RC Hierarchy's
Ruthlessly Fierce
Suppression of
SCIENCE
on HOMOSEXUALITY
Verification
RC Hierarchy
in
"Primitive
Anti-instinctual
Due To Their
Pervasive Dominance
Pervasive Dominance
of
Repressed Homosexuals
What is SPHINCTER MORALITY?
(Psychology Dictionary)
Psychoanalytic theory. Features of personality that includes parsimony, obstinacy that is particularly linked with an anal retentive personality. For having more concept clarity, have a look on anal personality or anal stage.
"Sphincter morality are the anal retentive traits of personality.”
SPHINCTER - the ring shaped muscle that closes a body opening. "We have sphincter muscles to close openings in our body like the iris."
OR
“- - - - - - - MORALITY”
RC Hierarchy's 6 Decades
Disregarding of Authoritative Science on Homosexuality
Instead relying on
Junk Science
on
HOMOSEXUALITY
To Support
The
RC Hierarchy’s
Repressed Homosexuals
Ignoring
The Substantiated lifelong Harmful Effects
Caused to Children Growing up
GAY
Following and Supporting The Inhumane Example of Major Global Corporations
Use of
Junk Science
To
Disregard
Substantiated lethal Harmful Effects to Human Life
For Selfish Gain
e.g.
Tobacco
&
Climate Change
RC Hierarchy's
&
JUNK SCIENCE
on
Homosexuality
Junk Science - untested or unproven theories when presented as scientific fact, especially in a court of law
So, what are 'deep-seated homosexual tendencies' anyway?
Dec 7, 2018
…The only research I could find on these so-called deep-seated and transitory tendencies was a paper titled "The Distinction between Deep-Seated Homosexual Tendencies and Transitory Same-Sex Attractions in Candidates for Seminary and Religious Life." Written by Peter Kleponis, Ph.D., and Richard Fitzgibbons, M.D., it was published in 2011 in The Linacre Quarterly, the official journal of the Catholic Medical Association.
The intention of the paper was to offer research that supports the Vatican's 2005 instruction banning gay priests.
According to the website MaritalHealing.com, Kleponis participates in evaluating candidates for priesthood and religious life and has given conferences to Courage, a Catholic organization that treats homosexuality like an addiction.
Fitzgibbons has been an adjunct professor at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. In 2008, Benedict XVI appointed him a consultor to the Vatican's Congregation for the Clergy, a position he no longer holds, according to the latest Vatican yearbook.
According to Kleponis and Fitzgibbons:
Those with deep-seated homosexual tendencies often identify themselves as "gay men" which is based to a large extent upon their sexual attractions. They often reject the current scientific findings that there is no genetic or biological basis for SSA [same-sex attraction] and believe they were born this way. They do not view homosexuality as a disordered inclination, are comfortable with their sexual attractions, subscribe to the increasingly prevalent belief that homosexuality is a normal variation in human sexuality, and think there is nothing wrong with homosexual acts. Their beliefs make them highly vulnerable to sexual acting out.
And what do the doctors believe are the causes of these deep-seated homosexual tendencies? They explain:
Men with deep-seated homosexual tendencies are usually unwilling to examine the possibility that they experienced emotional conflicts in significant male relationships that result in same-sex attraction. When asked, they are often unable to name a best male friend in elementary school. Their strong physical attraction to other men's bodies and to the masculinity of others is the result of profound weakness in male confidence, a craving for male acceptance, and a poor body image. They have a significant affective immaturity with excessive anger and jealousy toward males who are not homosexual. Their insecurity leads them to avoid close friendships with other men who do not have SSA.
The paper later goes on to argue that gay men have significantly higher incidences of cancer and psychiatric illness.
And as for transitory same-sex attraction, Kleponis and Fitzgibbons "deem it preferable to the use of the terms 'ego-dystonic' homosexuality or 'obligatory' or 'optional' homosexuality because it implies the ability to change," they write.
Is this the kind of junk science that Francis, the bishops, seminary rectors, and members of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith are relying on to support the barring of gay men from ordained ministry and gays and lesbians from consecrated life? Is this the "research" that is keeping all LGBTQ people from enjoying the fullness of life in their church?…
VATICAN’S USED OF
JUNK SCIENCE
AGAINST GAY PRIESTS
IS NOT
TRUTH
AND IT IS NOT LOVE!!!
THIS IS THE ULTIMATE SCANDAL!!!
Therefore I tell you, people will be forgiven for every sin and blasphemy, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.
Matthew 12:31-32
Francis warns youth synod bishops against 'falling into moralistic or elitist postures’ Oct 3, 2018 Photo
Vatican City — Pope Francis opened a month-long worldwide meeting of Catholic bishops Oct. 3 by exhorting the hundreds of prelates taking part to guard against "falling into moralistic or elitist postures" as they discuss the needs of young people today.
During his homily for the opening Mass of the Synod of Bishops, which will continue through Oct. 28, the pontiff also asked the prelates to listen to one another "sincerely and prayerfully, as free as possible from prejudice and conditioning."
Francis said the bishops should seek "to enter into communion with the diverse situations that the People of God experience." Such a venture, he said, "protects us from the lure of abstract ideologies that never touch the realities of our people."
"Hope challenges us, moves us and shatters that conformism which says, 'it's always been done like this,'" said the pope. "Hope asks us to get up and look directly into the eyes of young people and see their situations.”…
Read more:
RC Hierarchy's
Synod doesn’t waste time taking up abuse, LGBT issues and migration
Oct 5, 2018
ROME - One day after Pope Francis kicked off this month’s Vatican summit on young people by warning against a temptation to focus on “abstract ideologies” detached from the realities of young people, concrete topics ranging from sex abuse, LGBT issues, migration, and technology took center stage on Thursday.
Nearly 300 individuals are on hand for the Synod of Bishops, which is centered on the theme of “Young People, Faith, and Vocational Discernment.” The approximately 50 delegates that spoke on the first day didn’t waste time identifying what are expected to be some of the hottest topics in the month ahead…
“What the Church holds to be true about human sexuality is not a stumbling block. It is the only real path to joy and wholeness,” he insisted.
“There is no such thing as an ‘LGBTQ Catholic’ or a ‘transgender Catholic’ or a ‘heterosexual Catholic,’ as if our sexual appetites defined who we are; as if these designations described discrete communities of differing but equal integrity within the real ecclesial community, the body of Jesus Christ. This has never been true in the life of the Church, and is not true now.”…
Read more:
Oct 4, 2018
Chaput - “There is no such thing as an ‘LGBTQ Catholic’ or a ‘transgender Catholic’ or a ‘heterosexual Catholic,’..."
Kids Are Being Hurt!!!
Ignorance
About The
Science of Human Sexuality
Reigns Supreme Among
RC Hierarchy
e.g. Bishops Synod sessions 2014, 2015 & Synod 2018,
Burke, Chaput, Vigano,
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, etc., etc., etc...
Burke, Chaput, Vigano,
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, etc., etc., etc...
Science +
+ Religion = Truth = LOVE
Letter to Father George V. Coyne Pope John Paul II - 1988
A Vatican opening on sexuality worries conservatives — and cheers reformers
October 30, 2018 - by David Gibson
VATICAN CITY (RNS) — Did a just-concluded meeting of Catholic bishops here open the door to rethinking Catholic teaching on homosexuality?
The question was unexpectedly left hanging in the wake of the final report of the Vatican’s synod on young people, which ended Sunday (Oct. 28). Produced in a unique collaboration between 249 bishops and some three dozen young adults, the approved summary of the proceedings nonetheless had offered a rather diluted and uninspiring welcome to LGBT Catholics.
But as happened in the previous two synods called by Pope Francis to promote a more consultative form of Catholic governance, sex – in particular homosexuality – became a flashpoint.
In fact, conservatives inside the synod hall, aided by conservative Catholic media outlets that amplified their views, waged an intense campaign to excise any mention of the acronym “LGBT” or the word “gay” from the final document. The traditionalists, who ultimately succeeded, argued that both terms would have effectively validated homosexuality and thus could undermine Catholic teaching against same-sex relationships.
Yet their victory may prove to be more semantic than substantive. The problem for the conservatives lies in the first line of the relevant section of the final document. It reads:
“There are questions related to the body, to affectivity and to sexuality that require a deeper anthropological, theological and pastoral exploration, which should be done in the most appropriate way, whether on a global or local level. Among these, those that stand out in particular are those relative to the difference and harmony between male and female identities and sexual inclinations.”
Translation: The Catholic hierarchy is acknowledging that the church needs to update its understanding of the science of sex and gender, and that also means updating the church’s theology on sexuality and its ministry to gay people…
Read more:
Synod’s decision to drop 'LGBT' from its final document is a missed opportunity for the Church - The Tablet
28 October 2018 Photo
28 October 2018 Photo
A Failure to Communicate
The Synod’s Mistake on LGBT Catholics
By John Gehring - November 2, 2018
The recently concluded Synod on Young People reflected Pope Francis’s call for a listening church that accompanies people and discerns together. Unlike synods in previous papacies, where a final script was essentially drafted in advance and most bishops dutifully signed off, a more authentic process unfolded during the month-long gathering that ended last Sunday. A mode of engagement that prioritizes a humble posture of encounter is essential if the Catholic Church hopes to stem the tide of young people leaving an institution they often view as irrelevant, hypocritical, and aloof. In fact, those who are raised Catholic are more likely than those raised in any other religion to cite negative religious treatment of gay and lesbian people as the primary reason they leave, according to the Public Religion Research Institute…
For young gay Catholics and their allies, the synod offered a space where bishops could learn from the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties, of the LGBT faithful. Signs pointed to a potentially important step forward. In a document prepared before the synod, the Vatican used the term “LGBT” for the first time. “Some LGBT youth,” it read, want to “benefit from greater closeness and experience greater care from the church.” Not exactly a revolutionary statement, and rather painfully obvious. But the use of “LGBT” was striking and significant. The church has a major language problem when it comes to respecting the dignity of gay, lesbian, and transgender people. Catholic teaching documents typically use “homosexual” or refer to “homosexual tendencies.” Using the LGBT descriptor—often preferred by many gay, lesbian, and transgender people—is a sign of respect.
But the final report from the synod did not use the term “LGBT.” Several bishops, including Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput, criticized its potential appearance. For the church, he said, “there is no such thing as an ‘LGBTQ Catholic’ or a ‘transgender Catholic’ or a ‘heterosexual Catholic,’ as if our sexual appetites defined who we are.”…
Whatever discussions may yet take place in the church, an editorial in The Tablet underscored a painful truth. “Few progressive Catholics would have dared to dream that Synod might open a conversation about ‘intrinsic disorder,’ or that it might acknowledge that even the acronym LGBT excludes queer, intersex, and asexual Catholics,” the editors wrote. “What is, perhaps, most heartbreaking is that LGBT Catholics pinned their hopes on so little: being discussed in a language that wasn’t overtly offensive, with words that will—for many gay people—trigger memories of bullying and harassment.”...
Kids Are Being Hurt!!!
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RC Hierarchy's
Ruthlessly Fierce
Suppression of
SCIENCE
on HOMOSEXUALITY
RC Hierarchy
ARE
Repressed Homosexuals
Stuck
in
"Primitive
Anti-instinctual
State of
I. New Aspects of Male Homosexuality, Sidney H. Phillips, M.D., 2002
Ann Psychoanal 30:131-45
Sidney H. Phillips, M.D. - Int J Psychoanal 2003
Int J Psychoanal 2003; 84:1431–1450
Homosexuality:
Coming out
of the confusion
of the confusion
SIDNEY H. PHILLIPS
234 Church Street, Suite 300, New Haven, CT 06510–1802, USA – sidney.phillips@yale.edu
(Final version accepted 4 June 2003)
The author asserts that earlier theoretical assumptions contribute to the conceptual confusion about homosexuality in much contemporary psychoanalytic research. Bergeret’s article, recently published in this Journal, is exemplary of this confusion. The author refutes his contention that homosexuality is not true' sexuality but merely a defensive, narcissistic fixation away from, or a nearly psychotic denial of, heterosexuality. He then clarifies specific areas of conceptual confusion regarding homosexuality still prevalent in psychoanalytic discourse that derive from earlier theoretical premises. These areas of confusion include manifest versus latent homosexuality, narcissism and bisexuality, oedipal dynamics and development, and transference and technique.
Keywords: homosexuality, narcissism, bisexuality, oedipal, development, transference, technique
Recent articles concerning homosexuality published in the IPA newsletter (2001) (e.g.Responses to Roughton, 2001a) and in this Journal (Bergeret, 2002) reveal the conceptual confusion still prevalent throughout the psychoanalytic world regarding this topic. Many analysts continue to regard homosexuality a priori as psychopathological, and those of us who do not are considered less ‘anchored in specific scientific study of the subject but rather as yielding to the social and political winds of public opinion (Bergeret,2002, p. 351). After centuries of homosexuality having been regarded as heinous sin,capital crime or insane degeneracy, it was both surprising and humorously ironic to read Bergeret's lament that contemporary social and political considerations now make his views unacceptable! Ultimately, whether manifest homosexuality in general is considered psychopathological is neither a scientific nor a psychoanalytic question. Some have argued that it is a moral question steeped in a philosophical debate about the nature of categories: how are diagnostic categories influenced by the historical, social and cultural contexts in which they are constructed? (Bayer, 1987). Perhaps especially concerning the topic of homosexuality, clinical researchers tend to wrap themselves in the cloak of science and cast their opponents as being unscientific (Bayer, 1987, pp. 41-66). Michel (1984) asserted that the question of ‘normality” is not even a psychoanalytic question.
Psychoanalysis teaches us that all scientists have their blind spots and biases, and that these influence the questions we ask, how we set about answering them and thus even the answers we get. Whatever side we take in this debate on homosexuality, we
©2003 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Page 2
are unwittingly influenced by our individual pasts as well as the current sociocultural matrix within which we conduct our scientific research and clinical practice. Such inherent biases may have a profound impact on the outcome of research. If you pack a suitcase in the morning, you cannot really be surprised at its contents when you unpack it in the afternoon no matter how long or circuitous the journey. If two avenues of research begin with drastically different basic assumptions, then those assumptions inevitably affect both the outcome and interpretation of the research. In other words, what is one researcher's basic assumption is another's bias. Respectfully examining and questioning the basic assumptions of one another's research remain foundational to a scientific approach to these problems.
The purposes of this article, then, are two-fold. First, I will refute on psychoanalytic grounds Bergeret's (2002) contention that homosexuality is not sexuality at all but merely a defensive, narcissistic fixation away from, or a nearly psychotic denial of, heterosexuality. And, second, I intend to clarify specific areas of conceptual confusion regarding homosexuality that derive from earlier theoretical assumptions regarding homosexuality that fail to consider recent theoretical advances and new clinical evidence, both of which critique the ways homosexuality has been pathologized by premises based on these earlier, mainstream analytic assumptions. I will address particular areas of confusion that stem from these earlier assumptions, including manifest versus latent homosexuality, narcissism and bisexuality, oedipal dynamics and development, and transference and technique.
Manifest versus latent homosexuality
Much conceptual confusion exists in the analytic literature about the differences between manifest and latent homosexuality. A milestone of Freudian theory was the discovery of the oedipal complex (1950, pp. 265–6). Freud's recognition of its inverse form—the child's unconscious erotic attachment to the same-gender parent and rivalry with the opposite-gender parent-gave rise to the formulation of latent homosexual wishes and fears in the heterosexual, neurotic adult (1923a, pp. 33-4). The inverse or negative Oedipus complex, then, became the etiological explanation for manifest homosexuality. In this view, homosexuality was a regression away from heterosexuality.
Because heterosexual development is normative for reproductive life, psychoanalysis regarded it as the norm for sexual life in general. Any deviation from heterosexual ‘genital primacy’ leading to reproduction of the species was considered evidence of deviation or disorder (Freud, 1905, pp. 197–9). When heterosexual development became blocked by internal inhibition or external frustration, regression led the individual back to earlier psychosexual fixation points--for example, the negative oedipal phase of development. The explanations for such a fixation point included both constitutional predisposition and traumatic overstimulation (pp. 144-8).
Pre-oedipal development also figured prominently in etiological explanations of homosexuality. Even though no specific picture of pre-genital fixation has ever been proven to account etiologically for manifest homosexuality (Wiedeman, 1962, p. 394), analysts have continued to search for such explanations. The more analysts concentrated on the exigencies of pre-oedipal development as a determinant of negative oedipal
Page 3
HOMOSEXUALITY: COMING OUT OF THE CONFUSION
1433
fixation, the more the etiological searchlight homed in on primitive elements of the mind. That sexual orientation and mental health/illness might be independent dimensions within an individual has only recently been put forward as an alternative explanation for earlier findings linking homosexuality and severe psychopathology (see Cohler and Galatzer-Levy, 1996). The emphasis was always that the homosexual orientation was the cause of, or inextricably linked to, severe emotional illness. Friedman conclusively refutes this idea and shows how variation in sexual orientation is distributed across the entire range of character types and structures (1988, pp. 81–95).
Drawing mainly on Ferenczi's 1911 formulations of homosexuality, Bergeret recently repeated this earlier conceptualization: [W]e can identify among the manifest forms of homoeroticism clear regressions (“to narcissistic fixations” (p. 354)] on the basis of unhappy oedipal experiences, or rather, more clearly still, denial and imaginary neoconstructs of a psychotic nature” (2002, p. 357). Phenomenological experience and research notwithstanding (Kinsey et al., 1948; Hooker, 1957; Bell and Weinberg, 1978), Bergeret regards homosexual individuals as in psychotic denial or as narcissistically regressed, severely disturbed heterosexual individuals. In other words, he repeats the analytic premise that homosexuality is failed heterosexuality. This notion was reified by unquestioned conventional judgment and gave rise to decades of destructive therapeutic zeal that analysis could free up homosexual individuals for heterosexuality (Duberman, 1991; Moor, 2001).
Mitchell (1981) and Leavy's (1985a) pioneering articles-—from which I draw heavily in this article-questioned many of these mainstream psychoanalytic assumptions about homosexuality, and it may well have been their iconoclastic views that kept them from publication at that time in mainstream psychoanalytic journals. As a result, it was not until Isay published a series of articles (1985, 1986, 1987, 1991) that challenged the long-standing, psychoanalytic premises about homosexuality that the topic received broader reconsideration from a fresh perspective.
Isay stood traditional analytic theory on its head by proposing that manifest homosexuality was not the topographical invert of latent homosexuality. He asserted
both that manifest homosexuality was not the unrepressed, perverse expression of the latent version, and also that manifest homosexuality emerged from a wholly different
constitutional and psychosexual matrix than did latent homosexuality. He elucidated a new developmental framework for understanding male homosexuality:
It has become clear to me from working with these and other gay men that homoerotic fantasies are usually present from at least the ages of four or five years. This period of development is analogous to the Oedipal stage in heterosexual boys, except that the primary sexual object of homosexual boys is their fathers (1989, p. 29).
While Isay's formulation represents only one of various pathways to homosexuality, the clinical application of this new developmental framework has yielded significant results, and Isay presented ten cases treated in analysis or analytic psychotherapy to support his contention (pp. 24-125). Likewise Magee and Miller demonstrate the effectiveness of Isay's formulation—but focus on the oedipal relation with the mother—in a woman analysand conflicted about her sexual orientation (1997, pp. 161–2). Once these patients
Page 4
were relieved of their neurotic encumbrances through neutrally conducted analysis, homosexual individuals did not become heterosexual but rather led happier, richer,
less inhibited lives as homosexual men and women. Manifest homosexuality, then, designates those individuals who consciously and persistently take same-gender others
as objects of love and desire. A manifestly homosexual individual may or may not act upon or accept this desire, but this is still distinctly different from the unconscious
(latent) homosexual longings revealed in heterosexual analysands (Leavy, 1985a, p.164). Two clinical vignettes demonstrate this distinction.
Mr Adams, a 58-year-old man, presented for consultation because of stormy marital discord caused by his hypersensitivity to his wife's criticism–however slight, tactful or deserved—as well as her failure to acknowledge his substantial and real professional accomplishments. In his second consultation, he disclosed his fear that I would discover that he was homosexual. Despite never having actively sought out homoerotic experience nor consciously finding other men sexually attractive, Mr Adams's worry had persisted for decades. A dream in the last year of a six-and-a-half-year analysis demonstrates the typical constellation of latent homosexual conflict in a heterosexual analysand.
In the dream Mr Adams attended a football game between his college team and a team from my geographical origins. His team “scored’ repeatedly and was winning.
During the game, he went to the restroom where a stadium guard performed a ‘rectal examination from behind and inserted a rectal suppository'. His associations were to 'sexual scoring” and to the competition between his team and my team. The dream enabled me to interpret the anal attack he feared from me (who sat behind him) if he succeeded in ‘scoring’ in the game ‘against’ me (in part, this was also a play on the anal in ʻanal-ysis”). The patient's unconscious struggle against these passive homosexual trends powerfully infused his romantic and sexual relations with his wife such that he feared any criticism by her would reveal homosexuality as the cause of his feelings of sexual inadequacy.
The first vignette stands in contrast to a second in which a manifestly homosexual male analysand was nonetheless conflicted about his homosexuality such that he was
unable to sustain an enduring romantic, sexual relationship with another man. When Mr Baker first presented for analysis at 24 years of age, he described conscious, romantic and erotic attraction to and arousal for male peers since early adolescence. He deeply desired a loving, intimate relationship with a man, yet he reported having fled good prospects for reasons he did not fully understand. He felt chronically unhappy about this. In the sixth year of an eight-year analysis the patient described his childhood “obsession with seeing his handsome father's muscular body. He reported numerous episodes of trying to catch glimpses of his father getting in or out of the shower. Over the ensuing weeks, he told me in detail--alternating with protests of intense shame-of a conscious, erotic fantasy he recalled from childhood and adolescence. His fantasy was that he would be in the shower with his dad who would lift him face to face and press him up against his soapy, hairy, muscular chest, before gradually sliding him down to enter him anally with his erect penis. He yelled out in angry distress how humiliated he felt to admit to me that he liked anal sex: 'I like to get ed—OK?! Are you happy now, you er?” It was rare for him to speak so frankly. While silently noting the reference to the erotic fantasy toward his father consistent with Isay's (1989) formulation, I chose to reply within the transference: “You experience me as the humiliating er, penetrating you with my
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HOMOSEXUALITY: COMING OUT OF THE CONFUSION
1435
interpretations”. “Yes”, he said, though calmer now, “maybe you really get off on being top dog here.” It took many more months of analysis of his shame--touching on themes such as top/bottom, big/little, adult/child, “dirty' (anal) sex/“clean” vaginal sex for this analysand to acknowledge to himself and to me with some semblance of acceptance how passionately aroused in so many variations he was by other men's bodies.
In earlier theories of male homosexuality, Mr Baker's desire to be penetrated anally by his father would have been regarded as a regressive, so-called negative, oedipal
fantasy—that is, as an anxious, defensive reaction away from conflicted, positive oedipal fantasy toward his mother. In this sequence, the top dog’, penetrating fantasy toward the analyst defended against the anal receptive fantasy with the father. It is important to note that the anal receptive fantasy with the father was neither reconstructed nor unconscious. He recalled having been quite conscious of it during childhood, and its recovery in this phase of the analysis did not free up ‘latent” heterosexual currents. On the contrary, the analytic work seemed to free up deeper homosexual passions.
Narcissism and bisexuality
Using Freud's (1905, 1914, 1920), Abraham's (1916) and Ferenczi's (1953) formulations, Bergeret painstakingly develops a theoretical argument that homosexuality is not truly sexual' (2002, p. 353)—that is, representing ‘attachment to a truly sexual and oedipal object” (p. 353)—but rather is merely a developmental fixation with or regression to “narcissistic eroticism'. He writes that he has ʻemphatically insisted on the narcissistic nature of the erotic satisfaction sought by the homophile. This form of pleasure, which can be very intense, does not, however, constitute a truly sexual pleasure in the Freudian sense' (p. 355) because the object of desire would not be:
... a sexually complementary object (different in nature owing to its secondary sexual identity) but would simply be of a nature similar to the subject. This object would be envisaged essentially at the level of its primary and thus narcissistic identity, reflected in relation to the subject (p. 354).
“Homophile' is Bergeret’s preferred designation for homosexual individuals so as not to confuse them with “truly sexual”, object-related heterosexuals. In other words, if the external object of desire is anatomically (i.e. his reference to “secondary sexual identity”) the same as the external subject then, by Bergeret's definition, the object must be a “narcissistic object” (p. 355). And, if the subject desires a “narcissistic object”, Bergeret following Freud (1914) concludes that the subject must also be characterologically narcissistic and thus incapable of object love. It is important to recognize, however, that heterosexual men do not love women just for their sexual bodies. Sexual passion inspires or inflames love, which is not the same thing as genital feeling. Does Bergeret contend that homosexual individuals don't feel passion?
While I disagree with Bergeret's characterization of homosexual individuals as typically or universally suffering from narcissistic character disorders, he does seem
to be on to something when he depicts homoerotic passion as containing narcissistic elements. Leavy also argues for a version of “narcissism' as the regulatory mode of homosexuality without losing sight of the clinical and everyday observations of
Page 6
homosexual individuals: I suggest that we define the constitutive, elementary, and unconscious nucleus of homosexuality as the search for the narcissistic object, the
specular image of oneself discovered or revived outside oneself” (1985a, p. 164). In striking contrast to Bergeret's embrace of the Freudian narcissistic conglomerate,
however, Leavy drastically abridges the concept of narcissism in order to distinguish rather than conflate the various forms of narcissism.
Leavy regards Freud's clinical generalization of narcissism—that broadly includes schizophrenic flight from the external object world to cathexis of the ego, the hypochondriacal state and megalomania—as a brilliant observation of the superficial similarities of these phenomena while ignoring their substantive distinctions (p. 165). This misunderstanding emerges from the Freudian notion of mental substances — libido, anxiety, aggression—being distributed among psychic structures analogous to hydraulic transfer of physical substances or energies. “Why not then hypothesize’, Leavy deftly argues, ʻa narcissism present whenever the subject turns “an allocation of libido” towards his or her own being?” (p. 165). Any mental effort or interest inwardly directed—such as the poet's involvement with words or the mother’s involvement with her offspring'-meets this definition of narcissism whether or not connoting psychopathology (p. 165). Blechner humorously makes the same point: “If a psychoanalyst marries another psychoanalyst, does that reflect a narcissistic object choice? And if it does, in the treatment of such a psychoanalyst, should the aim be to get the person to marry a non-psychoanalyst?' (1995, p. 283). Leavy's argument reveals how Freud's understanding of the narcissism concept led to such an expansion of it that use of the term “narcissism” or “narcissistic' lacks theoretical or clinical precision. (For an elaboration of this point of view, see Leavy, 1996.)
It is Leavy's critical rethinking and narrowing of the definition of narcissism that explicates Bergeret's (2002) conceptualization of homosexuality as not involving
attachment “to a truly sexual and oedipal object' (1985a, p. 353). For, though Leavy would agree with the idea of ‘narcissistic eroticism' infusing homosexual desire, he
is quick to observe how clinical experience *does not reveal that the narcissism of homosexuals implies an outstanding degree of egoism, a disposition to hypochondriasis, megalomania, or the like, although it does not exclude any of these, either' (p. 165). For Leavy, the body narcissism in male homosexuality represents the attempt to repair the unconscious, 'defective', 'castrated' state: ‘But the castration complex is not the fate of homosexuals alone, and what is unique here is the attempted mastery of it through the reproduced image of the body, the doubling” (p. 166). Leavy asserts that what is neurotic (i.e. unsatisfying) in the sexual life of homosexual men is not so different from that which is neurotic in heterosexuality: the inability to compromise with reality and accept the complementarity of a lover who was not himself the ideal' (p. 166).
Mr Cooper, a 27-year-old, openly gay man, presented for analysis after failed attempts to sustain an enduring romantic, sexual relationship with another man. A
year into treatment, he found himself feeling lonely and restless over the weekend. He went into the bathroom of his apartment to urinate. As he urinated, he caught sight of himself in a full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. He looked at his face and physique and, to his surprise, found himself attractive. Despite being regarded as handsome by past lovers, he had commonly thought of his old acne scars as unattractive
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HOMOSEXUALITY: COMING OUT OF THE CONFUSION
1437
and had regarded himself as “skinny and gangly' compared to other muscular, gay men with perfect complexions' whom he admired. “Maybe it was because of the light
behind me', he reported, but it was like I was someone else, and I liked who I saw.” He undressed in front of the mirror and proceeded to masturbate while staring at his own image. “It seemed a little strange that I was turned on by my own body, but I was. At one point, it was like I was getting off with a twin.”
His associations were to a memory from childhood. When he was about 8 years old, he stood naked in front of a mirror in his bedroom looking at himself. He took a marker and traced the outline of his body on the mirror. This reminded him of an earlier memory from age 5 years. A television show advertised a clear plastic mat that could temporarily adhere to the television screen such that children could draw on the plastic during the show. When the man in the television program drew on his plastic mat, the scene he drew “came to life-like magic!” Mr Cooper recalled persuading his father to buy this plastic mat and marker for him: “I thought, if I drew something, it would come to life. I wanted to draw Indians because I knew they only wore loin cloths. And I wanted to see under those loin cloths. I remember being so disappointed when it didn't work”.
Here then is a clinical illustration of Leavy's contention that the homosexual man is in search of his specular image revived outside of himself in order to repair his imagined “castration' (acne scars). Look how quickly, too, the mirror image or doubling of the body leads back to the father, in confirmation of Isay's (1989) formulation. The analysand was looking for his father's loving, admiring gaze, and perhaps, in the transferential “light from the window behind me', he was beginning to rediscover it. At the core of his neurosis was his driven quest for union with the perfect lover, which he imagined would magically transform his own bodily and emotional imperfections. When this did not occur, he lost interest in his current lover and took up the search again. Mr Cooper was neither characterologically narcissistic nor incipiently psychotic. On the contrary, once we were able to make conscious the illusory elements of his search, he was better able to accept limitations in himself and others. He fell in love with a man with whom he proceeded to have an intimate, loving and enduring relationship. Mr Cooper's devotion to his partner during a family crisis in the partner's life made clear the genuine caring and affection he felt for him. There was no question, in my view, that their relationship represented both mutual, emotional complementarity as well as “object-related love'.
