ABSTRACT
In reflecting on the question, “What has the effect of trauma been on the development of psychoanalysis?” I found myself thinking about the postwar period during which émigré Jewish analysts spoke and wrote disparagingly of “homosexuals.” A scholar who has contributed important work on this subject is Kenneth Lewes (1988). In his book, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality, he documents a post-war period in language that faintly echoed the moralizing, anti-Semitic diatribes of the Nazis:
It is a striking fact of our history that both the conviction that homosexual object choice was necessarily psychopathological and the extremity of negative characterizations of homosexual general functioning became prominent in the years following World War II . . . I suggest that the historical trauma of the war was one cause of this shift in opinion . . . It is remarkable how many times in the postwar period homosexuals were compared to Nazis [and] this period [saw the use of a] chilling phrase, a solution to the problem of homosexuality.
