National Association For Research And Therapy Of Homosexuality----National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality’ for Distorting Research: The simple fact was that he had done something wrong, and at the end of a long and revolutionary career it didn’t matter how often he’d been right, how powerful he once was, or what it would mean for his legacy. Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, considered by some to be the father of modern psychiatry, who turns 80 next week, lay awake at 4 o’clock on a recent morning knowing he had to do the one thing that comes least naturally to him.
He pushed himself up and staggered into the dark. His desk seemed impossibly far away; Dr. Spitzer suffers from Parkinson’s disease and has trouble walking, sitting, even holding his head upright.
The word he uses to describe these limitations – pathetic – is the same one that for decades he wielded like an ax to strike down dumb ideas, empty theorizing, and junk studies. Now here he was at his computer, ready to recant a study he had done himself, a poorly conceived 2003 investigation of so-called reparative therapy to “cure” homosexuality. What to say? The issue of gay marriage was rocking national politics yet again.
The California State Legislature was debating a bill to ban outright the therapy that his study supported, as being dangerous. A magazine writer who had been through the therapy as a teenager recently visited his house, to explain how miserably disorienting the experience was. Dr. Spitzer’s fingers jerked over the keys, unreliably, as if choking on the words. And then it was done: a short letter to be published this month, in the same journal where the original study appeared.
“I believe,” it concludes, “I owe the gay community an apology.” Disturber of the peace, The idea to study reparative therapy at all was pure Spitzer, say those who know him, an effort to stick a finger in the eye of orthodox thinking. In the late 1990s as today, the psychiatric establishment considered the therapy to be a nonstarter.
Few therapists thought of homosexuality as a disorder. It wasn’t always so. Up into the 1970s, the field’s diagnostic manual classified homosexuality as an illness, calling it a “sociopathic personality disturbance.” Many therapists offered treatment, including Freudian analysts who dominated the field at the time.
Advocates for gay people objected furiously and in 1973, four years after the landmark Stonewall protests to stop police raids at a New York bar, a team of gay rights protesters heckled a meeting of behavioral therapists in New York to discuss the topic.
The meeting broke up, but not before a young Columbia University professor sat down with the protesters to hear their case. “I’ve always been drawn to controversy, and what I was hearing made sense,” said Dr. Spitzer, in an interview at his home last week. “And I began to think, well, if it is a mental disorder, then what makes it one?”
He pushed himself up and staggered into the dark. His desk seemed impossibly far away; Dr. Spitzer suffers from Parkinson’s disease and has trouble walking, sitting, even holding his head upright.
The word he uses to describe these limitations – pathetic – is the same one that for decades he wielded like an ax to strike down dumb ideas, empty theorizing, and junk studies. Now here he was at his computer, ready to recant a study he had done himself, a poorly conceived 2003 investigation of so-called reparative therapy to “cure” homosexuality. What to say? The issue of gay marriage was rocking national politics yet again.
The California State Legislature was debating a bill to ban outright the therapy that his study supported, as being dangerous. A magazine writer who had been through the therapy as a teenager recently visited his house, to explain how miserably disorienting the experience was. Dr. Spitzer’s fingers jerked over the keys, unreliably, as if choking on the words. And then it was done: a short letter to be published this month, in the same journal where the original study appeared.
“I believe,” it concludes, “I owe the gay community an apology.” Disturber of the peace, The idea to study reparative therapy at all was pure Spitzer, say those who know him, an effort to stick a finger in the eye of orthodox thinking. In the late 1990s as today, the psychiatric establishment considered the therapy to be a nonstarter.
Few therapists thought of homosexuality as a disorder. It wasn’t always so. Up into the 1970s, the field’s diagnostic manual classified homosexuality as an illness, calling it a “sociopathic personality disturbance.” Many therapists offered treatment, including Freudian analysts who dominated the field at the time.
Advocates for gay people objected furiously and in 1973, four years after the landmark Stonewall protests to stop police raids at a New York bar, a team of gay rights protesters heckled a meeting of behavioral therapists in New York to discuss the topic.
The meeting broke up, but not before a young Columbia University professor sat down with the protesters to hear their case. “I’ve always been drawn to controversy, and what I was hearing made sense,” said Dr. Spitzer, in an interview at his home last week. “And I began to think, well, if it is a mental disorder, then what makes it one?”