This vignette lends support to Leavy's belief that the capacity for the love of another person does not depend on sexual orientation (1985a, p. 167). Thus, precisely because
Bergeret embraces the broader Freudian notion of narcissism, he continues the earlier conceptualization of homosexuality: (1) because a homosexual individual loves a same-gender object, the person is narcissistic; and (2) because the person is narcissistic, that person is incapable of “truly sexual”, object love.
To what exactly do Bergeret's repeated references to “narcissistic fixation’ refer? How does it manifest clinically? If he is referring to conflicts of shame, there may be some common ground here. I address issues of shame in a later section of this article ('Transference and technique'). I would view such shame, however, as related to
(culturally mediated) internalized homophobia, reactions to “everyday overstimulation? (see ‘Transference and technique' section), and to the narrowly defined body narcissism mentioned earlier and not to characterological “narcissistic fixation”. Further, Bergeret
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insists that homosexuality is not “truly sexual', but his claim seems to be more a theoretical abstraction than a clinical reality. Each of the cases presented by Isay (1989), for example, suggests that after neutrally conducted analysis homosexual men are just as freed up to enjoy romantic, passionate relationships as heterosexual individuals can be after successful analysis. Certainly that was the case with Mr Baker. Are the narcissistic fixations that Bergeret universally discovers’ in his homosexual patients a product of the assumption that homosexuality is presumed to be psychopathological? Leavy notes that such biased analysis induces precisely this reaction:
Stuck in the primitive anti-instinctual state of sphincter morality, the analysand will dredge up acknowledgments of the evils of his sexual life, in order to bolster his anxious unity with the analyst, whenever the analyst interprets his sexual striving as something to overcome (1985a, p. 160).
Of course, such a question could fairly be fired back at me. Is my claim that homosexual individuals are capable of passionate, object-related love a product of my own prejudiced assumptions that lead me to see only what I want to see? No one can ever reach complete certainty on such a question, but I can only report that my convictions have been arrived at slowly from twenty-five years of in-depth clinical observations in nineteen analysands and patients in intensive psychotherapy (many more if I count shorter-term psychotherapies and consultations). Further, both Wood (1995) and Roughton (2001b) presented detailed narratives of the evolutions of their views toward homosexuality formed over decades of clinical experience. What is so persuasive about their accounts is that each analyst began his analytic career believing that homosexuality was a neurotic inhibition of heterosexuality and that analysis could free up such individuals to lead fulfilling heterosexual lives. It was their repeated treatment failures with such patients that convinced them to rethink their theoretical views and alter their clinical approach.
Because Bergeret seems to regard the difference in the actual, external genitalia of the subject and object as the crucial determinant of whether the subject is capable of ‘entering into a truly sexual relational (and conflictive) series of issues”, the concept of psychic bisexuality is troublesome for him: “the imaginary representation of the “phallus” is not identical for a man, who anatomically possesses a penis, and for woman, who, in her imaginary representations, can only very poorly interpret narcissistically what it would be like to have one' (2002, p. 356). He relates a failure to negotiate the phallic stage to a developmental ‘halting at a homoerotic stage” (p. 356). Accordingly, homoeroticism represents an effort to strengthen the “gender” (masculine or feminine) narcissistically? (p. 356). For Bergeret, homophiles do not resolve a basic conflict of bisexuality: “the distinction between the masculine situation and the feminine situation does not arise in a clearly differential manner at the level of the sexual object” (p. 356).
Bergeret asserts that homosexuality represents a failure to negotiate the phallic phase. But is it possible to know that homosexual males do not experience phallic and genital libido as fully as heterosexual men? Or that clitoral stimulation is not an equivalent of penile sensation? While homosexual women may imagine that they have penises and homosexual men may desire to be penetrated as if they had vaginas, does either case imply their pleasure is ‘narcissistic' or pre-genital?
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Like narcissism, bisexuality encompasses a broad range of theoretical concepts and clinical observations that refer to both conscious and unconscious mental life as well as to internal fantasy and external reality. (For further elaboration, see Grossman, 2001; Smith, 2002.) These include bisexual identifications—the sense of maleness and femaleness and/or having masculine and feminine attributes. Object choice is also bisexual --romantic, erotic attraction to people who resonate consciously and unconsciously with parents, siblings and other important people of both genders from our past. The term also refers to individuals who engage in sexual acts with both men and women. Roughton denotes a bisexual person as someone
who is sexually attracted to, has erotic fantasies about, and who has a capacity for sexual pleasure with those of both sexes-—without either option serving primarily a defensive purpose to avoid, or compensate for, some conflict about the other (in Grossman, 2001, p. 1365).
Young-Bruehl amplifies this idea in her consideration of the
... composite (or composed) object, which blends parts, traits, characteristics from at least two, and almost always more, sources. A woman, for example, loves a woman who is her mother plus her brother, as did the female homosexual about whom Freud (1920) wrote. Here it is the object's bisexuality that is of great importance to the choser [sic] (2001, p. 205).
In two landmark articles (1993, 1996) on gender and homosexuality, Corbett argues that “male homosexuality is a differently structured masculinity, not a simulated femininity' (1993, p. 345). In the second article, Corbett investigates a subset of homosexual boys, parodically called “girlyboys’, and asserts that there may be forms of gender within homosexuality that contradict and move beyond the conventional categories of masculinity and femininity' (1996, p. 432).
I am well aware that the idea of a “fixed' sexual orientation in early childhood is controversial and unproven, and the evidence supporting psychic bisexuality in childhood is impressive. Herzog brilliantly describes a contemporary example in his two-year analysis of a 6-year-old girl who early in the treatment experienced herself as a “boy-girl' (2002, p. 65). The relation between psychic bisexuality and
erotic object choice, however, remains to be worked out. A childhood disposition to psychic bisexuality in the sense of shifting parental identifications—is no more of a contradiction to the possibility of an early, stable, erotic object choice or ‘sexual orientation’ than the notion of psychic bisexuality is a negation of the possibility of
stable core gender identity. I agree with Lewes that biologically or constitutionally determined homosexual object choice is only a partial elucidation, at best, of
developmental questions about homosexuality. Lewes notes, for example, that analytic theory has been unable to explain adequately an initial erotic attachment to the father in male homosexuality, while the constitutional approach fails to consider developmental processes occurring after such an attachment is established (1998, p. 344). Surely Lewes is correct that the ſtwo are ... complementary and need to be informed by the other, addressed as they are to essentially different questions” (p. 344).
I must raise the question as to whether some heterosexist bias is at work when, in reaction to the possibility of early homosexual stable object choice as an adaptive
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resolution to the Oedipus complex, the insistence on psychic bisexuality is considered contradictory. The facts of psychic bisexuality, the shifts in gendered identifications, and the blending of ‘masculine’ and “feminine' traits seem indisputable. And yet the actual state of erotic arousal-perhaps due in part to biological determinants toward one gender or the other seems of a different order than the intrapsychic fluidity of bisexual fantasies.
Oedipal dynamics and development
Because of the traditional and mainstream psychoanalytic emphasis on pre-oedipal dynamics in the search for etiological explanations of homosexuality, consideration of
the importance of oedipal dynamics in gay men and lesbian women has been largely overlooked until recently. As quoted earlier, Isay was the first analyst to detail the
centrality of oedipal development in some homosexual men (1989, pp. 29–30). Isay describes the romance with the father of the homosexually inclined boy, the concomitant withdrawal of the father, and the envious and competitive relationship with the mother (pp. 35-43). The resemblance of these dynamics to the negative oedipal stage belies what is new and significant in this formulation. The negative oedipal complex is secondary for the heterosexually inclined boy, a regression away from the positive oedipal complex.
In the homosexually inclined boy, however, these dynamics are primary and dominant which led Goldsmith to assert that the plight of Orestes, who murdered his mother to avenge the death of his father, ‘may capture the essential nature of this conflict more closely than that of Oedipus” (2001, pp. 1273-4). Schwartz, too, doubts whether the Oedipus complex expands ‘psychoanalytic understanding of same-sex oriented sexuality, free of the prejudices of the past' and offers an alternative ‘formulation that derives from a constructivist, gender-critical framework' (2001, p. 93). Leavy (1985b) cautions analysts against being led down the path of Greek mythology and away from the person on the couch. Blos (1985, p. 8) offers non-oedipal terminology to characterize the dynamics of father-son relationships, but even a developmentalist of his renown has been unable to budge most analysts from their terminological focus on Oedipus. I yield uneasily to the term for the sake of familiarity, despite my reservations regarding its problematic usage.
Whatever its mythological moniker, dyadic parent-child relations eventually give rise to triadic ones which pose specific, internal, developmental challenges the resolution of which leaves its imprint on psychic structure. Lived development is not neatly linear, however, and the notion of psychosexual stages, while still useful clinically, only has heuristic value. The complex oscillations between progression and regression and the impact of constitution and temperament, environmental stasis and change, trauma and loss require a developmental calculus beyond the scope of this article.
Goldsmith elaborates on the differences in the family romance of the homosexually inclined boy in noting that parental oedipal expectations run contrary to and therefore confound this stage of [homosexual] development” (2001, p. 1274). The homosexual boy has competitive and aggressive feelings toward his mother-rival, who may very well be anticipating and longing for a ʻchildhood romance' with her son. Goldsmith's central point is that, in the context of such an emotionally charged and confusing environment, the homosexual boy views the mother's behavior “through a lens distorted by the projection of his own aggressive impulses”, thereby explaining how the mother of a homosexual boy
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can retrospectively appear to him to be ‘malignant, seductive, intrusive, or over-aggressive simply by virtue of the fact that her reasonable maternal behavior is incongruent with his internal emotional life' (pp. 1274-5). Both Isay and Goldsmith thus offer a cogent explanation of the earlier, mainstream “theory of etiology of male homosexuality namely, “absent, withdrawn fathers' and 'intrusive, seductive mothers' so commonly reported by homosexual men. Analysts on such an etiological search took their analysands at face value without detecting the neurotic distortion inherent in these reports.
Lewes describes a “special oedipal mechanism' in some gay men who present the puzzling finding in their psychoanalytic treatment in which ‘no amount of probing, no phase in the vicissitudes of the transference, is ever able to uncover a significant phallic libidinal tie to the mother, even in therapies that have lasted several years” (1998, pp. 345-6). These men present no genuine or deep-rooted instance of heterosexual arousal. Lewes grappled with this finding since it must be true that the initial libidinal object had been the mother, at least in the oral stage” (p. 346). And yet in this group of men the dynamics of the phallic stage—indeed, the entire oedipal conflict—are enacted with the father as primary object. He reports in these cases that there is ‘no indication that the mother has ever served as a phallic oedipal object” (p. 346). He also observes that while in the so-called inverted (negative) Oedipus complex the mother serves as prohibitor of erotic striving and the source of the castration threat, in these cases “this role is taken again primarily by the father, even though he also serves as the object of libidinal strivings” (p. 346).
Lewes then considers the possibility that for these men their Oedipus complex operates in a newly discovered form that is distinct from the so-called positive and negative ones usually described. He calls this third form the plicate or folded' Oedipus complex “because in it a single figure, the father, plays two diametrically opposed and simultaneous roles the exciter and the prohibitor of erotic arousal' (p. 347). This form is not defensive or secondary within the context of the phallic period but represents the primary and central experience of phallic striving. Might it be that the ‘phallic tie? to the mother is not a general occurrence? Is Little Hans (Freud, 1909) here merely an epiphenomenon? While I concentrate in this article on recent contributions involving oedipal, developmental formulations of homosexuality, I do so as a necessary corrective to the earlier mainstream, psychoanalytic emphasis on pre-oedipal formulations. Certainly the possible pathways to a homosexual orientation are diverse such that references to the homosexualities--referring to the heterogeneity of homosexual orientation are apt.
Lewes's (1998) clinical observation that the father is the source of both erotic excitement and prohibition in some homosexual men is consistent with a clinical discovery of mine concerning the childhood and adolescent development of some gay men. I have termed this special feature commonly observed in male homosexual development “the overstimulation of everyday life' (Phillips, 2001), by which term I refer to the frequent experiences of homosexually inclined children and adolescents who are placed again and again in the company of same-gender parents, siblings and peers in various degrees of undress or nakedness and the subjective states generated by those experiences. The homosexually inclined child or adolescent may be repeatedly overstimulated by gender pairings that paradoxically were meant to protect against just such a risk. This everyday overstimulation is thus consciously unintentional: the adults involved inadvertently overstimulate the child through subscription to heterosexual societal norms.
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The internal landscape of this group of homosexual men is best described as a tantalized inner world of longing. It is relentless cycles of attraction, hope, excitement and arousal alternating with states of disappointment, loss, despair and grief that give their inner world a unique form and content. It seems plausible in this group of homosexual men that Lewes's (1998) plicate Oedipus complex is the underpinning of the everyday overstimulation’ I have observed. The oscillation between excitement and disappointment of the mid-adolescent, homosexually inclined boy toward his heterosexually inclined paramour may reflect internal, object-relational shifts toward his oedipal fathers' acting as both exciter and prohibitor.
It is common in the analyses of gay men to hear reports that during adolescence they had one or several unconsummated 'love affairs’ with heterosexual adolescent boys. These homosexually inclined, mid-adolescent boys pined away from afar' for their heterosexually inclined, close male friends. I contend that this longing is distinctly different in its origins and mechanisms than the usual longing anyone has for someone else. These homosexual adolescent boys long for love affairs with their heterosexual male friends as displacements for their (heterosexual) oedipal fathers and are operating from within their long-standing tantalized inner worlds. They seek to undo and reverse the shame and fear of exposure of the paternal rejection and withdrawal described by Isay (1989, pp. 39–41).
The crucial distinction resides in the basis of the paternal rejection. In heterosexual oedipal disappointment and anxiety, the father declares this particular woman taboo, while wittingly or unwittingly approving the boy's generic desire for a woman. In homosexual oedipal disappointment, the boy's desire itself is often attacked root and stem: desire not just for this particular man (the father) but for any man is taboo. This fact is powerfully reinforced by social and cultural pressures to conform to heterosexual ‘norms”. This version of homosexual adolescent longing, then, is a reflection of or failure to accept oedipal disappointment (for a more detailed elaboration of this point of view, see Phillips, 2001).
Transference and technique
As early as 1978, Mitchell challenged the prevailing psychoanalytic theoretical position that presumed homosexuality a priori to be psychopathological. Mitchell drew attention in a review of the analytic literature of the preceding twenty years (see Socarides, 1968; Ovesey, 1969; Hatterer, 1970) to the recurrent admonition to the analyst to depart from the traditional analytic position on non-directive neutrality by actively discouraging homosexual behavior and encouraging heterosexual behavior” (1981, p. 63). Regrettably, such a position is not relegated to the distant past. While Bergeret does not explicitly call for redirection of homosexual orientation, all of his clinical vignettes are directed at precisely such a goal. Although he briefly describes four cases of various ſclinical forms of homoeroticism' (2002, p. 357), strikingly he offers no details about the therapeutic outcome of any of them. Further, the tone of his article leaves little doubt that a persistent homosexual orientation would not be considered a successful analytic outcome by Bergeret since he warns against ‘falling into the trap of believing an apparently “sexual” discourse on the part of any homoerotic who finds himself beset, to one degree or another, by essentially narcissistic conflicts” (p. 361).
