by Charles W. Socarides, M.D., (1922-2005) (clinical
professor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore Medical Center in New York).
Excuse me. Gay is not good. Gay is not decidedly free. How
do I know this? For more than 40 years, I have been in solidarity with hundreds
of homosexuals, my patients, and I have spent most of my professional life
engaged in a kind of "pastoral care" on their behalf.
But I do not help them by telling them they are O.K. when
they are not O.K.
Nor do I endorse their "new claim to self-definition and
self-respect."
In point of fact, many of my patients had character; they
had an education; they were respected ad men and actuaries and actors. But they
were still in pain-for one reason and one reason alone. They were caught up in
this mysterious compulsion to have sex with other men. They were not free. They
were not happy. And they wanted to see if they could change.
Over the years, I found that those of my patients who really
wanted to change could do so, by attaining the insight that comes with a good
psychoanalysis. Others found other therapies that helped them get to the bottom
of their compulsions, all of which involved high motivation and hard work.
Difficult as their therapeutic trips were, hundreds and thousands of homosexuals
changed their ways. Many of my own formerly homosexual patients-about a third
of them-are married today and happily so, with children. One-third may not
sound like a very good average. But it is just about the same success rate you
will find at the best treatment centers for alcoholics, like Hazelden in
Minnesota and the Betty Ford Clinic in California.
Another third of my patients remain homosexual but not part
of the gay scene. Now, after therapy, they still have same-sex sex, but they
have more control over their impulses because now they understand the roots of
their need for same-sex sex. Some of these are even beginning to turn on to the
opposite sex. I add this third to my own success rate-so that I can tell people
in all honesty that my batting average is .667 out of more than a thousand
"at bats."
Of course, I could bat .997 if I told all my patients in
pain that their homosexuality was "a special call" and "a
liberation." That would endear me to everyone, but it would not help them.
It would be a lie-despite recent pieces of pseudo-science bolstering the
fantasy that gays are "born that way."
The media put its immediate blessing on this
"research," but we were oversold. Now we are getting reports, even in
such gay publications as The Journal of Homosexuality, that the gay-gene
studies and the gay-brain studies do not stand up to critical analysis. (The
author of one so-called "gay-gene theory" is under investigation by
the National Institutes of Health for scientific fraud.)
CAUSES OF HOMOSEXUAL DISORDER
I was not surprised to hear this. My long clinical
experience and a sizable body of psychoanalysis research tell me that most
[homosexuals]are reacting, at an unconscious level, to something amiss with
their earliest upbringing- over-controlling mothers and abdicating fathers.
Through long observation I have also learned that the supposedly liberated
homosexual is never really free. In his multiple, same-sex adventures, even the
most effeminate gay was looking to incorporate the manhood of others, because
he was in a compulsive, never-ending search for the masculinity that was never
allowed to build and grow in early childhood...
Once my patients have achieved an insight into these
dynamics-and realized there is no moral fault involved in their longtime and
mysterious need-they have moved rather quickly on the road to recovery. Their
consequent gratitude to me is overwhelming. And why shouldn't it be? They were
formerly caught up in compulsions they could not understand, compulsions they could
not control. Now they are in charge of their own lives.
Their former promiscuity may have looked a lot like
"liberation." But it was not true freedom. It was a kind of slavery.
And it was not a lifestyle. With the onset of AIDS, as the playwright and gay
militant Larry Kramer said in a 1993 interview, it turned out to be a death
style. I have had some patients tell me, "Doctor, if I weren't in therapy,
I'd be dead."
[ In addition, child and youth sexual abuse is a major cause
of homosexuality. A 1992 study of 1000 homosexuals found that 37% had been
abused sexually by an older male. Socarides, Homosexuality: A Freedom Too Far ,
p. 88)
IN WAR, FIRST CASUALTY IS TRUTH
Testimonials from my recovered patients make me feel my work
is worthwhile-despite regular demands from the gay rights community for my
silence. What would they have me do? Pack my bags, find a new profession, lock
up a lifetime of research and analysis, hide my truth under a bushel? It is not
my psychoanalytic duty to tell people they are marvelous when they are out of
control, much less ask disingenuous rhetorical questions like, "What kind
of God would afflict people with an 'objective disorder' in the disposition of
their hearts?"
