C. Socarides, Psychiatrist, Dies at 83
December 28, 2005, Wednesday
Dr. Charles W. Socarides, a well-known psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who maintained publicly, long after it was considered scientifically acceptable to do so, that homosexuality was a condition amenable to treatment and even to conversion to heterosexuality, died on Sunday at Metropolitan Hospital Center in New York.
Note the words “scientifically acceptable.”
Here’s the opening of an interesting piece written by Dr. Socarides in 1995, with the title and short bio that appears at the site linked below. It’s worth reading.C
How America Went Gay
by Charles W. Socarides, M.D.
Charles W. Socarides, M.D., is clinical professor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Center in New York. He is president of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, and author of Homosexuality: A Freedom Too Far (Adam Margrave Books, Phoenix, Arizona).
For more than 20 years, I and a few of my colleagues in the field of psychoanalysis have felt like an embattled minority, because we have continued to insist, against today’s conventional wisdom, that gays aren’t born that way. We know that obligatory homosexuals are caught up in unconscious adaptations to early childhood abuse and neglect and that, with insight into their earliest beginnings, they can change. This “adaptation” I speak of is a polite term for men going through the motions of mating not with the opposite sex but with one another.
For most of this century, most of us in the helping professions considered this behavior aberrant. Not only was it “off the track”; the people caught up in it were suffering, which is why we called it a pathology. We had patients, early in their therapy, who would seek out one sex partner after another-total strangers-on a single night, then come limping into our offices the next day to tell us how they were hurting themselves. Since we were in the business of helping people learn how not to keep hurting themselves, many of us thought we were quietly doing God’s work.
Now, in the opinion of those who make up the so-called cultural elite, our view is “out of date.” The elite say we hurt people more than we help them, and that we belong in one of the century’s dustbins. They have managed to sell this idea to a great many Americans, thereby making homosexuality fashionable and raising formerly aberrant behavior to the status of an “alternate lifestyle.”
Click here to read the entire article.
Click here to read a review of Dr. Socarides’ book “Homosexuality: A Freedom Too Far.”