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Mitchell details the analytic technique—the directive-suggestive approach--devised during the nineteen sixties to treat” (i.e. reverse) homosexuality. He discusses in particular the work of Socarides (1968), Ovesey (1969) and Hatterer (1970), and offers a brilliant critique of the directive-suggestive approach which begins with this comment:
To declare homosexuality to be pathological, heterosexuality desirable, and to use various types of pressure to induce the patient to change his behavior from one to the other eliminates the possibility of finding out what the patient would do on his own as a consequence of psychoanalytic inquiry into his experience (1981, p. 68).
He then takes Socarides, Ovesey and Hatterer to task for their striking failure to demonstrate in their clinical work
how it is possible both to exploit compliance in the transference to produce behavioural change and then subsequently to interpret and resolve such a transference, nor how the basic contradiction in the position can be handled in good faith with the patient (p. 71).
Mitchell addresses another problematic aspect of the directive-suggestive approach namely, the consequences of failed treatment. He observes that even the most optimistic of the authors he cites report only a small percentage of ‘cures', which are defined as conversion to exclusive heterosexuality (27% by Bieber et al., 1962). Mitchell poignantly summarizes the double bind in which such patients find themselves:
With the analyst either overtly or covertly urging a behavioral transformation which in the large majority of cases doesn't take place, the result can only be a profound sense of failure, shame, self-hatred and a deep cynicism about the analytic process (1981, p. 73).
(For a detailed and moving account of the harm inflicted by such “conversion therapies’ — then and now—see Shidlo et al., 2001.)
Leavy also points to the impossibility of psychoanalytic treatment where the analyst sticks consistently to the conception of homosexuality as defense or deficiency. (I support his use of the word “consistently because there are occasions when this defensive posture is indeed paramount” (1985a, p. 160) in the analysis of homosexual individuals.) He notes how analysis proceeding under such prejudicial conditions succeeds only in confirming the prejudice over and over again (p. 160). Leavy notes that, even if the analyst maintains scrupulous neutrality on the morality or even normality of homosexuality, as long as it is interpreted primarily as a defensive function or treated as a defect to be overcome, the analyst cannot be separated analytically from the voice of an anguished parent (p. 160).
On the other hand, treatment that fails to analyze instances or phases when homosexuality is defensive strains neutrality in the opposite direction. In the analyses of some gay men and lesbian women, it is not unusual that heterosexual interest and excitement may emerge in certain phases off and on throughout the work. Such interest is often experienced as extremely threatening to the analysand's hard-fought, yet still tenuous analytic gains toward accepting—let alone welcoming—homosexual trends into the analysis. To (re)discover currents of heterosexual feeling and fantasy is experienced as at least confusing but more often as an unwanted, dreaded stranger attempting to enter
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the room. The panicky vehemence with which the analysand will slam the door in the stranger's face must be patiently and tactfully interpreted. This will, in turn, often lead to a sudden shift into a negative transference with vituperative accusations that the analyst is prejudiced and is trying to force the analysand into heterosexuality. Earlier analytic approaches mistakenly understood such material only as resistance against a “definitive” heterosexual orientation, whereas contemporary approaches would view such material as more grist for the analytic mill. Patiently weathering such storms while actively engaging the confusion in order to sort through previously disowned elements of the self-just as one would do when homosexual material emerges in a manifestly heterosexual analysand—is essential to permitting the analysand a deeper sense of conviction about the eventual outcome of the analytic work. Blechner observes that “If you cannot consider heterosexual and homosexual activity and ideation to have equivalent potentials to be defensive or expressive of desire, then you cannot consider yourself neutral' (1993, pp. 635-6). Mitchell notes that analysts can never be free of personal biases and must constantly search for them in their own experience and in the patient's reactions:
The pursuit of a bias-free ideal seems futile and disingenuous; the analyst serves the patient better by an openness toward discovering and rediscovering his or her own prejudices, affinities, and fears as an inevitable and interesting feature of analytic inquiry (1996, p. 71).
Lesser also challenges the idea of analyst as blank screen: Is there such a thing as neutral analytic curiosity?' (1995, p. 84).
Recognizing that homosexually inclined children and adolescents grow up within the dominant heterosexual culture is the functionally neutral (Kris, 1990, p. 615)
analytic stance with the openly homosexual patient. I have emphasized (Phillips, 2001) the importance, for example, of analyzing the developmental impact of the everyday overstimulation of childhood and adolescence on the person's current sexual adaptation and the capacity for integrating sexual and affectionate currents into a coherent love life. In this regard, it is crucial to be aware of the complex interplay between shame and overstimulation. Homosexual adolescent boys live in daily fear of exposure both of their sexually aroused state and of the homoerotic source of their arousal in school athletic locker rooms. Vaughan draws attention to similar experiences for homosexually inclined, adolescent girls (1998, p. 162).
Yorke asserts that “there is ... no defense against shame. One can only take measures to avoid the situations that give rise to it—to restrict, for example, social exposure
(1990, p. 406). Thus, when the overstimulation of everyday life evokes these dynamics of shame—the fear of exposure, the need to hide, the lack of internal defense against shame, avoidance of social exposure being the sole protection—the uncannily apt convergence is a description, indeed, a definition, of the homosexual closet (Phillips, 2001, pp. 1252-3). Blechner observes that one difficulty ‘with being in the closet for a long time is that you get used to it, and you start to lose awareness of how debilitating it is” (1996, p. 231; see also Sedgwick, 1990; Drescher, 1998, pp. 265–91; Vaughan, 1999).
These shame dynamics frequently play out in the analyses of gay men and lesbian women. Insistent obsessional and compulsive character traits, for example, that fail to yield at all to traditional interpretation may represent not simply entrenched character armor against unconscious conflict. They may also be defending against conscious but
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disavowed states of overstimulation here and now within analytic sessions that have become activated within the transference. The shame associated with overstimulation
may reinforce the conscious avoidance of the overstimulated state during a session. Yorke, for example, notes that it has been rightly said that guilt brings material into an analysis while shame keeps it out” (1990, p. 381). Evidence of trancelike states, autohypnosis or falling asleep on the couch in response to the emergence of an erotic transference often signals an active struggle against such overstimulation. Vaughan notes that lesbian women report in treatment having responded to this everyday overstimulation ‘by disconnecting from their bodies” (1998, p. 162). Drescher also observes how dissociative defenses are commonly employed in the lives and treatments of gay men (1998, pp. 261-5).
I have reported elsewhere (Phillips, 2001) on the analysis of a 32-year-old gay man who presented for treatment for difficulty in initiating and sustaining romantic, sexual relationships with other men. Diagnostically, Mr Davis had an obsessional character disorder with depressive-masochistic traits. The patient had grown up in a family with several siblings and as a result had slept in the same bed as his brother from early childhood until he left home for college. When puberty arrived, Mr Davis found himself attracted to his brother especially as they slept next to one another dressed only in their underpants. One night, after his brother was asleep, the patient had gently touched his brother's bare chest. His brother awoke slightly, brushed his hand aside and fell back asleep. The next morning the brother teased the patient for ‘being all over him last night', which was a source of intense shame even to the present. When Mr Davis went off to college, he repeatedly fell in love with unavailable, heterosexual, male classmates, silently pining away for them. This pattern also found its way into the analysis.
As more direct expressions of curiosity and feelings of closeness for me emerged in the transference, his feelings tilted subtly in a sexual direction. For example, he said how grateful he was that I had stayed the course of the analysis with him despite how frustrating he knew he could be. He spoke directly of feeling close to me, but then the subject would change to another person of whom he was also fond and for whom he explicitly sexual feelings. I shared this observation with him: “Did you notice that what began as an expression of warmth and affection for me ended up with your speaking about your sexual feelings for [person X]?” A characteristic pattern would then ensue. He would fall silent and eventually report that he had ‘hit a wall' or that I've gone blank'. I would then invite him to see what came to mind about the wall' and the ‘blank’, and strikingly he responded the same way each time. He would compliantly and somewhat obsessively take up the invitation and say, "OK, let me see what comes to mind. I'll just relax. I'll just let my thoughts go. I'm drifting off. I'm feeling so relaxed. I'm getting kind of sleepy. I feel like drifting off and falling asleep”. All of this was said in a sing-song and progressively dreamier manner culminating in his actually falling asleep on the couch. He would subsequently wake himself a few minutes later with his own snoring.
When this first happened, I was perplexed. I did not know what else to do other than to analyze his falling asleep as a resistance as a kind of dramatic, somatic changing the subject. Several such attempts led us nowhere. Gradually, as I paid more attention to the pattern itself, I came to recognize the trance-like prelude to falling asleep as autohypnosis-much like that reported by Shengold (1967) in his landmark article on the effects of overstimulation. His patients, in the aftermath of brutally traumatic and
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repeated molestations, employed autohypnosis as a way of contending with chronic states of overstimulation. This revelation enabled me to see that the falling asleep on
the couch was not only a resistance to the burgeoning erotic transference: it was also an indulgence of it. Mr Davis was enacting with me what must have happened in bed with his brother night after night. There he was, filled with sexual excitement and arousal for his nearly naked but forbidden brother who was lying next to him. What could he do with this unbearably intense build-up of sexual stimulation with no available outlet for discharge? He became ingenious at obsessively thinking about other things—other things that would help calm the tension, that would assist him in relaxing, that would promote drifting off, which after all was the only substantive solution available that would bring some temporary relief-sleep! Falling asleep on the couch, then, represented both a transference resistance against the developing sexual arousal within a session as well as a transference re-enactment of how he dealt with the arousal in bed with his brother.
The re-enactment in the transference of this type of overstimulation and the defensive struggles against it give rise to characteristic countertransference reactions in the analyst. The analyst may unwittingly collude with patients in their dissociative defenses against overstimulation by becoming distracted, bored or sleepy. Or the analyst may experience a version of the sexual overstimulation itself by feeling mild sexual arousal accompanied by explicit erotic fantasies about the patient or a displacement figure. Analysts may react with shame and/or guilt to such fantasies. When recognized and brought under self-analytic scrutiny by the analyst, these reactions—both the arousal and the shame and/or guilt-can prove extremely illuminating with regard to the patient's early, warded-off experiences of everyday overstimulation (see Phillips, 2002). I do not address further in this article the long-standing and now well-known heterosexist, heterophilic and/or homophobic countertransference biases in clinical work with and psychoanalytic writing about gay and lesbian individuals since the subject has been written about by others with decisive eloquence (Chodorow, 1992; Blechner, 1993, 1995, 1996; Lesser, 1993; O'Connor and Ryan, 1993; Schwartz, 1993; Domenici and Lesser, 1995; Isay, 1996; Magee and Miller, 1997; Young-Bruehl, 2000; Roughton, 2002).
During the Middle Ages certain allegedly aberrant behaviors were “diagnostically indicative of witchcraft. When this “diagnosis was confirmed by the historical equivalent of the clinical interview-judicial and religious inquisition the individual was ‘treated’ with the only know ‘cures” of the affliction ranging from exorcism to execution. Freud analyzed such demonological possession as exemplary of neurosis-repudiated and repressed “reprehensible wishes' projected into the external world (1923b, p. 72). Freud did not, of course, present any arguments against the existence of demonological possession. He assumed such a phenomenon to be anachronistic, a product of widespread religious belief from a bygone era. Strangely, contemporary psychoanalytic discourse on homosexuality exists in a time warp reminiscent of Freud's article. It is as though within the same era different analytic researchers present evidence from their analyses of gay men and lesbian women favoring as diverse understandings of homosexuality as pre-oedipal fixation and near-psychotic psychopathology and garden-variety neurosis not unlike the neurotic difficulties of heterosexual individuals. To paraphrase Stephen Mitchell (1996), what is the perplexed, postmodernist clinician to do? I have attempted to show that the ways homosexuality is pathologized as universally indicative of a severe, narcissistic,
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pre-oedipal condition can be critiqued by psychoanalytic reasoning and evidence. With such considerations before us, perhaps we can begin to come out of the confusion.
Translations of summary
Homosexualität: der Verwirrung entkommen. Der Autor vertritt die These, dass ältere theoretische Annahmen zu der konzeptuellen Verwirrung beitragen, die für einen Großteil der zeitgenössischen psychoanalytischen Forschungen über die Homosexualität charakteristisch ist. Bergerets (2002) jüngst in dieser Zeitschrift publizierter Beitrag ist ein Beispiel für diese Verwirrung. Seine Behauptung, Homosexualität sei keine Sexualität „im eigentlichen Sinn“, sondern lediglich eine defensive, narzisstische, von der Heterosexualität distanzierende Fixierung oder eine nahezu psychotische Verleugnung der Heterosexualität, wird widerlegt. Der Autor zeigt spezifische Bereiche auf, in denen die konzeptuelle Verwirrung in bezug auf die Homosexualität im psychoanalytischen Diskurs noch immer vorherrscht, und
führt dies auf ältere theoretische Grundannahmen zurück. Verwirrung herrscht u.a. in bezug auf manifeste versus latente Homosexualität, Narzissmus und Bisexualität, ödipale Dynamik und Entwicklung sowie Übertragung und Technik.
Homosexualidad: salir de la confusión. El autor sostiene que anteriores supuestos teóricos conducen a la confusión conceptual sobre la homosexualidad en gran parte de la investigación psicoanalítica contemporánea. Un reciente trabajo de Bergeret, publicado en esta revista, es un ejemplo de ello. El autor refuta el argumento de Bergeret de que la homosexualidad no es una “verdadera” sexualidad sino una fijación defensiva narcisistica que la aleja de la heterosexualidad o una negación casi psicótica de ella. El autor luego esclarece aquellas áreas específicas en el discurso psicoanalítico en las que aún prevalece una confusión conceptual respecto a la homosexualidad, como consecuencia de premisas teóricas anteriores: homosexualidad manifiesta versus latente, narcisismo y bisexualidad, dinámica edípica y desarrollo, y
transferencia y técnica.
Homosexualité : sortir de la confusion. L'auteur considère que les toutes premières hypothèses théoriques psychanalytiques contribuent à la confusion conceptuelle dans la recherche psychanalytique contemporaine concernant l'homosexualité. L'article de Bergeret récemment publié dans la présente revue est exemplaire de
cette confusion. Son affirmation selon laquelle l'homosexualité n'est pas une « vraie » sexualité, mais plutôt une fixation narcissique défensive, plus ou moins proche dl’hétérosexualité ou le déni psychotique de celle- ci, est réfutée. L'auteur clarifie par la suite certaines zones spécifiques de confusion conceptuelle concernant
l'homosexualité, encore prévalentes dans le discours psychanalytique, et provenant des toutes premières hypothèses théoriques. Ces zones de confusion concernent l'homosexualité manifeste dans son opposition à l'homosexualité latente, le narcissisme et la bisexualité, la dynamique oedipienne et le développement,
le transfert et la technique.
