THE HOMOSEXUAL AS SEEN BY THE MARRIAGE COUNSELOR

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When I talked with Mr. Brown he blamed his wife for his own lack of desire. To prove his point he told in detail of his exciting life prior to marriage. One found on careful questioning that the most meaningful relationship had been with an officer in Franco during the war. Like his wife, he had had occasional homosexual relationships with this one man, but afterwards his sex life had been purely heterosexual. The significant fact soomed to me to be that all of the women with whom he had had this joyous sex life had been extremely aggressive and experiencod women, with whom he needed merely to cooperate. too, had sampled an extra-marital relationship since his marriage just to prove to himself that he was adequate. Why does he not wish sex relations with his wife? Because it's so dull. She's just there. He must do all the work.

Ho,

With only this much of the case most of you who are psychologically oriented would conclude that here we havo two latent homosexual individuals trying to live on a heterosexual level. But do we have enough data for such an assumption? This is a Freudian conclusion, and for some reason Freudianism has made the deepest impression of all theories upon American society. It could be that since we are an affluent society, we can enjoy the indulgences of psychoanalysis. It may be that the Freudians have been the most active proselyters. Or it could be that Freudianism is one of the fow complete theorie s of personality in all its ramifications. Whatever the reason, the diagnosis in current psychological parlanco would be frigidity and impotence on the basis of latent homosexuality. The cure, of necessity, would be psychoanalysis which would aim either to cure them or to help them to live happily as homosexuals.

But whether the pracitioner recognizes or not that these are Freudian concepts, they have permeated professional thinking. Let me quote from a small magazine published by a pharmaceutical house (1) specifically for the education of physicians. The writer is a psychiatrist, the director of a division of psychosomatic obstetrics and gynecology in one of our best medical schools.

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Ho says: