ABSTRACT
‘Homosexual panic’ suggests that episodes of acute anxiety and fear characterised by guilt about some past homosexual experience or aspects of homosexual desire may result from a lack of heterosexual integration in an unstable individual. It can be traced back to the conservative reworking of Freud's insights into undifferentiated sexual desire and the ambiguous legacy of his views about homosexuality in the human unconscious. In Psychopathology (1920), Edward Kempf first developed this new term. This major tome was a patchwork compilation of the diverse insights and anecdotes about mental illness intending to offer ‘an unprejudiced insight into human behaviour’ (Preface) collected by a psychiatrist who spent years in practice at a mental hospital in the United States.
