Twenty-five years ago, Dr. Ralph Roughton tried to cure a gay man of his homosexuality. He didn’t use shock treatments, aversion therapy or any of the other now-infamous techniques doctors once employed to try to turn gays straight. As a psychoanalyst, Roughton simply let his patient lie on the couch and talk.
Today, though, Roughton feels almost as remorseful as if he’d zapped his charge with electrodes Not only did his patient decide after years of trying to make a marriage work, that he was better off gay, but Roughton eventually came to the same realization about himself.
“At the time I was seeing him as a patient I was also, in my own analysis, trying to make the same changes in myself,” Roughton says now. “At that time, in the 1970s, I thought this was something I had to get rid of. There was sort of a parallel process going on in him and in me.”
The difference was that, while Roughton’s patient was simply trying to have a happy, well-adjusted life. Roughton faced higher stakes. He wanted to become a full-fledged member of a profession that tacitly required its practitioners to be straight. As a result he spent years working to change both psychoanalysis and himself. Even as he attempted to suppress his homosexual desires and live an ordinary married life, Roughton tried to find new ways for his notoriously hidebound profession to understand gay men and lesbians.
In the end it was psychoanalysis that changed the most. It’s with pride and not a little amazement that Roughton surveys his field today. Now openly gay, he was an honored guest this weekend at a conference on gays and lesbians sponsored by the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society and the Institute for Psychoanalysis. More than 200 participants — quite a throng by this field’s modest standards — discussed problems that were barely addressed a decade ago: the experiences of children with homosexual parents, the issues that arise when homosexuals “come out” and the ways homosexuals can grow to understand their desires.
“I’ve been to a lot of conferences, and frankly they can be pretty boring. But there’s a real excitement in the air here — the energy is high,” said Dr. James Fisch, the chairman of the organizing committee for the event. “The institute is enjoying the success of this conference.”
That energy was evident at Saturday’s lunchtime address by the University of Chicago’s Martha Nussbaum, author of numerous books on law, ethics, ancient Greece and Rome and other topics. Nussbaum’s talk, which focused on the ways Greek and Roman attitutes toward homosexuality have been understood over the years, drew numerous questions from the audience. Her theme — that homosexuality has different meanings in different periods of history — was clearly a crucial one for mental-health professionals trying to understand their gay clients.
“A study of history reveals a wide variety of judgments about same-sex acts and loving attachments and a comparable array of arguments on this topic,” she said, “which might well cause us to ask what our own arguments in this area are like and how well they stand up to the scrutiny of reason.”
The question of how — and how much — to respond to changing attitudes about sexuality has been central for psychoanalysis in the ’90s. Although the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its diagnostic manual of mental disorders in 1973, Roughton notes that it was only in 1992, after established analysts began to come out and press for change, that the American Psychoanalytic Association adopted a policy of non-discrimination in the selection of candidates and faculty at its training institutes.
By contrast, some participants said homosexuality is one of the most important topics in psychoanalysis today, not just because it’s such a high-profile social issue but because it offers insights into other areas of human experience. During a workshop on coming out of the closet, Dr. Arthur Nielsen, a local psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, pointed out that the image of “coming out” can be applied to all sorts of life experiences.
It’s about “acknowledging who you are as an individual,” he explained afterward. “There’s probably lots of things about each of us that we feel like we have to keep secret from other people, and sometimes from ourselves.”
Nielsen added that the shame some gay people feel may even be similar to the feelings of patients in analysis. Although psychotherapy has become a relatively common practice in our society — even turning up in the hit show “The Sopranos” — old-fashioned psychoanalysis as pioneered by Sigmund Freud, complete with reclining patient and unobtrusive doctor, is more obscure.
“For people to acknowledge that they’re in therapy [they have to] admit that they need someone else to help them, that they’re not perfect,” Nielsen said. “But often people can acknowledge they’re in therapy — it’s easier. But to tell your friends you go four days a week and lie on the couch — a lot of people think that only happens in New Yorker cartoons.”
Some participants went so far as to say understanding homosexuality is central to understanding the human experience as a whole.
“It’s an important topic for anyone’s psychology because sexual interest is a major part of human life,” said Dr. Robert Galatzer-Levy, a member of the faculty at the institute and co-author of “The Course of Gay and Lesbian Lives,” a book to be released by the University of Chicago Press this summer.
Echoing a perspective widely voiced at the conference, Galatzer-Levy noted that there are currently far more questions than answers about the causes and effects of homosexuality. Some, like Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, who has written about such diverse subjects as philosopher Hannah Arendt, racial and sexual prejudice and Anna Freud, find this lack of knowledge particularly stimulating.
“This is an emergent part of psychoanalytic theory, and there’s a lot of work that needs to be done,” she said. “One reason why I decided to talk about lesbian parenting today was that this is a dimension where there’s no psychoanalytic literature whatsoever. There are lots of assumptions. … What’s going to be so fascinating about this literature as I hope it will develop is we can actually see whether these assumptions have anything to do with the reality of people’s situations. But in order to do that you have to have gays and lesbians who are working psychoanalytically.”
That wasn’t possible before the 1990s. Until then psychoanalysis lagged behind its sister professions, psychiatry and psychotherapy, in addressing gays’ changing situation. Roughton says he’s known many would-be analysts who were denied the opportunity to train at psychoanalytic institutes when they admitted they were gay.
“I know of one [person] who applied to one institute [and] told them he was gay in the evaluation interviews and they did not accept him,” he says. “He went to another institute, didn’t tell them, and he was accepted. But then he began his analysis and told his analyst and the analyst said, `Well, I’ll have to report this to the institute,’ and he was dropped then.”
Encountering the conventional wisdom that “if you’re gay, don’t bother to apply,” and convinced he could make a go of it in a normal marriage, Roughton dedicated himself to learning how to be straight. He was married for 38 years and has two grown daughters and three grandchildren, but questions about his sexuality have stubbornly resurfaced throughout his life. Recalling his second course of analysis, he says, “He [the analyst] and I both thought that we were solving this, quote, `problem.’ I ended that analysis thinking that I should be, maybe could be, straight.”
“That didn’t last very long after the analysis was over,” he adds. “I wound up with the conviction that I was really bisexual — that I was going to try to continue the marriage I had — and only many years later did I eventually decide that wasn’t going to work either. And so I’m out.”
Today, though he looks back with regret on some of the missteps he’s taken, Roughton expects to find firmer footing ahead. With his help, psychoanalysis may do the same.
