Homosexuality: Psychoanalytic Therapy

Rating:
Summary: Anachronistic
Review: Despite Socarides' well meaning desire to help the "homosexual" and many years of experience doing just that, his perspective is one that is long out of date and not accepted by the psychological community.

Socarides was one of the only psychologists to battle against the removal of homosexuality from the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistics Manual: the APA's guide to diagnosis) in 1973. There is nothing in this book that has not been incontravertably contradicted---both his desciptions of the origins of homosexuality, and the "cures". In fact, more than 50 academic publishers rejected this manuascript because its content was not scientifically acceptable even in the late '70s. Eventually, it was published privately.

I'm surprised to see it still in print.

Rating:
Summary: The case for reparative therapy
Review: Essentially all of psychoanalysis to the modern day derives from Freud's original study of the Oedipal crisis. Now psychoanalyst Charles Socarides MD, has extended psychoanalysis into a new realm, i.e., that of the pre-oedipal crisis, left only vaguely defined by Freud. Socarides has fully delineated the fundamental role of pre-oedipal crisis in homosexuality, as well as its previously uncharted relationship to the Oedipal crisis.

Socarides' thesis is that the intensely erotic, visual attraction in homosexuality is self-reparative of a pre-oedipal(maternal) separation/individuation crisis and splitting of ego and object, and serves the function of creating a substitute choice for a pathologically rejecting, or intrusive mother.

Socarides' theory explains, directly and explicitly, why male reparative homosexuals may continue to lack visual erotic attraction to females even after they successfully achieve full heterosexuality in therapy, since the perversion itself, namely homosexuality, originally served a self-reparative function, in a pre-oedipal, erotic/competitive splitting of the maternal imago into a pre-visual, sentient/sensual mother on the one hand, versus an intensely visual, idealized maternal substitute on the other.

According to Socarides, a homosexual lover is simply an idealized masculine, or feminine "twin" or "mirror", that repairs a defective or incomplete sense of one's own gender identity. The love object is intensely visual/sexualized precisely because it is both erotically competitive with, and intensely revenge-driven against a mother, or other primary caretaker, who was either too withholding, or too engulfing. However, at best, the perversion can only achieve a problematic compromise separation, and only a precarious sense of self-identity, since the perversion is always a regressive return to the precise point of pre-oedipal(maternal) separation/individuation crisis and fixation, according to Socarides.

Rating:
Summary: Terrible Book
Review: This book was written with a clear polictical, non-scientific agenda in mind. This book is an embarrazment to the mental health profession. The sad thing is, the author is still writing and publishing his personal, political views as science. Note, all his books are self-publshed because no legitimate publishing house will touch his material.