Medicine: The Strange World

Manhattan’s Dr. Edmund Bergler, 60, has a distinction unique even for a psychiatrist : over the past 30 years he has examined or treated nearly 1,000 male homosexuals. From this long and intimate professional voyage into a strange world, he has put down some surprising conclusions in a book, published last week, titled 1,000 Homosexuals (Pageant Books; $4.95). Says Psychoanalyst Bergler: ¶ The homosexual is a glutton for punishment and is surely unhappy—consciously or unconsciously.

¶ His parents are not to blame for his plight.

¶ He alone controls his own fate—and thus he controls the power to be cured.

Pleasure from Displeasure. Despite all the washroom jokes, most of Dr. Bergler’s homosexuals look and act perfectly masculine, and many are married. Then how did they get that way? Answers Bergler: it all traces back to the nursery.

From the very first day, life is a series of shocks: the shock of birth itself, of hunger, of weaning, of not having one’s own way. Most humans make adjustments to these painful shocks. Yet many are overwhelmed by them, and so they attempt to turn the pain itself into pleasure, i.e., they become psychic masochists. At the same time, humans learn in the nursery to fear the woman: it is she who takes the nipple out of the infant’s mouth, she who disciplines him. Many persons grow up to run away from the fearful mother image, and at the same time unconsciously to court self-damage. The resort for both distorted tendencies is homosexuality.

Does this mean that, as in popular fiction, the parents are guilty? Emphatically not, says Bergler. “No parent—not even the parent who directed the affairs of the nursery foolishly—has the power to induce neurosis in his children.” (But many a parent wants to assume the blame, because every parent also has some masochism in him.)

Indeed, the parent’s worst mistake may have been his softness. Every person craves some punishment; if he cannot get it at home, he goes to extremes to seek it. As Bergler told one homosexual patient, who was rarely spanked as a child: “You had to work hard to get your beatings at home. The generations brought up in the era of ‘progressive education’ faced the same problem.”

Misery Concentrated. The seed of self-punishment flowers in the conspiratorial world of the homosexual. Its life, as one Bergler patient related, is “misery concentrated, guilt heightened, depression the order of the day.” Male homosexuals are pathologically jealous and “unfaithful.” Some have relations with more than 100 males a year. Few relationships last more than several weeks; the most common type is the “one-night stand” or the five-minute meeting in a public park or even a comfort station. With contacts so casual, venereal disease runs wild. (One survey showed that almost 10% of male homosexuals are carriers, v. a fraction of 1% of arrested female prostitutes.)

Detection and arrest of homosexuals are also common, even though Bergler holds that most times “it is impossible to identify a homosexual who does not want to be identified.” But the homosexual unwittingly yearns for exposure. His distorted pleasures feed on the allure of danger. One of Bergler’s patients picked up a man in the washroom of a police station; of course the man was a detective. Others pick up extortionists or toughs who beat them.

The homosexual’s worst trouble comes when he starts to age. His craving is for youth and the weird, youthful banter peculiar to the homosexual world. But young men do not want him; they have to be bought. One homosexual, aged 48 and the president of a corporation, came to Bergler in hopes of switching, because, as he said: “My choice is between homosexual male whores and decent, heterosexual women. Maybe I could find some body in the other camp who would care for me a bit.”

No Cure in Marriage. To avoid such frustrations, many “ambidextrous” homosexuals alternate their adventures between men and women. To Bergler, such practice is nonsensical delusion. “The supposed bisexual,” says he, “is a homosexual with some mechanical potency retained.” This is particularly true of the many homosexuals who marry to produce heirs and a façade of respectability. “Marriage cannot cure homosexuality,” says Bergler. For one thing, it does not root out the desire for self-punishment. Thus the married homosexual keeps slipping back, unconsciously hopes that his wife will catch him in flagrante.

Just that happened to Mr. M., aged 34, father of two and the head of an engineering firm. He dared to speak on the phone about his homosexual affairs while his wife was near by; she began to blast him as “a dirty pansy” and threatened a headline-catching divorce. He asked Dr. Bergler: “Why should I pay a premium for her bitchiness by becoming a good, lovey-dovey husband and giving up all my homosexual fun?” But later Mr. M. confessed on the couch that there was very little fun. “My sex life was all one-night stands. None of my boy friends wanted love or anything but sexual release.” After Mr. M. came to that realization, the way opened for him to understand his self-damaging tendencies and purge them. Ultimately he rejoined his wife as a happy heterosexual.

Dr. Bergler holds that every homosexual can be cured in about eight months of psychiatric treatment. All he needs is the will to change, and the willingness to accept that what he really seeks is not synthetic sex but self-punishment. But if he wants to persist in self-punishment, homosexuality is certainly the most efficient means to that unhappy end.