Date: Mon, 15 Apr 1996 20:49:05 +0100
From: Bogdan Lesnik <bogdan.lesnik@guest.arnes.si>
Subject: Finnish psychoanalysts and WHO disease classification

I should not be too surprised that some traditionalist psychiatrists insist
that homosexuality be a disease, as they are a notoriously repressive lot.

Homosexuality was first labelled a disease by Krafft-Ebing (a psychiatrist,
of course) in 1886, in his book _Psychopathia sexualis_, and Thomas Szasz
had a perfect point in writing (_Sex by Prescription_, Syracuse Univ. Press
1990, p. 19):

"_Psychopathia Sexualis_ is full of falsehoods pretentiously presented as if
they were the fruits of hard-won scientific discoveries."

Psychoanalysts, however, have a different tradition. 

To be sure, Freud cannot be credited for an unquestionable attitude towards
sexuality. But one should do him justice (psychoanalysts should, if anybody)
and read him thoroughly. 

Freud made a political statement about homosexuality as early as in 1915.
That year, he added a footnote to a new edition of Three Essays On Sexuality
(Standard Edition, book VII, p. 145); the first paragraph reads as follows:

"Psycho-analytic research is most decidedly opposed to any attempt at
separating off homosexuals from the rest of mankind as a group of a special
character. By studying sexual excitations other than those that are
manifestly displayed, it has found that all human beings are capable of
making a homosexual object-choice and have in fact made one in their
unconscious. Indeed, libidinal attachments to persons of the same sex play
no less a part as factors in normal mental life, and a greater part as a
motive force for illness, than do similar attachments to the opposite sex.
On the contrary, psycho-analysis considers that a choice of an object
independently of its sex - freedom to range equally over male and female
objects - as it is found in childhood, in primitive states of society and
early periods of history, is the original basis from which, as a result of
restriction in one direction or the other, both the normal and the inverted
types develop. Thus from the point of view of psycho-analysis the exclusive
sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs
elucidating and is not a self-evident fact based upon an attraction that is
ultimately of a chemical nature."

Leaving whatever objections one could make to Freud's choice of terms (to
speak of "normal" vs. "inverted" type is rather contradicting the essential
idea of the note), he made it quite clear that he opposed to the view that
homosexuality is a pathological condition, at least any more than
heterosexuality is.

I'm not sure this will work as an argument against hard-headed
"traditionalist" psychoanalysts' views in Finland or anywhere, but it's
worth trying. The problem is, of course, that "traditionalists" do not
usually study their sources but merely maintain traditional prejudices and
stereotypes.

Bogdan Lesnik