UPDATE 11/21: With the recent Mass. Court decision on gay marriage generating much discussion, I thought it might be useful (or at least provocative) to move this earlier posting back to the top:
========================
You would think all those so publically exercised and agitated about homosexuality lately--whether homosexual marriage, or gays in the military, or homosexuals on TV--would be slightly abashed to have revealed their own latent homosexual desires to the world. Or perhaps they're counting on the fact that, these days, no one remembers Freud.
You see, the standard, but I guess no longer familiar, Freudian explanation for hostility towards homosexuals is that such hostility is a defense mechanism against the subject's own homosexual desires. So, e.g., Justice Scalia, all too aware at some level of his powerful homosexual urges, tries to defend against these unacceptable desires by adopting very publically--say, in a dissenting opinion (see esp. 18 ff. of the slip opinion)--the cause of those opposed to the "homosexual agenda" in the "culture wars." If the "homosexual agenda" prevails in the culture war, then Justice Scalia, himself, is at greater risk of succumbing to his latent homosexuality. And by very publically committing himself to opposition to homosexuality, he is better able to strengthen his resolve against his own homosexual tendencies.
"Rank speculation!" you object. Perhaps.
But consider the University of Georgia psychologist, an avowed Freud-skeptic (before), who conducted an experiment to test the Freudian hypothesis. (For the details, see Henry E. Adams, Lester W. Wright, Jr., and Bethany A. Lohr, “Is Homophobia Associated with Homosexual Arousal?” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 105 (1996): 440-445.) The finding: those who expressed the most hostile and negative attitudes towards homosexuals demonstrated the highest level of sexual arousal when exposed to homosexual pornography. In Freudian terms: their homophobia was a reaction formation designed to protect them from their own powerful homosexual desires.
Which brings us to the ludicrous William Bennett, failed philosopher and sanctimonious fraud, who is already well-known as a case study in reaction formations. (The man who is a pathological gambler lectures everyone else about virtuous behavior--his only, feeble defense against his overwhelming urges.) Writing recently in the Los Angeles Times, Bennett now reveals to the world his own struggle with his latent homosexuality by launching what might be generously described as an "intellectually bankrupt" attack on homosexual marriage. Says failed philosopher Bennett in the crux of his "argument":
"Just as human nature has inherent purpose, so does human sexuality. There is a natural sexual order, a proper order for love — an ordo amorum, as St. Augustine put it. We are made male and female, and these immutable characteristics define proper sexual behavior. Because this proper sexual behavior quite commonly results in childbearing, these characteristics also define the appropriate relationship for sexual behavior: marriage.
"In marriage alone do men, women and children find the relationship that balances their sometimes mutual, sometimes competing, needs.
'"Marriage is our attempt to reconcile and harmonize the erotic, social, sexual and financial needs of men and women with the needs of their partner and their children,' says Maggie Gallagher, co-author of "The Case for Marriage."
"The parameters of proper sexual behavior are not arbitrary, nor are they intended to evolve. If we depart from the natural order of sexuality and the proper behavior and relationships that ensue from it, we are left with no guiding principle but the prevailing mood of the age. We are currently on the cusp of doing just that: We must decide whether we will continue to reinforce the natural sexual order in our laws or whether we will let them cave in to arbitrary preference."
One would search in vain for some non-question-begging explanation of "the natural order of sexuality," say, one that might win support from the biological sciences or other sciences that are actually interested in natural orders and natural kinds. But no such explanation is forthcoming (even the Discovery [sic] Institute probably won't tackle this one). What Nietzsche says of the Stoic imperative, "live according to nature," applies equally well here: "while you pretend rapturously to read the canon of your law in nature, you want something opposite....Your pride wants to impose your morality, your ideal, on nature...[Y]ou demand that she should be nature 'according to the Stoa,' and you would like all existence to exist only after your own image--as an immense external glorification and generalization of Stoicism" (Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 9).
So consider: when folks like Bennett make public displays of their hostility towards homosexuality, and support those displays with transparently shoddy reasons, surely some explanation is called for, since the most charitable (and superficial) rationalizing explanation won't work. The Freudian hypothesis, which now has experimental support, does seem a plausible candidate, does it not?
So Bennetts and Scalias of the world beware: Freud is back, so the more you doth protest, the clearer it is to the rest of us what's really going on.
APPENDIX: Freud and the Philosophers
In writing and lecturing about the "hermeneutics of suspicion," I've discovered that many philosophers (at least those not directly interested in these issues) appear to have been turned in to Freud skeptics by Adolf Grünbaum's important book The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Many of these philosophers turn out to be unaware of both:
(1) the large, and quite devastating, critical literature on that book (see, e.g., Arthur Fine and Mickey Forbes, “Grünbaum on Freud: Three Grounds for Dissent,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9 (1986): 237-238; Jim Hopkins, “Epistemology and Depth Psychology: Critical Notes on The Foundations of Psychoanalysis,” in P. Clark & C. Wright (eds.), Mind, Psychoanalysis and Science (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988); David Sachs, “In Fairness to Freud,” reprinted in J. Neu (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Freud (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Richard Wollheim, “Desire, Belief, and Professor Grünbaum’s Freud,” in his The Mind and Its Depths (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); and
(2) the extent to which Grunbaum's methodological critique of Freud's reliance on evidence from the therapeutic context does not touch the extensive non-therapeutic evidence in support of the theory, such as the homophobia experiment, noted above. For a useful review of the enormous experimental literature supporting distinctively Freudian hypotheses, see Drew Westen, “The Scientific Legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a Psychodynamically Informed Psychological Science,” Psychological Bulletin 124 (1998), pp. 333-371. Westen identifies five tenets of Freudian psychoanalysis—for example, “much of mental life—including thoughts, feelings, and motives—is unconscious, which means that people can behave in ways or develop symptoms that are inexplicable to themselves” and “stable personality begin to form in childhood, and childhood experiences play an important role in personality development, particularly in shaping the ways people form later social relationships”—and then reviews an overwhelming body of experimental literature supporting all five. As Westen notes, the five “propositions were all once highly disputed in psychology and were exclusively associated with psychoanalysis” and “are indeed central to contemporary thinking among practicing psychodynamic psychologists and psychiatrists.” Id. at 335.
Of course, Grünbaum challenged not only the reliance on evidence from the therapeutic context, but also whether Freud had adequately confirmed his causal claims. For example, to show that repressed homosexuality causes paranoia, ordinary canons of confirmation would dictate that one adduce not only evidence of paranoids who were repressed homosexuals, but also evidence that where homosexuality was unrepressed, paranoia was absent. Of course, we make no such demand on the confirmation of folk-psychological claims—to confirm that John went to the refrigerator because he was hungry we don’t need to show also that most people who aren’t hungry don’t go to the refrigerator—and since Freudian claims are on a simple continuum with these claims, it is not entirely clear why Grünbaum thinks his canons of confirmation apply. Add to that the unparalleled consilience of the Freudian theory--its ability to unify a plethora of diverse human and cultural phenomena--and the theory's extraordinary parsimony (it simply extends the familiar apparatus of common-sense belief-desire psychology to the unconscious, a realm recognized long recognized before Freud's systematic account of its contours), and it's clear that, for its domain, it still has no real rivals (even the Darwinians can't compete for consilience or for parsimony).
Recent Comments