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 87 october 31, 1998 Our insistent yearnings ought not to be the stuff of glib psychiatric pronouncements. W e have been told lately, in the name of religion, that homosexuals are sinners, and that if they only accepted that notion, they would be entitled to a new moral and theological status. They would be among the saved, which means, presumably, those who have acknowledged their wrongdoing and thereby returned to the Lord’s fold. What are the rest of us to make of this new outburst of spiritual accusation directed at thousands, even millions, whose desires of heart and mind have been turned into a matter of errant choice, if not outright evil in the biblical sense? What are we to make of these claims to be able to “cure” homosexual people? When Freud, the first psychoanalyst, was asked by the mother of a homosexual man what was proper for her to feel and think about her son and what his clinical prospects might be, the great explorer of the human mind, of our passions and preferences (who at the time was much criticized by various religious leaders) responded with humility and compassion —humility by making no claim to be able to reverse out of hand what he knew to be a complex life already substantially set in its ways; 88  compassion out of a doctor’s quiet decency and a scientist’s interest in understanding and responding to another human being. Who can say how such an attitude on the part of a brilliant psychological healer would be regarded today by those who claim to know so much about this aspect of our human feeling, an aspect so much a part of many lives, as those of us who work in schools and colleges, in clinics of various kinds, well know? Like others of my profession, I have “worked with” men and women who came to see me out of anxiety and worry; and I have tried hard to learn from them about their lives, dreams, and attachments, their interests and preoccupations. Again and again I hear the word “homosexual” used or various kinds of heterosexuality mentioned with acceptance or regret, fearful panic or apprehension and, not rarely, with the same alarmed curiosity that prompts so many individuals these days to visit a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst to ask, “How did I become this person I know in my heart I’ve become (in thought, in desire, in deed), and what might I do to make myself quite another kind of person?” To be sure, few in our time would doubt that self-reflection and self-knowledge, helped by an informed, experienced, and conscientious psychological clinician, are often remarkably valuable instruments of personal change. Those who once felt “driven,” relentlessly drawn to ideas and actions they themselves criticized or condemned, can begin to note that their attitudes have become somewhat different and their feelings quite otherwise in the range and direction of desire. Still, as with any of us, what we find interesting and attractive tells a lot about how we have been brought up, who our parents were, what we learned from them and about them. Hence the power of our particular interests in other people. Thisisallnowunsurprisingandpartofreceivedknowledge.YetFreud  89 knew well that human complexity and ambiguity, our moral makeup and insistent yearnings toward certain other persons, ought not to be the stuff of quick psychological conclusions and glib psychiatric pronouncements. Much less should it be subject to the denunciatory and exclusionary excesses of those who are ready to rid themselves of others in a body politic. Hewentsofar(anindicationofhisgenerous,unafraidhumanism,putting manyofusinthesamebasket,asitwere)thatheevenspokeofhomosexual feeling as a passing part of most everyone’s psychological development. We have mothers and fathers; we are daughters or sons, and, of course, we grow up intimately connected to people of the same sex. Hence the numerous “variations on a theme,” as the expression goes: the manner in which we come to feel stirred or scared with regard to sex or to one or another kind of person. To fly in the face of such clinical awareness, of generations of stories told in offices to psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts, who want to attend to and learn from their patients, is to retreat sadly and with an obvious, eager insistence from what is now clinically informed rationality. What Freud long ago knew, we are entitled to know. How ironic, then, that today our homosexuals are called “sinners” and are told to repent, even as...

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