Homophobia has existed within Western societies for centuries, painting gay men as criminals, deviants, and sinners. However, it was not until the turn of the 20th century that homophobia started to run rampant within the field of medicine on the basis of pseudoscientific arguments. Much of this started with the birth of the field of psychoanalysis, which emerged due to Sigmund Freud’s research on human psychology. His writings sought to understand the foundations of the human psyche where he explored the unconscious motivations which develop due to life’s experiences.1 Much of his work focuses on the emotional attitudes held towards parents and the ways in which humans cope with love and loss.1 However, Freud’s work did not transfer well into the post-World War I and II period. The societal pressure for men to uphold traditional masculinity fueled anti-LGBTQ(Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual, Queer) beliefs. Freud’s research into the causes of homosexuality generated arguments that allowed physicians to characterize nonheterosexual identities as mental disorders. Within the writings of Freud, the fields of psychoanalysis and psychology justified their hostility towards LGBTQ people using a “scientific” basis throughout the 20th century, leading to the widespread popularity of conversion therapies. Freud’s theories on human sexuality utilize harmful rhetoric leaving room for its misuse and misinterpretation. In one of Freud’s books on sexuality entitled, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” he explores the causes of human attraction. In his first essay, “The Sexual Aberrations,” he states that “[t]he popular view of the sexual instinct is beautifully reflected in the poetic fable which tells how the original human beings were cut up into two halves—man and woman—and how these are always striving to unite again in love.” Freud understood that the PAGE 22 VOL. 2, NO. 1 ZEITGEIST BY AURBEY HALL society in which he lived viewed heterosexuality as the only morally correct form of sexual expression. Even with such a claim, afterward, he describes that an individual who identifies as homosexual is a “great surprise,” which reinforces the idea that these specific people are “not normal.” He further separates homosexuals from heterosexuals by stating that “people of this kind are described as having ‘contrary sexual feelings,’ or better, as being ‘inverts.’”3 The word invert means that there is some sort of sexual reversal from heterosexuality, the “norm.” Within the first paragraph of “The Sexual Aberrations”, Freud has already pushed homosexual people into a different category than heterosexuals via harmful labels. Freud’s description of homosexual people as “sexually immature” resulted in physicians believing that this characteristic was something that must be fixed. Freud believed that “adults who achieved sexual excitement by means other than penilevaginal intercourse—fellatio or receptive anal sex, for example—suffered from either sexual fixations or regressions.” This idea that homosexuals were mentally regressed created a harmful image that left dangerous room for conversion therapies to sprout. Along with this, “Freud saw these latter activities [non-heterosexual sex], heterosexual or homosexual, as expressions of immature sexuality and contrasted them with what he believed to be mature forms of genital, (hetero)sexual expression.”4 According to Freud’s writings, homosexual people were expressing “immature sexuality,” which was interpreted as needing therapy so that they would be pushed into their full maturity. Due to Freud’s theories on the origins of sexuality, he directly created pseudo-scientific ideas that physicians used to justify the creation of conversion therapies. Freud’s intention is not to depict homosexual
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