L'omosessualità: uscire dalla confusione. L'autore dichiara che alcune vecchie affermazioni teoriche contribuiscono alla confusione concettuale sull'omosessualità in quasi tutta la ricerca psicoanalista contemporanea. Il lavoro di Bergeret (2002) recentemente pubblicato su questa rivista è un esempio di questa confusione. È rifiutata la sua tesi che l'omosessualità non sia una “vera” sessualità ma semplicemente una fissazione narcisistica difensiva lontana dalla eterosessualità o la negazione quasi psicotica della stessa. L’autore chiarisce quindi quali siano le aree specifiche di confusione concettuale sull'omosuessalità, una confusione ancora assai diffusa nel discorso psicoanalitico e derivante da vecchie premesse teoriche. Tra
le aree di confusione si citano quelle dell'omosessualità latente versus manifesta, del narcisismo e della bisessualità, delle dinamiche e dello sviluppo edipici, del transfert e della tecnica.
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Homosexuality:
Coming out of the confusion
SIDNEY H. PHILLIPS
234 Church Street, Suite 300, New Haven, CT 06510–1802, USA – sidney.phillips@yale.edu
(Final version accepted 4 June 2003)
Int J Psychoanal 2003; 84:1431–1450
The Overstimulation of Everyday Life: I. New Aspects of Male Homosexuality
Sidney H. Phillips - 2001
Abstract
Western heterosexual culture surrounds the homosexually inclined boy in a climate of erotic overstimulation that powerfully affects his development and adult sexual adaptation. This assertion is illustrated through a case presentation of a homosexual man who shared a bed with his brother from childhood into adolescence. Analysis of the patient's transference enactment—repeatedly falling asleep on the couch—gradually revealed the psychic impact of this everyday overstimulation: the creation of a tantalized inner world of longing. The regular occurrence and developmental understanding of adolescent homosexual boys' unrequited love affairs with adolescent heterosexual boys are described and explored. Finally, the overstimulation of everyday life is proposed as a new model for understanding certain behavioral aspects of male homosexuality, such as the avoidance of rough-and-tumble play in childhood and homosexual cruising.
Sexual orientation and psychotherapy.
Phillips, S. H., Richardson, J., & Vaughan, S. C. (2005).
Sexual orientation and psychotherapy. In G. O. Gabbard, J. S. Beck, & J. Holmes (Eds.), Oxford textbook of psychotherapy (pp. 421-430). New York, NY, US: Oxford University Press.
Abstract
Setting aside a chapter to explore the implications of our patient's sexual orientation on their psychotherapy suggests that the treatment of gay, lesbian, and bisexual patients differs from the work we do with our heterosexual patients. In many ways, of course, it doesn't. Much of our daily work focuses on the mitigation of mental disorders and of life challenges that transcend the categories of sexual orientation. Nevertheless, gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals do bring to their treatments particular life experiences that are less common in the lives of heterosexual patients and that can profoundly shape the goals and the techniques of their psychotherapies. The mental health profession has its own developmental history that also contributes to the challenges clinicians face in treating these patients. Although attitudes regarding homosexuality have changed rapidly in the last few decades, we have behind us a long history of considering homosexuality a sin, a crime, a form of degeneracy, and--our own contribution to this list--a psychiatric disorder. Despite the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association's nosology in 1973, this legacy still casts a shadow over our efforts to understand our gay patients as clinicians and as a profession. Perhaps what is unique about homosexual and bisexual people would disappear in an unbiased society. But in our current world, conventional judgments about gender, the necessity for hiding and secrecy, and the presumption that all children will turn out to be heterosexual make for common developmental challenges in the lives of gay and lesbian patients, which, in turn, lead to particular clinical presentations and unique technical challenges for the therapist. In this chapter the authors examine each of these areas to define a psychotherapeutic approach to gay, lesbian, and bisexual patients that has, at its core, the goal of promoting the healthy integration of our patients' sexual orientation into their personality as a whole. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Related links:
OCTOBER 23, 2018
“APPEASEMENT” - “SYNOD ON YOUTH” 2018 BISHOPS' DEGENERATION OF LOVE - Caritas in veritate - Pope Benedict XVI https://fathermartykurylowicz.blogspot.com/2018/10/synod-on-youth-2018-degeneration-of.html
pacify or placate (someone) by acceding to their demands
SEPT 20, 2018
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
F L A S H B A C K S
Traumatic vs Loving
HATE vs LOVE
* * * * *
UNCONSCIOUS
of
Early Childhood
ANTIGAY
Traumatic Memories
The Compulsion to Repeat the Trauma
Re-enactment, Revictimization, and Masochism
Bessel A. van der Kolk, MD
Psychiatric Clinics of North America,
Volume 12, Number 2, Pages 389-411, June 1989
&
A flashback
December 26, 2008 –
Fr. Marty Kurylowicz
Posted below:
A
Lasting & Life-debilitating
Early Childhood
Memory of
Hate & Brutal Violence
Ennis's Traumatic Early Childhood Memory Scene - Video
A
Powerful, Enduring &
Life-sustaining
Life-sustaining
Memory of
LOVE
"was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger." Video
“A new command I give you:
Love one another. As I
have loved you, so
you must love
one another.
Love one another. As I
have loved you, so
you must love
one another.
By this everyone will know that
you are my disciples, if you
love one another.”
love one another.”
John 13:34-35
“If you continue in my word, you
are truly my disciples; and
you will know the truth,
and the truth will
make you free.”
John 8:31-32
TRUTH
Will Set Us Free NOT FEAR
&
&
HYSTERIA!!!
John Paul II & Benedict XVI gives Us the recipe to find Truth - it comes from the light of Reason/Science and Faith/Religion in Dialogue that we learn the true meaning of LOVE.
Without TRUTH there is no LOVE
Science +
+ Religion = Truth = LOVE
Pope Benedict XVI 2009
THE BREACH - Antigay Prejudices, Unsubstantiated, Suppression, Repression, Exploitation, Globalization, Annihilation - - NO SCIENCE - - NO TRUTH - - THEREFORE - - - NO LOVE
Related links:
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2018
LET’S GET A GRIP!!! - Divide & Separate - A Curia Tactic - PANICKING EXPOSURE - Burke & Lepanto = Denunciation of “GAYS” in the Church and Attacks Threats - UNFETTERED Economic Liberalism
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2018
MENTAL HEALTH of "OUT" (Gay Athletes) vs. "REPRESSED" (Curia & Hierarchy) HOMOSEXUALS
TUESDAY, JANUARY 9, 2018
Part 4D - NAZI ABUSE OF SCIENCE
HUMAN
ATTACHMENT
Bowlby - Ainsworth - Hazan
“The Cradle to the Grave” - Emotional Bond
Infants and their Caregivers
Adult Romantic Partners
Read more: Part 4A & Part 4B
The Absence of
Parental Love
On Homosexuality
Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well considered and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child’s spirit.
Erik Erikson
Read more: Part 4A & Part 4B
…The forced suppression of a gay child’s sexual orientation during early childhood years growing up —- this is the problem. This is the absence of parental love that is the problem. It is this heinous form of child abuse that is the problem - supported and promoted by - the negligence of the complete absence of the science on homosexuality in the Catechism of the Catholic Church regarding homosexuality. It kills human bonding that develops human EMPATHY!!! It kills LOVE!!! It promotes hatred - a never ending hatred - gives license - to be as mean as you can be - for as long as you want!!! All because this child was not loved!!! It is the never ending story of child abuse -- the mutilation of a child's spirit!!! Read more: Part 4B http://fathermartykurylowicz.blogspot.com/2017/11/part-4b-homosexuality-if-it-is-not.html
HOMOSEXUALITY
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
RELIGIOUS
BREACH = HATE = LGBTQ YOUTH =
HOMELESS = SURVIVAL SEX
RC’S BREACH - PREPARED WAY FOR CLIMATE CHANGE
Twisted - Isaiah 40:3
LGBTQ Youth At Higher Risk For Homelessness, Sex Trafficking
Jan 24, 2018
…Nationally, about 40 percent of homeless youth identify as LGBTQ. In Springfield, the average is higher - at 55 percent.
Reynolds says their sexual orientation is most likely the reason they ended up on the streets. Because they need shelter and food, homeless youth are a vulnerable target for labor and sex trafficking.
…”The biggest target right now is young gay men," said Reynolds.
It's a situation that can be even harder to spot. For any person looking from the outside, it can look like a normal relationship.
"A typical scenario would be if a young gay man would go to Martha's and then two or three days later he would tell me that he's been staying at an old gentleman's house," said Reynolds. "And everything was going great for a while, and then the older gentleman started asking for favors in return for staying there. That's sex trafficking."
Reynolds says their sexual orientation is most likely the reason they ended up on the streets. Because they need shelter and food, homeless youth are a vulnerable target for labor and sex trafficking.
…”The biggest target right now is young gay men," said Reynolds.
It's a situation that can be even harder to spot. For any person looking from the outside, it can look like a normal relationship.
"A typical scenario would be if a young gay man would go to Martha's and then two or three days later he would tell me that he's been staying at an old gentleman's house," said Reynolds. "And everything was going great for a while, and then the older gentleman started asking for favors in return for staying there. That's sex trafficking."
The situation can escalate and go as far as that person forcing the youth to perform favors for others in exchange for shelter and other goods.
"A lot of the at-risk population that we have are the ones that are engaging in that survival sex, or having to give something in order to have a place to stay, and we would consider that unsafe housing," said Sudduth.
Reynolds says young gay men are also less likely to report.
"That's the last thing they're going to do, is to tell someone that they are being taken advantage of every night by another person," said Reynolds.
Reynolds believes what they are fighting are overwhelming religious implications in the area.
"It's sort of top heavy. There really isn't another answer. It's either this religion or not," she said. "It's difficult to fight that money and that power when that's what existed for so long. It sort of tends to lead a blind eye to what's happening on the underside of society."
"No one chooses to be homeless. No one chooses to be taken advantage of by an older gentleman. No one chooses to be sex trafficked," said Reynolds. "We've got to get past the religion oppression. It cannot matter anymore what you believe religiously, you have to look at them as a human being. It's that simple.”… Read more:
Sexual Trafficking of LGBTQ Youth in the Americas Photo
Homeless Youth at High Risk of Human Trafficking Photo
American Association of Suicidology Photo
Dr. Caitlin Ryan,
Family Acceptance Project
Documentary, APR 27, 2016, 45:00 - Listen
Michigan Radio NPR - Photo
Homeless LGBTQ Youth and Progressive Churches:
A New Agenda for Care and Justice - Feb 02, 2016 - Photo
The Presence of
Parental Love
Written by - Diane Warren - to honor her father
Sung by - Celine Dion
For all those times you stood by me
For all the truth that you made me see
For all the joy you brought to my life
For all the wrong that you made right
For every dream you made come true
For all the love I found in you
I'll be forever thankful baby
You're the one who held me up
Never let me fall
You're the one who saw me through through it all
You were my strength when I was weak
You were my voice when I couldn't speak
You were my eyes when I couldn't see
You saw the best there was in me
Lifted me up when I couldn't reach
You gave me faith 'cause you
Lifted me up when I couldn't reach
believed
I'm everything I am
Because you loved me
You gave me wings and made me fly
You touched my hand I could touch the sky
I lost my faith, you gave it back to me
You said no star was out of reach
You stood by me and I stood tall
I had your love I had it all
I'm grateful for each day you gave me
Maybe I don't know that much
But I know this much is true
I was blessed because I was loved by you
You were my strength when I was weak
You were my voice when I couldn't speak
You were my eyes when I couldn't see
You saw the best there was in me
Lifted me up when I couldn't reach
You gave me faith 'cause you believed
I'm everything I am
Because you loved me
You were always there for me
The tender wind that carried me
A light in the dark shining your love into my life
You've been my inspiration
Through the lies you were the truth
My world is a better place because of you
You were my strength when I was weak
You were my voice when I couldn't speak
You were my eyes when I couldn't see
You saw the best there was in me
Lifted me up when I couldn't reach
You gave me faith 'cause you believed
I'm everything I am
Because you loved me
You were my strength when I was weak
You were my voice when I couldn't speak
You were my eyes when I couldn't see
You saw the best there was in me
Lifted me up when I couldn't reach
You gave me faith 'cause you believed
I'm everything I am
Because you loved me
I'm everything I am
Because you loved me
Diane Warren explained in the book Chicken Soup For the Soul: The Story Behind The Song how she honors her father in this song.
FORMALIZED A DOCUMENT ON
ADULT PORNOGRAPHY
While Excluding Science on
Human Sexuality
USCCBishops
U.S. bishops approve statement that calls pornography 'mortal sin'
Nov 18, 2015 https://www.ncronline.org/news/vatican/us-bishops-approve-statement-calls-pornography-mortal-sin
Catholic bishops find pornography more important than poverty
Dec. 4, 2015
Pope Francis’ emphasis has been on “a poor church for the poor” and the church as a “field hospital.” But the agenda of the American bishops at their annual meeting in Baltimore last month was business as usual, with a focus on abortion, same-sex marriage, religious liberty and, especially, pornography….
Read more:
A Reaction Formation Against Porn
Those who advocate against the dangers of sexual arousal fear their own desires
David J. Ley Ph.D. - May 25, 2014
In May 2014, a Chicago-area Catholic priest was arrested, allegedly for exposing himself to other adults at a gas station. He turned himself in after he was identified by the license plate on his car. Even now, I imagine the man is sitting in a police station, tormented by his actions, in agony for his mistakes. I sympathize with the pain he must feel, and his fear of the rejection, judgment and scorn he will surely experience from his Church and congregation.
The irony of his hypocrisy is made worse by the monsignor’s recent campaign against the seductive, insidious and “addictive” dangers of Internet porn. The clergyman has written and spoken publicly about how Internet pornography, so readily accessible to teens on their phones and computers, causes neurochemicals changes in their brains, and warps the young people’s ideas of sex, love and intimacy:
“One huge concern is the personal isolation that porn creates. It is such a fake form of intimacy and love, it does the absolute opposite of fulfilling each person’s need for intimacy and love. ... There are great negative effects on people on a social, personal, family and relational level.
“It is just a lie, a false presentation (of love and intimacy) … Many, if not most, kids are starting to get addicted.”
He went on to suggest that the crisis of Internet pornography was something that parents, congregations and communities needed to act on, because “Kids ages 11 to 17 are the highest consumers of pornography, according to recent statistics.”
This man’s well-meaning but destructive campaign was based on misconceptions, driven by fear, probably his own fears, of the power that sexual arousal has in his life and that of others. Porn isn’t addictive, it doesn’t change one’s brain, and children under 17 are definitely not the highest consumers of pornography. Porn isn’t addictive, but perhaps fear is.
