ABSTRACT
The interplay of social change and psychoanalytic understanding is demonstrated by how psychoanalysts have dealt with homosexuality, more than by any other issue—more, even, than female psychology. In the bitter 1973 fight over removing homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of diagnosable disorders, the American Psychoanalytic Association took no official position. Psychoanalytic principles were abandoned in the zeal to cure homosexuality. By the 1980s, however, the American Psychoanalytic Association had become the most conservative and tradition-bound of the mental health organizations, our theories and our attitudes reflecting the thinking of decades past. The early homophile organizations, the Stonewall uprising that catalyzed the modern gay rights movement, the growing acceptance of gay men and lesbians in mainstream culture in the 1980s, the formation of a cohesive gay community to fight the AIDS crisis, and the rise in academia of gay and lesbian studies.