Giving God the credit for their gayness is a persistent
refrain in much gay literature today, and I am saddened to see people of
evident good will become unwitting parties to the blasphemy. Gays ascribe their
condition to God, but he should not have to take that rap, any more than he
should be blamed for the existence of other man-made maladies-like war, for
instance, which has proven to be very unhealthy for humans and for all other
living things. God does not make war. Men do.
And, when homosexuality takes on all the aspects of a
political movement, it, too, becomes a war, the kind of war in which the first
casualty is truth, and the spoils turn out to be our own children. An
exaggeration? Well, what are we to think when militant homosexuals seek to
lower the age of consensual sexual intercourse between homosexual men and young
boys to the age of 14 (as they did in Hawaii in 1993) or 16 (as they tried to
do in England in 1994)? In the Washington March for Gay Pride in 1993, they chanted,
"We're here. We're queer. And we're coming after your children."
What more do we need to know?
-----
Note: Does
Homosexuality Threaten Society? Socarides - "Yes, and the most troubling
thing to me is that we don't know it yet. The American public doesn't
understand.For more than 40 years the most basic institution in society has een
under assault, while the nation's traditional watch dog, the press, has been
largely unconcerned...Sexual freedoms don't give anyone the permission to
destroy society. And that's what the gay rights movement is doing, destroying
society, in the name of freedom, a fictive freedom." (Homosexuality: A
Freedom Too Far, pp.285-6)
------- - See more at:
http://henrymakow.com/2013/03/Excuse-Me-Gay-is-Not-Good%20%20.html#sthash.7aiGjCJu.dpuf
Excuse Me, Gay is Not Good
March 11, 2013
Charles W. Socarides, M.D., (1922-2005) was clinical professor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Montefiore
Medical Center in New York. Over 40 years, he treated hundreds of gays and helped about 33% return to heterosexuality.
This is the second part of "How America Went Gay" the classic 1995 essay
by Charles Socarides, the psychiatrist who pioneered the treatment of homosexuality.
Here he explains the root causes of homosexuality which are anything but normal.
[My patients] were caught up in this mysterious compulsion to have sex with other men. They were not free. They were not happy. And they wanted to see if they could change.
Part One is here
by Charles Socarides M.D.
(Edited & Abridged by henrymakow.com)
Excuse me. Gay is not good. Gay is not decidedly free. How do I know this? For more than 40 years, I have been in solidarity with hundreds of homosexuals, my patients, and I have spent most of my professional life engaged in a kind of "pastoral care" on their behalf.
But I do not help them by telling them they are O.K. when they are not O.K.
Nor do I endorse their "new claim to self-definition and self-respect."
Tell me: Have we dumped the idea
that a man's self-esteem comes from something inside himself (sometimes
called character) and from having a good education, a good job and a
good family-and replaced that notion with this, that he has an affinity
to love (and have sex with) other men?In point of fact, many of my patients had character; they had an education; they were respected ad men and actuaries and actors. But they were still in pain-for one reason and one reason alone. They were caught up in this mysterious compulsion to have sex with other men. They were not free. They were not happy. And they wanted to see if they could change.
Over the years, I found that those of my patients who really wanted to change could do so, by attaining the insight that comes with a good psychoanalysis. Others found other therapies that helped them get to the bottom of their compulsions, all of which involved high motivation and hard work. Difficult as their therapeutic trips were, hundreds and thousands of homosexuals changed their ways. Many of my own formerly homosexual patients-about a third of them-are married today and happily so, with children. One-third may not sound like a very good average. But it is just about the same success rate you will find at the best treatment centers for alcoholics, like Hazelden in Minnesota and the Betty Ford Clinic in California.
Another third of my patients remain homosexual but not part of the gay scene. Now, after therapy, they still have same-sex sex, but they have more control over their impulses because now they understand the roots of their need for same-sex sex. Some of these are even beginning to turn on to the opposite sex. I add this third to my own success rate-so that I can tell people in all honesty that my batting average is .667 out of more than a thousand "at bats."
