Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis Meet at a Mental Hospital: An Early Institutional History

Abstract

Abstract Psychoanalysis and homosexuality in the United States were both largely in flux between 1910 and 1935. This article sheds light on this unique historical moment by first exploring scholarly discussions of the era’s psychoanalysis and homosexuality, both of which emphasized the transitional nature of therapy and sexuality. By putting two bodies of scholarship into conversation, I also suggest how the historiography might move beyond two oft-cited arguments—that the psychoanalysis of the era had the power to form a person’s sexual identity negatively, and that sexual minorities formed their identities affirmatively by staying away from medical interventions. I argue that, instead, psychoanalysis was part of modern sexual identity-formation in surprisingly open-ended ways. The second half of the article continues to explore the interplay between therapy and sexuality by closely examining clinical practices at one of the leading mental hospitals of the era: Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Towson, Maryland, where an eclectic mode of psychotherapy was actively employed to treat homosexuality. In particular, the work of Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949), a gay psychiatrist well-known for his interpersonal theory of mental illness, shows how male patients who experienced same-sex sexual relationships nurtured productive interdependency among men in their articulation of sexual identity. By carefully delineating this process, the article shows how analytic practices could, and sometimes did, offer a crucial space for self-reflection and articulation of male sexuality.