11-12-2015, 05:50 AM
(Edited 11-12-2015, 06:27 AM by meridannight.)
Cuddly Wrote:I really don't feel that I've tried to emulate my mum or dad and I find the concept offensive in the sense that it depicts all gays as having been in love with their own dads. I know I haven't been. Just like I was never in love with my best friend, roommate, brother, teacher or whatever other dirty little secret you can imagine.
this isn't a theory exclusive to gays. in psychoanalytic theory there's this thing called the Oedipus complex. this means to say that heterosexual boys are sexually attracted to their mothers as children. it is part of the theory of psychosexual development according to which people have sexual instincts from birth (and i agree with this). it is no more directed toward homosexual men, than it is directed towards heterosexual men who are said to experience attraction to their mothers in early childhood.
what Isay proposed actually humanizes gay men's development. it's not offensive. you can react to it whichever way you do, but in the large psychiatric perspective it actually serves to normalize homosexual males' development.
in the past, homosexuality was thought of as an arrest or failure of normal heterosexual development, it was consequently held that homosexuals could be converted or changed to being heterosexuals (this within professional psychoanalytic/psychoterapeutic setting). psychoanalysts/psychotherapists held the view that homosexuality resulted from an overbearing mother, for example, who didn't let the boy detach from her and become a normal male (i.e. identify with his father, or with being a male), or alternately, that homosexuality resulted from a weak father who didn't assert himself enough to enable the boy adequate identification with himself/with being a male. (this is a past theory and shouldn't be given any credibility, i am only posting it to illustrate the difference). Isay argued against all that.
Isay, through his work with homosexual patients, (Isay was homosexual himself, by the way) argued that aberrant relations with his mother or having an overbearing mother results instead in adult men who have difficulties forming stable intimate relationships. this is true for both, homosexual and heterosexual men. and that crucial point in gay men's development is the childhood attraction to their father/father figure and his relations with him.
in my own case that father figure was my mom's brother, my uncle. i felt attraction for him as a kid which was sexual in nature. i remember the thoughts that went through my head about how i wanted to be with him, and what i wanted to do with him. i wanted to be near him, touch him, hold him, be held by him, and kiss him. i fantasized about him like that. as a result of this, i do think Isay is right and the whole thing makes sense to me.
it's also nothing to be ashamed of, or anything to be thought of as offensive. if you didn't experience it, you didn't.
i also want to point out something -- Isay was actually the pioneer in the psychiatric field that challenged the view of homosexuality as a pathology. he presented and worked out a normal model for gay men's development. when nobody else in the American psychiatric field dared to speak up he did, he wrote papers, presented clinical cases, and opened up about his own homosexuality. homosexuals were prohibited from becoming psychoanalysts till 1991! and it was directly thanks to Richard Isay's work that that got changed. he worked hard and succeeded at getting homosexuality recognized as an innate natural expression of sexuality rather than a pathology in the psychoanalytic community in the USA. it is not to be underestimated what he achieved, and the institutional bias he had to fight against.
''Do I look civilized to you?''