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Folie à deux (et folie à plusiers)
Published in David Enoch, Basant K. Puri, Hadrian Ball, Uncommon Psychiatric Syndromes, 2020
David Enoch, Basant K. Puri, Hadrian Ball
In some cases a powerful emotional bond between the partners of the same sex, and the active-passive polarity of their personalities, combine to raise the suspicion that latent homosexuality may be a factor in the psychopathology of folie à deux (Heuyer, 1935; Deutsch, 1938). In this connection it may be significant that the partners often occupy the same bed. Others, such as Coleman and Last (1939), suggest that the second partner already has his own repressed fantasies, “ripe for the picking” so that he easily succumbs to the dominant partner’s initiative. Such a fantasy, they suggest, will concern the oedipal situation; thus the inducer is identified in the mind of his partner with one or other parent.
Murder as an attempt to manage self-disgust
Published in David Jones, Working with Dangerous People, 2018
During the first half of the twentieth century German fascists regarded homosexuals as degenerates fit for eradication. As Himmler said, ‘[drowning in a swamp] was not a punishment, but simply the extinguishing of abnormal life. It had to be got rid of, just as we pull out the weeds, throw them on a heap and burn them.’21 Schools of thought developed within psychology that homosexuals needed changing, indeed should be changed.3,22 So throughout the institutions of human society the great passions of shame, anger and disgust have fuelled widespread homophobic attitudes. In effect, same-sex intimacy becomes the receptacle for all that is feared and unwanted and thus despised. In excising the latent homosexuality and locating it elsewhere, social groups take a short cut from the dilemma posed by universal bisexuality and the uncomfortable matter of the Oedipal triangle of child, mother, and father. This often results in rigid and sometimes highly destructive social and legal attitudes.
Clinical-Psychological Approaches to Alcoholism: Multiple Versions of Alcohol Dependence
Published in Bernard Segal, Caesar Korolenko, Addictive Disorders in Arctic Climates, 2014
A new hypothesis about alcohol dependence must be created for every patient, that is, every case must be perceived as unique. An important question arises: Will the system work in psychotherapy, will it be useful for a specialist to help a patient change his or her behavior? The divergent approach is responsive to any form of alcoholism, even those cases which may involve tension reduction, latent homosexuality, dependence-independence conflict, or family disruption. But any diagnosis or understanding of a particular form of alcoholism does not necessarily apply to other cases. The results of group studies or statistical models, therefore, cannot be applied to an individual.
Topology of the Closet
Published in Journal of Homosexuality, 2022
“Latent homosexuality,” a term “used interchangeably with unconscious homosexuality,” has been a persistent theme in clinical, biographical, and autobiographical accounts of same-sex attraction (Campbell, 2009, p. 463; Ellis & Symonds, 1897/2008, p. 124; West, 1969, pp. 207–209). Logically, the closet of latent homosexuality can be discerned only from the outside—either by onlookers peering in or by oneself after quitting it (Chekola, 1994, p. 70). Symonds’s Memoirs assume the latter perspective, as when the author credits his first readings of Plato with “unseal[ing] … the fountains of my hidden consciousness” (1984, pp. 66–83; Symonds, 2016, pp. 114, 128; see also Cohen, 1993a, p. 359). In Teleny we find both perspectives. Soon after embarking on his affair with René, Camille learns of a coterie of men who long suspected him of being, in their words, “one of us” (Teleny, 1893/1986, p. 141). These gossips, Camille concedes, detected something in him he hadn’t recognized in himself: “The exile knows what his cravings are but I did not” (p. 46). Later he muses that “a man’s passions[,] … though smouldering in a latent state, … are in his bosom all the same” (p. 70). The point is reinforced when Camille frets to René that, “had it not been for me, you might have loved some woman whom you could have married,” to which René replies: “And have found out, but too late, that I was born with other cravings. No, sooner or later, I should have followed my destiny” (p. 172).
Shades of Homophobia: A Framework for Analyzing Negative Attitudes Toward Homosexuality
Published in Journal of Homosexuality, 2021
Denialist homophobia also applies to situations where negative attitudes toward homosexuality arise from a person’s rejection of their own same-sex sexual desires, as is the case with latent homosexuality and internalized homophobia. Herek (1986) notes that with latent homosexuality, the individual refuses to acknowledge their own homosexual feelings by outwardly expressing contempt toward gay men and lesbians. In internalized homophobia, the individual refuses to accept their sexual orientation even though they engage in homosexual intercourse, and tend to adopt “covert lifestyles” (Miller & Humphreys, 1980, p. 169) even in contexts where homosexuality is not criminalized or stigmatized. Moreover, they often experience self-hatred that may lead to suicide (see Richmond & McKenna, 1998). Denialist homophobia could lead to manifestations that fall within the other shades of homophobia. For instance, when an individual with latent homosexuality or internalized homophobia reacts violently toward gay men and lesbians or inflicts harm on themselves, respectively, such actions would also be classified as radical homophobia.
Toward Total Composite Theory
Published in Psychiatry, 2019
I was disappointed in Robbins’ discussion of his patient who dreamed of feeling comforted by an approaching bear; as they were about to embrace, he awakened, “feeling some sexual excitement” (p. 296). But Robbins writes that he doubts the dream reflects “genuine homosexual lust” (p. 297). I find this puzzling. Perhaps Robbins is implicitly making a false dichotomy between homosexuality and heterosexuality, rather than understanding that heterosexual patients can have homosexual transference feelings (and vice versa). Robbins implies that applying the notion of latent homosexuality to his patient will necessarily be reductionistic, missing a correct assessment of what he calls the patient’s “total personality structure” (p. 298). However, Freud was anything but simplistic. It is instead Robbins’ reductio ad absurdum account of Freud’s ideas that is reductionistic.