As an advocate against the sex/porn addiction industry, I am regularly challenged with fear-based rhetoric, that porn and sex can lead people to dangerous, destructive, frightening sexual acts…
A reaction formation is a psychological concept, whereby a person with a strong, uncomfortable desire, develops an even stronger, exaggerated, public stance against that secret, shameful desire. Shakespeare knew this human dynamic, when he wrote in Hamlet, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
Mark Foley is a former US House Representative, who was a political leader against child pornography, homosexuality and sex offenses against children. He resigned from the House after revelations of a scandal involving a young male page and Foley’s inappropriate communications with the young man. Ted Haggard is an American minister, who preached against homosexuality and exhorted his congregations to support anti-gay legislations. Haggard was later exposed as engaging in homosexual relationships, and even later identified himself as bisexual. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich castigated President Bill Clinton’s infidelity during impeachment proceedings, while Gingrich himself was having an affair…
Read more:
EXPLOSIVE ANTIGAY OUTRAGE
Conservative News Publications
As Per usual NO Supporting Documentation
Accusations Expansion
“HOMOSEXUAL NETWORK”
“SAME PLAYBOOK” "2015"
Conservative media move to front line of battle to undermine Pope Francis
Philip Pullella - August 30, 2018
…In a bombshell statement published last weekend when Pope Francis was in Ireland, Vigano, the former Vatican ambassador to Washington, urged Francis to resign on the grounds he knew for years about the sexual misconduct of an American cardinal and did nothing.
The full extent of journalists’ involvement in the statement - from conception and editing to translation and publication - emerges from a series of Reuters interviews that reveal a union of conservative clergy and media aimed at what papal defenders say is a campaign to weaken the reformist Francis’s pontificate…
…Vigano said he had told the pope of the allegations five years ago, soon after Francis’ election. The statement included no supporting documents and also accused a long list of current and past Vatican and U.S. Church officials of facilitating the expansion of a “homosexual network” in the Church.
Pope Francis told reporters on his plane returning from Ireland that he would “not say one word” about the accusations. “Read the document carefully and judge it for yourselves. It speaks for itself,” he said…
…“It’s very reminiscent of what is going on in conservative politics in the United States. It’s the same playbook,” said David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University in New York. He was alluding to the close relationship between President Donald Trump’s administration and conservative-leaning news outlets such as Fox News… Read more:
TRUTH
Will Set Us Free NOT
HYSTERIA!!!
John Paul II & Benedict XVI gives Us the recipe to find Truth - it comes from the light of Reason/Science and Faith/Religion in Dialogue that we learn the true meaning of love.
Science +
+ Religion = Truth = LOVE
Pope Benedict XVI 2009
St. Francis, Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy Photo
‘God Made You This Way,’ Pope Is Said to Have
Chilean bishops offer mass resignation over sex
The Overstimulation of Everyday Life: 1. New Aspects
of Male Homosexuality
Sidney H. Phillips, M.D., 2002 - Photo
"Homosexuality: coming out of the confusion”
Sidney H. Phillips, M.D. - Int J Psychoanal
1518 appointed the Papal Master of Ceremonies
an OUTRAGED [hysterical] critic of Michelangelo’s NUDES
- Michelangelo responded by DEPICTING
Cesena, in his “Last Judgment” fresco -
as the judge of the underworld with -
The letter dated: July 12, 2017
Science +
+ Religion = Truth = LOVE
July 12, 2017
Bishop David J. Walkowiak
Bishop of the Grand Rapids Diocese
360 Division Avenue S.,
Grand Rapids, MI 49503-4501
Dear Bishop David,
I received your letter dated October 2015, that included a request to set an appointment to dialogue with you. At the time, my commitments,obligations and lack of financial means did not permit me to follow through. Furthermore, the around trip from Canton, MI to Grand Rapids, MI would have been about eight hours. However, after seeking reliable spiritual direction I was advised to write a letter to accept your request to meet. In the process of writing this letter, I began to thoroughly research the situation, from the combined insight obtained from three professionals perspectives, as a priest, as a psychologist, and as a historian. Through these perspectives, I have analyzed the many ways in which I was a victim of antigay hierarchal violence, having no judicial oversight to appeal to for protection within the church or civilly. This is an unidentified form of structural violence directed not at me alone but also many priests, theologians, sisters, religious and others, including Pope Francis for the past four decades - all have been victims of this form of violence.
S t r u c t u r a l V i o l e n c e
Introduction
by Deborah Du Nann Winter and Dana C. Leighton
Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century
…Direct violence is horrific, but its brutality usually gets our attention: we notice it, and often respond to it. Structural violence, however, is almost always invisible, embedded in ubiquitous social structures, normalized by stable institutions and regular experience. Structural violence occurs whenever people are disadvantaged by political, legal, economic, or cultural traditions. Because they are longstanding, structural inequities usually seem ordinary—the way things are and always have been. But structural violence produces suffering and death as often as direct violence does, though the damage is slower, more subtle, more common, and more difficult to repair. The chapters in this section teach us about some important but invisible forms of structural violence, and alert us to the powerful cultural mechanisms that create and maintain them over generations…
One outcome of exclusionary thinking is the belief that victims of violence must in some way deserve their plight. But certainly it is easy to see that young children do not deserve to be victims…
Section II: Winter, D. D., & Leighton, D. C. (2001). Structural violence. In D. J. Christie, R. V. Wagner, & D. D. Winter (Eds.), Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century. New York: Prentice-Hall.
The main purpose of this form of structural violence is to silence and remove anyone in the Church who openly discusses the science on the sexual orientation of homosexuality - gay people. This antigay hierarchical, structural violence has been successful in firmly suppressing this science on homosexuality for the past 60 years. In 1957, world renowned psychologist, Dr. Evelyn Hooker conducted ground breaking research proving that homosexuality is not a mental illness. She proved that being homosexual was just as normal as being heterosexual. For years the hierarchical church has rebuked such scientifically sound findings and have championed the obsessive suppression of gay people. Such actions lead to question who benefits from falsifying truth? The hierarchical church did not suppress the scientific research on heart surgery or cancer for the past 60 years. This vicious form of gay suppression is entrenched in the corruption of the curia in which speaking the truth has become a reprehensible thing. Through my years of analysis, I have come to find that the greatest harm this suppression imposes is on our children.
Truly I tell you, unless you
change and become like little children,
you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this
child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
And whoever welcomes one such child in
my name welcomes me.
Matthew 18: 3-5
…whoever causes one of these
little ones
who believe in Me to stumble,
it would be better for him
to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck,
and to be drowned in the
depth of the sea.
Matthew 18:6
My “coming out” in March 1997 was all based on substantiated science and scripture. Furthermore, it was motivated to protect defenseless children. How did risking my life by coming out warrant such extreme vindictive retaliation for the past 20 years by members of the curia and hierarchy?
How did it get twisted around that I refused to return to the Grand Rapids Dioceses, when in fact, it was made clear to me that it was unsafe for me to return by their coercing me to acquiesce to being sent away to be re-educated on the science on the sexual orientation of homosexuality. They wanted me to leave the priesthood on my own, which would be another grave sin to commit. Since I had no recourse to appeal to for justice in 1997 - what recourse would I have available to me if I returned and more severe immoral tactics were used against me?
This tactic of the curia to dispose of someone was most recently demonstrated by Cardinal Raymond Burke firing Boeselager the Grand Chancellor of the Knights of Malta. Burke falsified a papal decision of Pope Francis that no one was to be fired, that the problematic issues with the Knights of Malta should be resolved through dialogue. Burke without any true dialogue with Boeselager stated that it was Pope Francis’s wish that he resign as the Grand Chancellor of the Knights of Malta. When Boeselager refused to resign because of “unreasonable circumstances,” Burke fired him on the grounds of disobedience. Sound familiar? Boeselager, then appealed directly to Pope Francis and an investigation was ordered into the firing of Boeselager. It was later exposed that the grounds that Burke had used against Boeselager were over “condoms.” However, this information was contrived by a group of Burke’s supporters known as “Lepanto Institute for the Restoration of All Things in Christ.” This group is described as a “militant traditionalist organization close to Burke (Austen Ivereigh).” “This ultraconservative organization specialized in the denunciation of "gays” entering the Church and in attacks on the major development associations that question unfettered economic liberalism (La Croix International).” On February 4, 2017, Pope Francis replaced Cardinal Burke as the Patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and overnight all over Rome appeared posters of Pope Francis with a sad expression with the words - “Where is your mercy?”
It was the truth from science and religion that morally obligated me to come out for the protection of children growing up gay in March 1997. This was an act of love and my duty as a priest. It is the true meaning of being a priest. Pope Francis on Thursday, June 22, 2017 in his homily during Mass at Casa Santa Marta confirmed this fact stating,"The Good Shepherd gives his life for his sheep,” using as an example the parish priest of Barbiana, Fr. Don Milani, the from the Diocese of Firenze (Florence).
The research to find the answers to these questions endlessly kept unfolding more and more information that led back in time - more than a century and a half. The research doors were opened wide once Pope Francis was elected and he along with his team of experts, and cardinals began reforming the curia. The research revealed two main historical events that were dependent on exploiting societal prejudices against gay people to rise and to stay in power. The, first, began with the ideology of Nazism promoted by Hitler and the Nazi regime that led to the deaths of 70 million people unprecedented in human history. The, second, began the with ideology of the “trickle-down theory” known as Reaganomics that led to Globalization and the greatest inequality in human history - “A world where 1% of humanity controls as much wealth as the bottom 99% will never be stable (President Obama’s departing speech to the UN General Assembly September 2016).‟ Ian Kershaw explains what Hitler’s place in history will be:
…Primarily, as the inspiration of the most lethal and destructive war in history, and of the most terrible genocidethe world has ever seen. He left behind him not just physical, but also moral, ruination such as history has never previously experienced. He represented an extreme pathology of modern society. He showed us the most radical face of modern inhumanity – how an advanced society can undergo a breathtaking descent into modern barbarity that’s quite without precedent. That’s what, with the passage of time, we can see was historically defining about Hitler. Never before Hitler’s time had we seen so clearly what human beings are capable of…
…we shouldn’t mystify Hitler’s personality. The uniquenessof Nazism can’t be reduced to that strange personality. Another time, another place, and Hitler would have had no impact at all. He couldn’t have derailed a modern society without that society itself making a major contribution to its own fate… We shouldn’t be complacent about the future. New forms of fascism and racial intolerance rightly appal and worry us…
…what we can do is to remind ourselves of the essential point about Hitler: he represented the most fundamental and frontal assault ever launched on all that we associate with humanity and civilisation.
Excerpt from: - Hitler’s Place in History - Ian Kershaw
Professor of Modern History at Sheffield University
Lecture - Wednesday 27th April 2005
Over the past year and a half - I have been researching and writing 24/7, since I received your letter - gathering significant amounts of factual data on all three levels (as a priest, psychologist and historian). This research includes my personal experience of being a victim of the hierarchical, antigay violence. As it happens when I do research, such as it did when I was doing the qualitative research on the Holocaust in graduate school for psychology, it is only after thoroughly exhausting every possible avenue several times do all the pieces begin to fall into place like a jigsaw puzzle that a picture is formed.
The picture centers on the crucial importance for the safety and well-being of all of humanity present and on into the future and is dependent on maintaining an ongoing dialogue between science and religion. This is necessary to obtain truth that which then gives meaning and value to love. Without this truth formed through this process -
…Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way. In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love. It falls prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word “love” is abused and distorted,to the point where it comes to mean the opposite…
Benedict XVI - Caritas in Veritate 2007 2009
Pope Benedict XVI goes on to make the warning that “Any breachin this dialogue comes only at an enormous price to human development…” St. Pope John Paul II made an early statement to this effect explaining how science and religion cannot be separated. He explains - as Benedict does that science is the study of all of God’s creation and religion is formed from the bible, which is the inspired word of God. They both explain how the dialogue between science and religion becomes a self-correcting mechanism of oversight, preventing abuse and maintaining integrity of both science and religion - thus allowing science and religion to guide us on our journey into the future. Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI are writing from their experience having lived through the atrocities of Hitler and the Nazi regime (1933-1945) that resulted from their manipulation and abuse of science and religion to invent a pseudo-science to legitimize Hitler’s ideology of Nazism and pseudo-religious terms to promote it. They experienced living in a social environment saturated in the racial ideology of Nazism - where the meaning of love was so twisted around that in actuality love meant the opposite. Love meant exterminating people considered to be less than human or subhuman - “Life Unworthy Of Life.”
With the recent election of President Trump we are experiencing living in a similar social environment saturated with the ideology of the “trickle-down theory.” This led to Globalization that was also legitimized by the manipulation of science and religion that twisted the meaning of love around to mean the exact opposite. In addition to Mr. Trump’s behavior, the Republican Convention 2016 slogans, “Lock her up!” (that sounded like the palpable hysteria of the Nazi Party “Sieg Heil” chant at a Cathedral lit Nuremberg Rally of the 1930s) and his being elected US president are all blatant examples of love twisted to mean the opposite. Both the rise of Nazism and Globalization were depended on the exploitation of societal prejudices against gay people.
However, in regards to rise of the “trickle-down theory”of the 1980s that led to Globalization - the majority of the members of the curia and hierarchy are responsible for the exploitation of societal prejudices against gay people. The research of Dr. Evelyn Hooker and subsequent research completely dispel prejudices against gay people. Instead of the curia and hierarchy acknowledging the truth of this science - they manipulated religion by misusing the bible and continued to wrongly condemn homosexuality. Thus they twisted the meaning of truth around to the point that it continues to mean the opposite. They and their supporters are not about truth and therefore not about love. They are no different than the palpable hysteria of the Nazi Party “Sieg Heil” members at the Nuremberg Rallies of the 1930s. And this is the violence, their twisted meaning of truth - the complete absence of love, they have used against me and against so many others before and after me. Some of our best and brightest theologians and bridge makers, such as, Sister Jeannine Gramick and Fr. Robert Nugent. Gramick and Nugent have been responsible since 1977 for saving millions of people’s lives, especially very young children. To the best of my knowledge, they were the first to begin an ongoing dialogue on the science of the sexual orientation of homosexuality - gay people and religion - scripture and theology.
S c i e n c e can purify religion from error and superstition;
R e l i g i o n can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.
Each can draw the other into a wider world,
a world in which both can flourish.
For the truth of the matter is that the Church and the scientific
community will inevitably interact; their options
do not include isolation.
St. Pope John Paul II - 1988
I came out in March 1997: for the protection of children, as young as 4 and 5 years of age, who are growing up gay. Since then it has become a moral obligation to educate and prevent forced parental suppression and unsubstantiated antigay social and religious norms.What has bothered me ever since was the fact that I found it difficult to find the r o o t c a u s e in understanding “how” and “why” and “when” did the meaning of “love” and “truth” get so monumentally - twisted around; notably among the majority of the members of the curia and hierarchy to mean the exact opposite.
For the past 10 years I have been writing in an effort to explain how this mindless inquisition that started almost immediately after coming out in June 1997 - of being coerced “behind closed doors” by a directive from the curia conveyed by the bishop for me to acquiesce to being sent away “somewhere” to be re-educated on the science on the sexual orientation of homosexuality. This directive was not only shocking, but traumatizing as well.
