Kenneth Lewes

The subject of homosexuality has occupied a central place in psychoanalytic
thinking from the beginning. Although psychoanalysis has never absolutely de-
cided what causes homosexuality--whether homosexuality is an emotional dis-
turbance or even just what homosexuality really is--psychoanalytic theoreticians
and clinicians have nevertheless made important contributions to such issues.
The debates swirling around these complex questions continue to this day and
have a history of their own, which, though long and convoluted, can be sum-
marized in a few sentences. Freud never concluded whether homosexuality was
a pathological condition or merely represented a variant of the many forms that
mature adult sexuality might assume. But by the 1930s, psychoanalysts generally
thought it was an emotional disturbance--either a perversion (classified with
fetishism, sadism, pedophilia, and the like) or a stunting and blockage of a more
"natural" heterosexuality. This view continued unchallenged until the 1970s,
when analytically oriented clinicians again began to think of it as a variant. This
is now the official position of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, but some,
perhaps many, psychoanalysts still adhere to the older, more conservative view
of it as pathology ( Lewes 1988). Recently, the most powerful argument for
considering homosexuality an entirely "natural" condition comes from biolo-
gists, who argue for genetic, neurologic, or hormonal causes for that orientation.
It is not yet clear how such arguments will ultimately affect psychoanalytic
theories of homosexuality, but the relation between biological and psychoana-

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