You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Psychoanalytic writers, with but few exceptions, are pessimistic as to the possibility of curing homosexuality through psychoanalysis. This pessimism is based upon two statements of Freud and upon the evidently unfavorable therapeutic experiences of the pessimistic writers. To account for the unfavorable therapeutic results two statements of Freud are cited again and again. They date from the year 1920 and are contained in the paper, “On the Psychogenesis of a case of Female Homosexuality” ( “Über die Psychogenese eines Falles von weiblicher Homosexualität”, Gesammelte Schrijten, V, p. 342; Collected Works, ii, p. 230). The quotation follows:
“It is not for psychoanalysis to solve the problem of homosexuality. It must rest content with disclosing the psychical mechanisms that resulted in determination of the object-choice, and with tracing the paths leading from them to the instinctual basis of the disposition. There its work ends, and it leaves the rest to biological research.”
This point has hitherto never been challenged by any analyst; on this there is unanimity. On the other hand, doubt has been raised in individual cases in regard to another remark of Freud's, as follows ( Gesammelte Schrijten, V, pp. 317-18; Collected Works, ii, pp. 207-8):
“… in general, to undertake to convert a fully developed homosexual into a heterosexual is not much more promising than to do the reverse, only that for good practical reasons the latter is never attempted.
“In actual numbers the successes achieved by psychoanalytic treatment of the various forms of homosexuality, which, to be sure, are manifold, are not very striking. As a rule, the homosexual is not able to give up the object of his pleasure, and one cannot convince him that if he changed to the other object he would find again the pleasure that he has