This irrational directive from the curia completely negated the immediate need of protecting the lives of millions of very young defenseless children from lifelong debilitating harmful effects. It also negated the wealth of the authoritative substantiated research gathered from the major medical and mental health associations, institutions, and organizations, including universities. This was the reason for my “coming out.”
Through knowledge acquired during my studies at the University of Michigan and attending the American Psychological Association National Conventions my research was reinforced on the science of sexual orientation. The action of the curia and hierarchy was a blatant affront, a direct attack on truth and love, as taught and embodied in Jesus Christ, of which the entire purpose and meaning of priesthood is based on. It was like a supervisor telling a heart surgeon that he is going to be be sent away on a sabbatical to be reeducated on the ancient system of medicine known as “bloodletting.” I cannot explain how twisted it sounded - to be told such absurdity!!! “Who in the hell is running this ship?!?” I was 47 years old at the time.
How did the curia and hierarchy cause a breach in the dialogue between science and religion that ended up twisting the meaning of love around to mean the opposite?
We will learn from studying the - science on sexual orientation that it is composed of interrelated biological and psychological processes that are not able to be consciously controlled or suppressed. These interrelated processes function outside our conscious awareness - automatically and continuously throughout life as part of the autonomic nervous system - like the heart beating and breathing. The continuous functioning of our sexual orientation - is essential in meeting our most basic human need for love, attachment, intimacy, through which empathy is developed. The continuous functioning of our sexual orientation is as vital to human survival from the beginning of life to the end - as the heart beating and breathing. Any attempt to force the suppression of a child’s gay sexual orientation is the same as suppressing the heart and breathing rate which can cause a number of lifelong adverse effects (persistent form of depression (dysthymia), suicidal ideation, and obsessive dislike for gay people that is implicit, to explicit verbal expressions of hate, to lethal forms of violence, and torture).
The majority of the members of the curia and hierarchy are European. They are the ones who grew up in the toxic antigay social environments left behind by Hitler’s Nazi regime. This begins to explain the long history of the majority of the members of the curia and hierarchy’s collective obsessive antigay crusade. This collective thought suppressed all emerging science on homosexuality for the past 60 years. For these members of the curia and hierarchy the thought of gay science has been a long closed door slammed shut in their early childhood years. This was out of great fear from their witnessing the terror in the adult’s warnings of how Hitler treated priests who were found out to be homosexuals. As this trauma of the early childhood events are not remembered, only the emotional terror of the event remains. It is this emotional terror that is wronglymistaken as an innate guiding voice of their conscience strongly conveying to them that homosexuality is evil. This misunderstanding then becomes a force that completely obliterates years of scientific research on homosexuality. It is more likely that such scientific research ignites seemingly unending waves of unexplainable terror. That door slammed tightly shut - is the breach in the dialogue between science and religion on the issue of homosexuality. This is a childhood defense mechanism. It is the only means available to the child to stop the unending waves of fear. However, as adults, these childhood defenses must be reexamined in a safe environment - to be challenged in the adult dialogue between science and religion on issues of homosexuality. As Pope Benedict XVI explains, this is the only process to find truth and give real value and meaning to the understanding of love. I do not presume this to be an easy task to unravel and should only be attempted in a safe environment. However, this situation - is not unusual - it brings to mind the words of St. Paul to be understood with great care and empathy.
When I was a child, I talked like a child,
I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.
When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.
1 Corinthians 13:11
No, no, no this type of breach in the dialogue between science and religion on gay sexual orientation has to stop! Justice demands that I be exonerated and proper restitution be made for all harm endured, including the lost salary for the past 20 years to be made quickly. Not to follow through on this road of true justice is to continue this breach in the dialogue between science and religion on gay sexual orientation. Am I, like so many others, going to be made an example of what happens when a priest speaks aloud the truth? Will this be a situation reminiscent of Hitler’s regime to remove and silence Anti-Nazi priests? Are you going demonstrate publicly how an advanced society of people made a major contribution to the modern barbarity of Hitler and the Nazi regime by their complicity and indifference?
My moral obligation as a priest is to protect people, especially children.
I look forward to setting a time to dialogue the reality of this situation in the light of the warnings of both St. Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI while maintaining an open discussion between science and religion for the search of truth that leads to love.
Sincerely yours,
Fr. Marty Kurylowicz
Cc. Pope Francis
PS. For more information on the:
- Science of Homosexual Sexual Orientation
- Gay Adult Porn & Homophobia - Who views it the most and why?
- Vatican’s Swiss Guards Break Up a D r u g - F u e l e d G a y O r g y
at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - July 2017
- “Priests In Panties” 2010
- Who is the blame for all the gay closeted sexual acting-out scandals at the Vatican?
Can be found online at the -Thalamus Center
- Saturday, July 1, 2017 - Pope Francis - Teaches the World to Dance the TANGO - the Dance of LOVE - INCLUSION - through - DIALOGUE! - http://fathermartykurylowicz.blogspot.com/2017/07/pope-francis-teaches-world-to-dance.html
Enclosures:
Letter from Bishop Walkowiak
Bishop of Grand Rapids Diocese - Dated, September 17, 2015
Letter from Archbishop Joël Mercier
Secretary of the Congregation for the Clergy - 3 March 2015
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The end of the letter.
Once, when religious art was young,
nudity symbolized purity.
But during the Renaissance
that changed, and
for the first time a
naked body was "dirty."
When did penises become offensive
USCCB Corrosive effects of PORNOGRAPHY??? 2015, Synod of Bishops 2015, &
Last Judgment, Sistine Chapel
The Eyes Have It: Sex and Sexual Orientation
Differences in Pupil Dilation Patterns
Science +
+ Religion = Truth = LOVE
Pope Benedict XVI 2009
Is Some Homophobia
Self-phobia?
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
QUACKS: 'Conversion Therapists,' the Anti-LGBT Right, and the Demonization of Homosexuality May 25, 2016
Executive Summary
...The real science is perfectly clear. A consensus of the vast majority of psychiatrists, psychologists and other counselors and their professional organizations agree that homosexuality is a normal variation of human sexuality. Likewise, they condemn reparative therapy and other attempts to change sexual orientation…
SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 2018
THE BREACH - Antigay Prejudices... http://fathermartykurylowicz.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-breach-antigay-prejudices.html
F L A S H B A C K S
HATE vs LOVE
Traumatic
Early Childhood Memories
Severe Antigay Violence
HATE
The Pope: Journey from liberal to conservative
12 February 2013
…In 1966, just after the end of the Council, Joseph Ratzinger took up a new academic position at Tubingen University, which was at the time the flagship of liberal theology in Germany. So when student revolutions convulsed Western Europe and the United States two years later, he was a first-hand witness.
The experience changed his life. Years afterwards he recalled the "traumatic memory" of a group of theology students at Tubingen who put out a flier claiming that "the New Testament is a document of inhumanity, a large scale deception of the masses", and asking "so what is Jesus's Cross but the expression of a sado-masochistic glorification of pain?
Prof Ratzinger, as a German who had grown up in the 1930s, understood all too well what a totalitarian regime could do. He saw a new left-wing totalitarianism at work in the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s.
"It is true I saw a new spirit creeping in," he said. "A spirit in which fanatical ideologies made use of the spirit of Christianity… Here I saw very clearly… that there was an abuse of the Church and the faith, which were used as instruments of power.”…
Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21425105
E.J. Dionne: Pope Benedict’s legacy is one of paradox
Feb.11, 2013
…The student revolts of 1968 deeply alarmed him. “At the time,” he wrote, “I was dean of the faculty of theology at [the University of] Tubingen, and in all the university assemblies in which I participated, I could notice all kinds of terror, from subtle psycho-terror up to violence.”
He described how he initially regarded Marxism as a possible corrective to certain strains of modern thought. But he came in the late 1960s to identify it with “terror.” He added: “I think that in those years, I learned where discussion must stop because it is turning into a lie and resistance must begin in order to maintain freedom.”…
The paradoxes of Benedict — and perhaps of Catholicism itself — were visible in two statements he made at Christmastime. Progressives could only welcome an op-ed piece he wrote for the Financial Times on Dec. 19 in which he declared that “Christians fight poverty out of a recognition of the supreme dignity of every human being, created in God’s image and destined for eternal life.”
Yet he followed this with a Christmas sermon denouncing gay marriage, insisting that gays and lesbians were turning their backs on the “essence of the human creature” and denying “their nature.”
Read more:
&
- vs -
Grand Haven, Lighthouse, Lake Michigan
Powerful, Enduring &
Life-sustaining
Memory of
LOVE
Fr. Marty Kurylowicz
Fr. Marty Kurylowicz - June 9, 2017 - Excerpts:
The hierarchy and Pope Francis - vividly validated the reasoning for the immediacy - why I came out in March 1997, as pastor of Holy Family Parish, Sparta, Michigan - for the protection of gay children, as young as 4 and 5 years of age - from the lifelong harmful effects growing up gay or bisexual - during early childhood caused by the influence of anti-gay social and religious norms. These lifelong harmful effects can be clearly observed in the curia and hierarchy fierce homophobic behavior - their inability to form life-long meaningful and fulfilling relationships, including their inability to connect with others, their lack of empathy for others, their over concerns about outward appearance, status and careers, as noted in Pope Francis "Christmas address to the curia", December 22, 2014. It is not only their complete absence of maintaining any ongoing dialogue between science and religion on the topic homosexual sexual orientation for the past 60 years, which is directly against the words of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI , it is also by their immediate emotional explosive outbursts to the 2014 midterm report of Synod session on Family - that listed notes of the open discussion that took place - discussing ways of how to be pastorally more welcoming to gay people and their families, including ways of valuing long term committed gay relationships. There was a lot of emotional outbursts among the curia and hierarchy, however, there is absolutely - no detail reasoning to substantiate their extraordinary hostile and aggressive reactions to the report. So intense was their fierce emotional reaction that the continuation of this open discussion on gay people scheduled for the second synod on Family session 2015 had to be canceled.
Sadly, one cannot, also, help to notice the enormous amount of the emotional psychic energy that is use by the curia and the hierarchy completely absorbed in an anti-gay obsession and the enormous amount of Pope Francis emotional psychic energy is used in reaching out to all people globally in nearly every situation in extraordinary effort to be inclusive of everyone, particularly those most forgotten and are in need of our help. Pope Francis has been relentless in this regard since his election to the papacy in March 2013.
As Church Shifts, a Cardinal Welcomes Gays; They Embrace a ‘Miracle’ The New York Times - June 13, 2017
NEWARK — The word “pilgrimage” usually evokes visions of far-off, exotic places, but for some 100 gay and lesbian Catholics and their families, a pilgrimage to the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart here on a recent Sunday was more like a homecoming.
The doors to the cathedral were opened to them, and they were welcomed personally by the leader of the Archdiocese of Newark, Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin. They were seated on folding chairs at the cathedral’s center, in front of the altar in the towering sanctuary, under the blue-tinted glow of stained glass.
“I am Joseph, your brother,” Cardinal Tobin told the group, which included lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Catholics from around New York and the five dioceses in New Jersey. “I am your brother, as a disciple of Jesus. I am your brother, as a sinner who finds mercy with the Lord.”
The welcoming of a group of openly gay people to Mass by a leader of Cardinal Tobin’s standing in the Roman Catholic Church in this country would have been unthinkable even five years ago. But Cardinal Tobin, whom Pope Francis appointed to Newark last year, is among a small but growing group of bishops changing how the American church relates to its gay members. They are seeking to be more inclusive and signaling to subordinate priests that they should do the same…
Four years ago, Pope Francis shook the Catholic world with his comment about gay priests seeking the Lord: “Who am I to judge?” But it was unclear how his words would affect Catholics seeking acceptance in the pews…
But gestures like Cardinal Tobin’s are evidence that Pope Francis’ words are having an impact…Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/nyregion/catholic-church-gays-mass-newark-cathedral.html?_r=0
Fr. Marty Kurylowicz - June 9, 2017
S c i e n c e
H o m o s e x u a l
S e x u a l O r i e n t a t i o n
DR. EVELYN HOOKER
In the USA, 1957, Evelyn Hooker’s most notable and ground breaking research proving that homosexuality is not a mental illness was completed called:-
in which she administered several psychological tests to groups of self-identified male homosexuals and heterosexuals and asked experts to identify the homosexuals and rate their mental health. The experiment, which other researchers subsequently repeated, argues that homosexuality is not a mental disorder, as there was no detectable difference between homosexual and heterosexual men in terms of mental adjustment... Photo
Being Gay Is Just as Healthy as Being Straight
Evelyn Hooker's pioneering research debunked the popular myth that homosexuals are inherently less mentally healthy than heterosexuals, leading to significant changes in how psychology views and treats people who are gay...
Hooker's work was the first to empirically test the assumption that gay men were mentally unhealthy and maladjusted. The fact that no differences were found between gay and straight participants sparked more research in this area and began to dismantle the myth that homosexual men and women are inherently unhealthy.
In conjunction with other empirical results, this work led the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from the DSM in 1973 (it had been listed as a sociopathic personality disorder). In 1975, the American Psychological Association publicly supported this move, stating that "homosexuality per se implies no impairment in judgment, reliability or general social and vocational capabilities…(and mental health professionals should) take the lead in removing the stigma of mental illness long associated with homosexual orientation." Although prejudice and stigma still exist in society, this research has helped millions of gay men and women gain acceptance in the mental health community. Read more: http://www.apa.org/research/action/gay.aspx
A B S E N C E o f S C I E N C E
Ian Kershaw “is regarded by many as one of the world's leading experts on Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Kershaw).” Kershaw describes in great detail - the horrific atrocities instigated by Hitler and how we should see his place in history. Kershaw looks upon Hitler’s place in history as:
Primarily, as the inspiration of the most lethal and destructive war in history, and of the most terrible genocide the world has ever seen. He left behind him not just physical, but also moral, ruination such as history has never previously experienced. He represented an extreme pathology of modern society. He showed us the most radical face of modern inhumanity – how an advanced society can undergo a breathtaking descent into modern barbarity that’s quite without precedent…
Read more:
Hitler's Place in History
Ian Kershaw
Professor of Modern History at Sheffield University
Wednesday 27th April 2005
&
…The horror of the Holocaust began in 1933 and ended in 1945. The psychological fallout would have been far more extensive and more deadly, especially when it is not identified as such…
AUSCHWITZ -- CHRISTMAS 2008 -- A flashback far more severe than in --- BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN – December 26, 2008 – Fr. Marty Kurylowicz
Know thyself
Oracle at Delphi
This above all:
to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
William Shakespeare
Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your
brother's eye and pay no attention to the
plank in your own eye? How can you
say to your brother, 'Brother,
let me take the speck
out of your eye,
'when you yourself fail to see the
plank in your own eye? You hypocrite,
first take the plank out of your eye, and
then you will see clearly to remove
the speck from your brother's eye.
Luke 6:40-42
Kids Are Being Hurt!!!
