ABSTRACT
René Allendy was a sickly child, frequently bedridden, near death more than once, a victim of pneumonia, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and a spinal cord injury, for which he received a disability pension throughout his life. In 1924, René Laforgue introduced him to the new technique of psychoanalysis, "the talking cure" invented by Sigmund Freud of Vienna: analyzing dreams and random thoughts to recover long-forgotten traumas from the depths of the unconscious mind. The homosexualité of psychoanalysis was not pederasty, inversion, or degeneration, not caused by some hereditary flaw, psychological feminization, or cultural decay. During the 1920s and 1930s, psychoanalysis was all the rage. Local psychoanalytic societies appeared throughout Europe, in North and South America, and as far afield as India and Japan. Many other psychiatric criminologists of the 1940s and 1950s found the queer psychopath at the heart of every criminal.
