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January 15, 1999
The American Psychoanalytic Association, which is emerging from decades of struggle among its members and with the public over homosexuality issues, held a public forum last month on the psychological and social roots of homophobia and whether psychoanalysis has contributed to this type of bias.
The panel at the December 18 forum, held in New York City in conjunction with the American Psychoanalytic Association's annual fall meeting, explored whether psychic causes have led inexorably to homophobia becoming an apparently normal and accepted attitude among the U.S population-a "permissible prejudice."
Panel members also explained ways in which they believe psychoanalysts could respond to bias against homosexuals.
The forum's organizers believed that this topic was particularly critical at this time in light of an FBI report released in November that found that 1,100 crimes were committed in 1997 against individuals who were targeted because of their sexual orientation, Leon Hoffman, M.D., chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association's Public Information Committee, told Psychiatric News. This was an 8 percent increase over the previous year. The forum is especially timely, he noted, since it follows by just a few months the well-publicized murder of Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard, who apparently was targeted because he was gay.
"A psychoanalytic frame of reference is very useful in trying to understand why it is difficult to achieve attitudinal change," Hoffman said. "People's attitudes toward themselves and others depend not just on conscious factors-what they believe or don't believe-but also on thoughts and feelings that are outside their conscious awareness."
Forum moderator Paul Lynch, M.D., an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, maintained that psychoanalysts, with their extensive knowledge of the workings of the unconscious and its effect on behavior, can play a crucial role in "weakening the grip of bias." Lynch was one of the first two openly gay candidates at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and is chair of the Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists' Committee on Psychoanalysis.
Unfortunately, homophobia is a particularly "intractable prejudice," Hoffman pointed out, because "it involves issues of sexual identity and sexual orientation-both issues concerning the body." Consequently, bigotry directed at gays and lesbians "may be a deeper phenomenon than either anti-Semitism or racism." He explained that "as a child grows, he or she learns about his or her body before learning about other people."
A psychoanalytic framework helps clinicians understand "why it is so difficult to achieve attitudinal change," Hoffman said. Concepts such as that people's attitudes toward themselves and others do not depend entirely on conscious factors play a role, as does the idea that homophobia derives in part from a heterosexual man's fear and anxiety about what his homosexual desires mean for his own sexuality, he noted.
Lynch pointed out, "It is easy to see homophobia in its extremes, but perhaps more important is. . .to understand the more pervasive, more subtle manifestations in ourselves and in our institutions."
Hoffman explained, "Psychologically, the homophobic activity represents externalization of the homophobe's self-hatred, of his hostility toward something that lies within himself."
The forum was also in part the latest of several steps, which have included an endorsement of the right of same-gender couples to marry, that the American Psychoanalytic Association has taken to distance itself from its long-held view that homosexuality is a pathology that has to be eliminated before a person can be considered mentally healthy.
Panel member Ralph Roughton, M.D., who is the past chair-and the first chair-of the American Psychoanalytic Assoc-iation's Committee on Issues of Homosexuality, apologized to the forum attendees for the association's history of hostility to the notion that homosexuals can lead healthy, productive lives.
"We were wrong. We caused pain. . . . We gave the public the image of psychoanalysts as homophobes," said Roughton, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in Atlanta. He described the "shame, degradation, depression, and confusion" that his own homosexuality caused him before he felt confident and secure enough to "come out" as a gay man.
Sociologist and psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow of the University of California, Berkeley, who has written extensively about gender and sexuality issues, emphasized that "permissible prejudices" are often the most pernicious, because to many otherwise well-meaning people, they seem "natural." On the individual level, bias against homosexuals "usually has a conscious rationalization," she said, "in terms of reasons for dislike, discrimination, or hatred: A man 'explains' his gay-bashing behavior as a reaction to having had a pass made at him; a senator invokes the Bible."
It is crucial that psychoanalysts not assume "that there is something special about or innate in homosexuality that makes it more likely to be subject to unthinking or permissible prejudice or to virulent violence," Chodorow said.
She added, "It is our absolute polarization of sexual orientation into a single homosexuality and a single heterosexuality that leads us not to notice the great variety of homosexualities and heterosexualities, the particularity of individual object choice and sexual fantasy."
With religious teachings sometimes accused of fanning the flames of homophobia in the U.S., panel organizers included the Reverend Peter Gomes, a chaplain at Harvard. An author and openly gay Baptist minister, Gomes condemned those who cite Scripture to justify their bias against gay men and lesbians. He emphasized that "the Bible does not create prejudice" and urged people to consider "tolerance for all sexuality as a gift from God."
The political arena was also represented in person and vicariously. In his opening remarks at the forum, New York City Comptroller Alan Hevesi told the attendees at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, "Bigotry is not only stupid, it leads to dangerous public policy and personal action." His office has been a key player in advancing the cause of equal rights for gays and lesbians in New York City.
One well-known scheduled speaker, U.S. Representative Barney Frank (D-Mass.), was occupied with impeachment proceedings in Washington, D.C., but sent a message praising the American Psychoanalytic Association for its efforts to "confront" its controversial past on this issue and work to eradicate this form of prejudice. Frank, one of Congress's three openly gay members, said he was "deeply grateful for [the psychoanalytic association's] efforts to combat this terrible prejudice, which, while diminished, still blights the lives of so many innocent people. . . ."
Lynch stressed his belief that "psychoanalysis, freed of its biases, remains the best available tool for exploring those parts of our lives for which there are no easy or apparent explanations." He hoped that with this forum, "psychoanalysis will now feed our understanding of the antigay prejudice that is in and around us all."