Dissociation
S e l e c t i v e
I n a t t e n t i o n
From L O V E
Killing Empathy
Creating Narcissists
i.e. Curia & Hierarchy
NARCISSISM
THE BIRTHING OF
CLERICALISM 
The Closet: Psychological
Issues of
Being In
and
Coming Out
Oct. 01, 2004
Cultural Psychiatry,
Dissociative
Identity Disorder
By Jack Drescher, MD
In the jargon of contemporary homosexual culture, those who hide their sexual identities are referred to as either closeted or said to be in the closet. Revealing one's homosexuality is referred to as coming out. Clinical experience with gay patients reveals hiding and revealing behaviors to be psychologically complex.
Homosexual Identities
In the developmental histories of gay men and women, periods of difficulty in acknowledging their homosexuality, either to themselves or to others, are often reported. Children who grow up to be gay rarely receive family support in dealing with antihomosexualprejudices. On the contrary, beginning in childhood--and distinguishing them from racial and ethnic minorities--gay people are often subjected to the antihomosexual attitudes of their own families and communities (Drescher et al., 2004). Antihomosexual attitudes include homophobia (Weinberg, 1972), heterosexism (Herek, 1984), moral condemnations of homosexuality (Drescher, 1998) and antigay violence (Herek and Berrill, 1992). Hiding activities learned in childhood often persist into young adulthood, middle age and even senescence, leading many gay people to conceal important aspects of themselves…
DISSOCIATION
What psychological mechanisms facilitate separating one's sexual identity from the rest of one's persona? Sullivan's (1956) concept of dissociation may be illuminating, particularly its most common aspect: selective inattention. A ubiquitous, nonpathological process, selective inattention makes life more manageable, like tuning out the background noise on a busy street. However, through dissociationof anxiety-provokingknowledge about the self, a whole double life can be lived and yet, in some ways, not be known. Clinical presentations of closeted gay people may lie somewhere in severity between selective inattention--most commonly seen in the case of homosexually self-aware patients thinking about "the possibility" that they might be gay--to more severedissociation--in which any hintof same-sex feelings resides totally out of conscious awareness. More severe forms of dissociation are commonly observed in married men who are homosexually self-aware but cannot permit the thought of themselves as gay (Roughton, 2002). Read more: http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/articles/closet-psychological-issues-being-and-coming-out
The internet was buzzing in January when an editor at a gay website in Virginia wrote that he'd encountered an antigay Republican lawmaker while on Grindr, without naming the person. Not every antigay crackpot is actually gay, but there's no shortage of those who actually are. Here are some hypocrites who just couldn't practice what they preached… Read more:
http://www.advocate.com/people/2016/4/18/17-antigay-leaders-exposed-gay-or-bi
http://www.advocate.com/people/2016/4/18/17-antigay-leaders-exposed-gay-or-bi
Puerto Rico Republican …Sen. Roberto Arango has previously voted in favor of Resolution 99, a proposal that would block any attempt to permit same-sex marriages in Puerto Rico. He has also opposed adoption rights for gay people. The AP reports.that local news media published photos from the application showing, “a man’s nude upper body with a cell phone obscuring his face,” and another showing “a rear view of a nude man on his hands and knees…
A child’s sexual orientation is not about sexual behavior - it is about love, wanting to feel one with another. Depending on the severity of this rejection of a child’s expression of love - the child wants to desperately please his parents and will learn to hid from his parent such emotions of love that are disturbing to them. He will even hide them from himself and thus begins the mental dissociation of this child - attempting to suppress the never ending - regular functioning of his sexual orientation of the emotional impulses - to be loved and to love and to feel one with another.
Sexual orientation
- refers to an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic and/or sexual attractions to men, women or both sexes...http://www.apa.org/topics/lgbt/orientation.aspx
Autonomic nervous system
The autonomic nervous system is a control system that acts largely unconsciously and regulates bodily functions such as the heart rate, digestion, respiratory rate, pupillary response, urination, and sexual arousal… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_nervous_system#cite_note-Human_Physiology_-_Janig-2
However, a person’s sexual orientation like the heart beating, breathing, sexual arousal, etc., are all under the control autonomic nervous system that operates automatically and unconsciously - they cannot be suppressed.
The Eyes Have It: Sex and Sexual Orientation Differences in Pupil Dilation Patterns
August 3. 2012 …pupil dilationto stimuli indicates activation of the autonomic nervous system. This system is associated with many automatic processes such as
perspiration,
digestion,
blood pressure,
and
heart rate.
For this reason, pupil dilation has been used as indicator of automatic response, for example, in studies of implicit reaction and cognitive load. Other research suggests that pupil dilation can reflect automatic attention, or attention that is likely not in the conscious control of participants. It is therefore unlikely that participants suppress pupil dilation to stimuli they are sexually attracted to. Pupil dilation patterns could therefore reflect, with high sensitivity, automatic attention related to sexual attraction and sexualorientation…
Read more: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0040256 
"Pupil dilation patterns could therefore reflect, with high sensitivity, automatic attention related to sexual attraction and sexual orientation..."
"Clinical presentations of closeted gay people may lie somewhere in severity between selective inattention--most commonly seen in the case of homosexually self-aware patients thinking about "the possibility" that they might be gay--to more severe dissociation--in which any hint of same-sex feelings resides totally out of conscious awareness"
“Brokeback Mountain” 2005
AUSCHWITZ -- CHRISTMAS 2008 -- A flashback far more severe than in --- BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
December 26, 2008 – Fr. Marty Kurylowicz
Dear Fr. Geoff Farrow,
I have been so saddened by Pope Benedict XVI's cruel words to LGBTQ people around the world, to their parents, families and friends, most ESPECIALLY TO CHILDREN. After reading the accounts of this human travesty, I did not know where to find comfort or hope. And then I thought about your blog. And just like receiving a wonderful Christmas present, sure enough I found the hope and comfort I needed to hear. Photo
I am a priest and a clinical psychologist (MS). And for one of my research projects I chose to do a qualitative research project of the recorded verbal accounts of survivors of the Holocaust, 50 years after the event. It was a difficult research project, because I could not make sense of one of the accounts of the survivors.
For example, one survivor was describing what it was like riding the train to AUSCHWITZ, but he was describing how he was trying to make conversation with a girl on the train. I listened and wrote out this one account almost 30 times but I just was not getting it. I could not understand how this man could be talking about wanting to make conversation with this girl on the same train to AUSCHWITZ!?!
Because I had taught high school religion classes for nearly 20 years, it hit me hard, like a flash of lightning. Instantly, all the pieces came together, so fast. Though this survivor was in his late 60’s when he gave his account of his story on audiotape, he was remembering the events that took place, but naturally they were recounted through the mind of a teenager, the age he was on the train to AUSCHWITZ. That is why the dialogue wasn’t making any sense. I was thinking of him as an old man because the voice on the audiotape was the voice of a 68-year-old. As shocking as a bomb going off, all the different aspects of the psychological developmental stages of a teenager kicked in. I realized only too fully that he was just a young normal teenager on that train!!! And so was the girl he was trying to make conversation, and their moms and dads were there with them!!! There was no way to pretend I did not realize what I discovered. It kept hitting me: this is not some script from a movie or TV miniseries on the Holocaust. No; as much as I wished it were. The reality of this horror hit me all at once, on so many different levels of consciousness: what an unbelievable horror it was!!! How could we treat human beings like this! I remember when the realization of the magnitude of this horror first hit me, like an instant reflex. I threw down the transcript I was holding as if it were a blazing hot poker. It kept hitting me over and over again that this is not a movie script or some kind of play – this really happened! It really happened! Oh, my God, how could this have happened!?!!!
My supervisor told me at the time that I was traumatized by the oral content. Qualitative research is an attempt to understand the complexity of emotions, the kinds of emotions, and the degree of intensity involved. Our emotions are what allow us to connect with other human beings. We identify with the non-verbal quality of emotions more immediately and strongly than with the words used to express them. The non-verbal qualities include tone of voice, eye contact, facial expression, body posture, and gestures, all of which express emotions. Emotions are why we can connect with people through time, across cultures, and individually. It is the expression of human emotions in the arts that makes some works of art timeless, because they continually speak to all people through the ages.
And when I heard what Pope Benedict XVI said about homosexuals and transgendered human beings at Christmas 2008, I felt that same trauma all over again. Because in some way, somehow, he was conveying in a non-verbal manner the horror of the Holocaust, in what appears to be a traumatized, trance-like, accepted social norm from that period of time dictating that some people just don’t count, aren’t important, and can be easily disposed of. And if you rock the boat, you could be next to be disposed of.
I truly have to believe that a person in his position would not be doing this consciously or intentionally. The horror of the Holocaust is like an atomic bomb with fallout so extensive that it spreads over a radius of more than 150 miles. The horror of the Holocaust began in 1933 and ended in 1945. The psychological fallout would have been far more extensive and more deadly, especially when it is not identified as such.
It hit me the way it did when I realized that the research I was doing about a Holocaust survivor, a man 68 years old telling his story, who was remembering what it was like to be on the train to AUSCHWITZ, from the perspective of a young teenage boy who just wanted to talk to a girl. It seemed like the same kind of horror, a tacit assumption that some people don't count and can be disposed of without remorse. Could it be that Benedict XVI is unconsciously repeating Hitler's crime against humanity by taking on a long-accepted social attitude from that period of time?
The question I asked myself was: what would it have been like for someone growing up gay during the Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933 -1945?
What would be the severity of the psychological effects on a boy who grew up to be gay in Germany during the time of Hitler’s NAZI PERSECUTION OF HOMOSEXUALS 1933 -1945? During the Nazi regime, homosexuals were publicly defamed and falsely accused for the major social problems of that time, which was done to incite massive public hatred and hostility directed against homosexuals. Homosexuals were used for medical experiments, physically mutilated, brutally tortured and exterminated.
Would this child, as an adult, in a severe dissociated state of mind from his own homosexual feelings (Harry Stack Sullivan MD, Dissociative Processes, Clinical Studies on Psychiatry (1956)), unconsciously perpetuate the terrifying horror of the insensitivity he had experienced growing up? If he found himself in a position of authority would he recreate the same social and political environment of violence and terror for homosexuals that he experienced, as a child who grew up to be gay, during the NAZI PERSECUTION OF HOMOSEXUALS?
I think in truth on a much deeper level I was frightened, really frightened, to hear Pope Benedict XVI’s Christmas remarks against homosexuals and transgendered human beings and even more frightened by the silence from the larger global community of human beings. What is so frightening is, even if there is agreement that one person does not matter or is not important, in truth then no one matters. Therefore, when I thought about your blog and what you did on October 5, 2008, I felt more reassured, I felt hope, and I felt comforted. NOW, isn’t that the true meaning of Christmas?
God Bless you,
Fr. Marty Kurylowicz
. . . .Written by Martin S. Kurylowicz, M.Div., M.S.
Edited by Madeline Wright, Ph.D., M.S. . . . .
Kids Are Being Hurt!!!
What you cannot do is
accept injustice.
From Hitler – or anyone.
You must make the injustice visible
– be prepared to die like a
soldier to do so.
Mahatma Gandhi
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.
Pope Francis offers 'radicals' Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton as models Sep.24.2015
Rachel Maddow describes the lives of Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, two American Catholics singled out by Pope Francis in his address to Congress, and talks with Father Matt Malone, Jesuit priest and editor-in-chief of American Magazine, about why the pope...Watch video: https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/pope-offers-radical-models-for-americans-533263427713?playlist=associated
P o p e F r a n c i s
New York City - 2015 - Arrival
High School Band Plays - Theme Song
Pope's hope for Congress contrasts with American cynicism
Sep.24.2015
Senator Amy Klobuchar talks with Rachel Maddow about Pope Francis delivering a message beyond the confines of religion and speaking to the nobility of public service in politics in working toward the common good for all people.
Pope Francis arrives in New York City for historic visit
September 25, 2015
As entrances go, this one was divine.
Pope Francis touched down in New York City on Thursday to the strains of “New York, New York” and began his historic 39-hour pilgrimage to the city that never sleeps by taking a drive up Fifth Ave…
'I Am Convinced That We Can Make A Difference,' Pope Tells Congress,
Pope Francis is greeted as he arrives at a lunch for homeless people who are regularly fed by Catholic Charities, at St. Patrick's Church in Washington DC.
September 24, 2015 Photo
Pope Francis spends lunch hour with homeless
Washington DC September 24, 2015
Pope Francis spent his lunch hour with some of Washington's homeless at a meals program run by Catholic charities. CNN's Carol Costello reports.
Watch video:
Pope Francis Dines with DC Homeless for Lunch
September 24, 2015
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- He's been called the pope of the poor. And on Thursday he spoke directly to those who have gone without.
"In prayer there is no first or second class," Pope Francis said. "There is brotherhood."
He shared his message of hope with people who work directly with the poor and some of the needy they serve, like Lanita King, a former drug addict who once was homeless.
"It felt like energy went right through my hand. He touched it and grabbed it," King recalled.
King was one of many who connected with the pope and felt blessed.
"He is delivering the message that God is here for us. God is here with us," she said.
…And if there were any question about the pope's priorities, he passed up a lunch in his honor on Capitol Hill to come here and spend time with the less fortunate.
Read more - watch video:
Pope Francis: "No justification whatsoever" for lack of housing
September 24, 2015
WASHINGTON -- Outside St. Patrick's Church in downtown Washington, denizens of Catholic Charities' various housing shelters waited for Pope Francis' visit.
The pontiff spoke about the plight of the homeless in remarks when he arrived at the church."We can find no social or moral justification, no justification whatsoever, for lack of housing," he said. "The Son of God came into this world as a homeless person. The Son of God knew what it was to start life without a roof over his head.”…
Read more:
Continuous
DIALOGUE
John Paul II and Benedict XVI
Science & Religion
Bessel van der Kolk MD
Rational & Emotional
Brains
Read more:
TUESDAY, JANUARY 9, 2018
Part 4D - NAZI ABUSE OF SCIENCE -> GENOCIDE “RACIAL CLEANSING” & WAR CHILDHOOD -> CURIA - GENOCIDE of HOMOSEXUALS - - Part 4D - Homosexuality - “If it is NOT a choice, if it is NOT a disease, in the perspective of faith it can only be a GIFT” - Bishop Cruz, Brazil - ’seeks to END ‘PREJUDICES that KILL’
Photos
SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 2018
THE BREACH - Antigay Prejudices, Unsubstantiated, Suppression, Repression, Exploitation, Globalization, Annihilation - NO SCIENCE - NO TRUTH - THEREFORE - NO LOVE
SATURDAY, JULY 14, 2018
Opening (PART 1) Vatican Doors 1981-2013 - TO - REPRESSED Homosexual PRELATES - “Murderous Mayhem” & “Cold-blooded Killer” - REACTION FORMATION - Obsessive Antigay Crusade & Condemning Gay ADULT Pornography & Vatican’s Decades Secret Gay Sexual Acting Out Sandals - All Leading to Benedict XVI Retiring | Global - Structural Violence Atrocities ¿¿¿ Culpability ???
THURSDAY, AUGUST 2, 2018
TRUTH not HYSTERIA - WILL SET US FREE! - (PART 2) Opening Vatican Doors 1981-2013 - TO - REPRESSED Homosexual PRELATES…
Update: Sept. 1, 2018 Revised: Aug.29, 2018 http://fathermartykurylowicz.blogspot.com/2018/08/truth-not-hysteria-will-set-us-free.html
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