Hello again,
Perhaps the greatest misunderstanding regarding homosexuality flowed from the theories and interventions of Freudian psychoanalysts. Their ideas negatively influenced clinical efforts to help gay men for years. Gays have been misled by being encouraged to pursue wrong goals and the influence of analysts has continued even to the present.
Freud’s followers were particularly hampered by two things as they attempted to assist same-sex attracted men desiring change. First, their ability to comprehend homosexuality was limited by the fact of their own heterosexual psychosexual and psychosocial development. They could not understand why all men were not erotically attracted by the feminine attributes they found so arousing.
Second, because of this lack of understanding, Freud tried to explain homosexuality on the basis of Oedipal constructs. The Greek character, Oedipus, was raised apart from his family, only later to unwittingly kill his father and marry his mother. Freud theorized that an infant boy’s love for his mother led to fear of his father whom he viewed as a jealous competitor. Castration fears led him to renounce affection for his mother, which was generalized to rejection of women as sex-objects. This resulting inversion of their sexual instincts left only other males with whom to be sexual. Freudians also proposed that fellatio was tied to unresolved nursing needs. Clinically, cure was claimed when homosexual men had sex with women.
Contrary to these psychoanalytic assumptions, much evidence suggests that same-sex attraction is not an adult issue but a matter of children’s disordered development. It is not an opposite sex issue, but a same sex issue. Children’s failure to identify with their same-sex parent or peers leaves them with an insatiable urge for gender-role alignment. The real need is for social/emotional male connection, but homophobia discourages male children from honestly acknowledging their having eroticized these needs. Same-sex sexuality is a sensual bridge which symbolically connects role-estranged males to others of their gender. It will never meet the inner need for identity and belonging.
Same-sex social/emotional connections must be met before heterosexual feelings can develop. The task for straight helpers is not erotic, but rather an errand of unfeigned, genuine friendship.
Comments