Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis Meet at a Mental Hospital: An Early Institutional History (original) (raw)

2019, Journal of the HIstory of Medicine and Allied Sciences

Psychoanalysis in the United States reached its golden age in a few decades following World War II. An unprecedented number of middle-class Americans met their psychotherapists in private offices, considering these sessions on a couch a part of modern, urban, and stressful life. The same era brought homosexuality to a heightened scrutiny. Not only psychoanalytic interest in sexuality, but also the culture of conformity in the Cold War era contributed to an increased medical attempt to "cure" homosexuality by changing it into heterosexuality. Obscured by this well-known historical narrative is the psychoanalytic practice that took shape in institutional settings before its rise to professional prominence. Indeed, between the 1910s and 1940s, select mental hospitals in the US were staffed by psychoanalytically-minded psychiatrists. These physicians may not have been formally trained by Freud, but their interactions with patients clearly reflected their aspiration to understand relationships among intra-psychic dynamisms, social inhibitions, and symptoms of mental illness. Homosexuality did not escape these doctors' attention, as their in-depth talk therapies revealed its surprising commonality and even its potential normalcy. By shedding light on the rhythm of institutional life at the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Towson, Maryland, one of the progressive mental hospitals that employed psychoanalytically-oriented psychiatrists in the 1920s, this article explores two under-examined aspects of the history of psychiatry: the prevalence of psychoanalytic practices before 1950 in mental hospital settings on the one hand, and the comparatively less-pathologizing clinical approach to homosexual experiences among the era's psychoanalysts, on the other. Such inquiry is inspired by Gerald Grob's scholarship that has delineated the rise and fall of US mental hospitals most definitively. Too, the paper is homage to his (trans-institutional) mentorship, which encouraged a broad range of historical inquiries.