Of course, I could bat .997 if I told all my patients in pain that their homosexuality was "a special call" and "a liberation." That would endear me to everyone, but it would not help them. It would be a lie-despite recent pieces of pseudo-science bolstering the fantasy that gays are "born that way."
The media put its immediate blessing on this "research," but we were oversold. Now we are getting reports, even in such gay publications as The Journal of Homosexuality, that the gay-gene studies and the gay-brain studies do not stand up to critical analysis. (The author of one so-called "gay-gene theory" is under investigation by the National Institutes of Health for scientific fraud.)
CAUSES OF HOMOSEXUAL DISORDER
I was not surprised to hear this. My long clinical experience and a sizable body of psychoanalysis research tell me that most [homosexuals]are reacting, at an unconscious level, to something amiss with their earliest upbringing- over-controlling mothers and abdicating fathers. Through long observation I have also learned that the supposedly liberated homosexual is never really free. In his multiple, same-sex adventures, even the most effeminate gay was looking to incorporate the manhood of others, because he was in a compulsive, never-ending search for the masculinity that was never allowed to build and grow in early childhood...
Once my patients have achieved an insight into these dynamics-and realized there is no moral fault involved in their longtime and mysterious need-they have moved rather quickly on the road to recovery. Their consequent gratitude to me is overwhelming. And why shouldn't it be? They were formerly caught up in compulsions they could not understand, compulsions they could not control. Now they are in charge of their own lives.
Their former promiscuity may have looked a lot like "liberation." But it was not true freedom. It was a kind of slavery. And it was not a lifestyle. With the onset of AIDS, as the playwright and gay militant Larry Kramer said in a 1993 interview, it turned out to be a death style. I have had some patients tell me, "Doctor, if I weren't in therapy, I'd be dead."
[ In addition, child and youth sexual abuse is a major cause of homosexuality. A 1992 study of 1000 homosexuals found that 37% had been abused sexually by an older male. Socarides, Homosexuality: A Freedom Too Far , p. 88)
IN WAR, FIRST CASUALTY IS TRUTH
Testimonials from my recovered patients make me feel my work is worthwhile-despite regular demands from the gay rights community for my silence. What would they have me do? Pack my bags, find a new profession, lock up a lifetime of research and analysis, hide my truth under a bushel? It is not my psychoanalytic duty to tell people they are marvelous when they are out of control, much less ask disingenuous rhetorical questions like, "What kind of God would afflict people with an 'objective disorder' in the disposition of their hearts?"
Giving God the credit for their gayness is a persistent refrain in much gay literature today, and I am saddened to see people of evident good will become unwitting parties to the blasphemy. Gays ascribe their condition to God, but he should not have to take that rap, any more than he should be blamed for the existence of other man-made maladies-like war, for instance, which has proven to be very unhealthy for humans and for all other living things. God does not make war. Men do.
And, when homosexuality takes on all the aspects of a political movement, it, too, becomes a war, the kind of war in which the first casualty is truth, and the spoils turn out to be our own children. An exaggeration? Well, what are we to think when militant homosexuals seek to lower the age of consensual sexual intercourse between homosexual men and young boys to the age of 14 (as they did in Hawaii in 1993) or 16 (as they tried to do in England in 1994)? In the Washington March for Gay Pride in 1993, they chanted, "We're here. We're queer. And we're coming after your children."
What more do we need to know?
-----Note: Does Homosexuality Threaten Society? Socarides - "Yes, and the most troubli9ng thing to me is that we don't know it yet. The American public doesn't understand.For more than 40 years the most basic institution in society has een under assault, while the nation's traditional watch dog, the press, has been largely unconcerned...Sexual freedoms don't give anyone the permission to destroy society. And that's what the gay rights movement is doing, , destroying society, in the name of freedom, a fictive freedom." (Homosexuality: A Freedom Too Far, pp.285-6) ------- - See more at: http://henrymakow.com/2013/03/Excuse-Me-Gay-is-Not-Good%20%20.html#sthash.7aiGjCJu.dpuf