with her family to New York for her summer hiatus, Dr. Gardner took the same ship and continued to have her analytic sessions on the bed in Dr. Brunswick's stateroom.