your three letters of April 20, June 16, and June 23, 1959. The Editor and I feel that your first letter while filled with intimate personal details having much meaning for the Psychiatrist and of emotional therapeutic catharsis value for you, is entirely too long and filled with too many private details to be reprinted in this column. I congratulate you on your insight into your own problem and willingness to share your experiences with the readers of ONE. Even though we cannot print all of the letters we receive, we realize that the act of writing them has value in releasing emotional tensions of the writers. We are deeply concerned over the writers and their problems for we realize the needs of you "lonely ones" to let off steam to people who will understand. That is part of the function of our column, "T.U." We assume from the fact that you wrote a second and third letter that you are sincere and that you have already benefitted from writing the first letter, and that you were not discouraged when we did not acknowledge it immediately. We find your second letter better suited to the pose of this column and are reprinting it herewith. Please bear in mind that our answers are not directed toward any one letter writer but must be of interest to a wide range of readers who have similar problems; for, as you imply through this column we offer a type of group therapy rather than an individual consultation service. Thus, as you seem to realize, your letters may be inspirations to some other souls seeking answers to their own problems.

pur-

You have courageously admitted to having experienced four "nervous breakdowns" within the past twelve years. This is just another way of saying that you have been subject to mental illness. However, if you can come to a better understanding of yourself, you can become a much

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wiser and more integrated individual because of the insights you have gained from this involuntary exploration of your unconscious through the mental illness. As the late Dr. Jacob Kissanin, Founder of the Mt. Zion Psychiatric Clinic in San Francisco has said: "Mental illness is a step in integration." I, too, find that many of my patients are stronger and wiser after they have gone through a mental illness; I encourage them to use the late Dr. Alfred Adler's principle of "organ inferiority," that is, if a person will make a special study of his own weak spots or handicaps, he can convert liabilities into assets. While I do not belong to the school of thought sponsored by Dr. Edmund Bergler and Dr. Albert Ellis which holds that homosexuality is some sort of disease, I do realize that homophiles are subject to neuroses and other forms of mental illness if they do not learn to clean out conflicts in their unconscious, accept themselves and make use of whatever individual abilities they may have. I do not claim (as I have often been misquoted) that all homophiles are talented, but I do maintain that like every type of human being they have special things they can do well and I encourage them to make use of any little gift they may have if it is only the ability to cry well. I have had many talented homophiles come to me who are now making good in the world. Yet I am fully aware that there are many criminal, confused and mentally ill homosexuals.

Mental illness is a subject which will require many columns in "T.U." in order to give some basic ideas of its causes and treatment. A few of the causes for the neuroses and other forms of mental illness experienced by homophiles, some of which you mention in your letters are: 1—Trying to direct one's life according to the social code rather than following

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