T
Thorolfr
Guest
One thing that people might think is that these writings from the 1950s and 1960s are flawed. One of the most influential books on homosexuality from this period was Irving Bieber’s Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals from 1962. Writing in 1988 in The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality, Kenneth Lewes stated that Bieber’s book was full of methodological errors. According to Wikipedia’s summary of what Lewes had to say:Doctors, meaning psychiatrists, were the people you went to with any problem relating to mental health, including homosexuality. Those doctors, at the time, had decades of experience dealing with homosexual persons. It’s as if none of their writing survived the 1950s and 1960s. Which is false. So if the police or private citizens read these accounts, what were they supposed to think? That these doctors were not doing their best?
Also, a lot of what Irving Bieber had to say on homosexuality is based on issues concerning Freud’s theory of an Oedipus Complex, and I think that this theory of an Oedipus Complex has fallen out of favor among most psychologists so that they wouldn’t use it as any sort of explanation for homosexuality.In his view, the most important error is the sample [used by Bieber], which consisted of patients in analytic therapy. Since these subjects had been preselected for psychopathology, the question of the emotional disturbance of the homosexual population at large could not be addressed. Bieber diagnosed the sample as follows: 28 were schizophrenic, 31 were neurotic, and 42 character disordered. While similar proportions obtained in the control group (although only eighteen percent of the controls were diagnosed as schizophrenic), Bieber’s comparison in effect involves two groups of moderately to severely disturbed males. Of the homosexual sample, 90% were “eager to conceal” their sexual orientation and 64% wanted their homosexuality “cured”. Bieber and his colleagues ignored the difficulties of obtaining a “normal” homosexual sample, which had been pointed out by Kinsey and other writers, and while this omission was criticized at length, Bieber did not accept the objection.
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