| Village Idiot Join Date: May 2008 Location: Not In Sterling City Gender:  Posts: 610 Country:  Level up: 17%, 125 Points needed |  |  An Honest Study on Homosexuality Part II
He describes in detail the well-known research study he conducted in 1962, involving a 500-item questionnaire and 106 male homosexuals, with a comparison group of 100 male heterosexuals.
Mother of Homosexuals
He found a close-binding, intimate mother who tended to interfere with her son's assertiveness, and who tended to dislocate his relationship with the father, siblings, and peers. However, Dr. Bieber found that homosexuality can develop without the frequently occurring close-binding-intimate, mother-son bond.
Fathers
But the most significant finding was that of the detached father. "The father-son relationship was almost the diametrical opposite of that between mother and son. The paternal portrait was one of a father who was either detached or covertly or overtly hostile," he reported. While there was some variance in the mother-son relationship, Dr. Bieber reported,
"The father-son relationship, however, revealed uniformly an absence of loving, warm, constructive paternal attitudes and behavior. In my long experience, I have not found a single case where, in the developing years, a father had a kind, affectionate, and constructive relationship with the son who becomes homosexual. This has been an unvarying finding. It is my view, and I have so stated and written, that if a father has a kind, affectionate, and constructive relationship with his son, he will not produce a homosexual son, no matter what the mother is like." Dr. Bieber's study in fact found a continuity of poor relationships with males, beginning with the father, older brothers, and same-sex peers in childhood. He concludes, "The consistent history of unremitting fear of and hostility to other males throughout childhood has led me to conclude that male homosexuality is basically an adaptation to a disorder of a man's relationship with other men." Of the 106 homosexuals who started psychoanalytic therapy, 29 changed to exclusively heterosexuality, which represented 27 percent of the total sample.
Dr. Bieber discussed the issue of the definition of normality. Because homosexual fantasies and behavior are fear-based, he concluded, we cannot call them normal.
The New Diagnostic Criteria
The A.P.A. at that time had adopted a new set of criteria for defining psychological disorder. To be disordered, a condition must:
- regularly cause distress, or
- interfere with social effectiveness.
The Psychiatric Association pointed to the excellent occupational performance and good social adjustment of many homosexuals as evidence of the normalcy of homosexuality. But such factors do not, Dr. Bieber countered, exclude the presence of psychopathology. Psychopathology is not always accompanied by adjustment problems; therefore, the criteria are in reality, inadequate to identify a psychological disorder.
Dr. Bieber stated that psychopathology can be ego-syntonic and not cause distress; that social effectiveness--that is, the ability to maintain positive social relations and perform work effectively--may in fact coexist with psychopathology.
A task force was set up to study homosexuality, but the members chosen included not a single psychiatrist who held the view that homosexuality was not a normal adaptation. There followed riots at scientific meetings by gay activists who increased the pressure on the Psychiatric Association.
Will preventive therapy for homosexuality be prohibited, Dr. Bieber wondered, when homosexuality is normalized?
Furthermmore--is it the proper domain of psychiatry to remove diagnoses to eliminate prejudice?
Dr. Bieber pointed out that there were several other conditions in the DSM-II that did not fulfill the "distress and social disability" criteria: voyeurism, fetishism, sexual sadism, and masochism. A.P.A.'s Dr. Spitzer replied that these conditions should perhaps also be removed from the DSM-II -- and that if the sadists and fetishists were to organize as did the gay activists, they, too, might find their conditions normalized.
Summary
The factors that determined the decision of the APA to delete homosexuality from DSM-II were summarized as follows:
- Gay activists had a profound influence on psychiatric thinking.
- A sincere belief was held by liberal-minded and compassionate psychiatrists that listing homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder supported and reinforced prejudice against homosexuals. Removal of the term from the diagnostic manual was viewed as a humane, progressive act.
- There was an acceptance of new criteria to define psychiatric conditions. Only those disorders that caused a patient to suffer or that resulted in adjustment problems were thought to be appropriate for inclusion in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
|