Don t ask, don t tell : a gay man s perspective on the psychoanalytic training experience between 1973 and 1991

J. Drescher

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association adopted a normal variant paradigm of homosexuality and took the diagnosis out of the diagnostic manual. At the time, the decision was deemed unacceptable by much of the psychoanalytic community which called for a vote to try and override the decision of a scientific committee. The fervor with which mainstream psychoanalysis opposed this change meant that one of the implications of depathologizing homosexuality - namely nondiscrimination in the selection of openly lesbian and gay analytic candidates - was not officially accepted by the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) until 1991. That period, between 1973 and 1991, roughly coincides with the time between the author_s receiving a college degree and the completion of his psychoanalytic training. This paper focuses on what those years were like for many gay men and lesbians seeking analytic training or treatment and why the analytic attitudes of that time led the author to seek his training outside the institutes of the APsaA. The author believes several things can be learned from the experiences between 1973 and 1991. These include how institutional biases were rationalized by clinical theory; how difficult it is to separate a scientific theory from the cultural matrix in which it is formulated; and how vulnerable patients and trainees are to the human frailties and prejudices of their analysts, supervisors, and teachers.<Copies are available from: Haworth Document Delivery Center. The Haworth Press, Inc., 10 Alice Street, Binghamton, NY 13904-1580, USA>