National Public Radio aired interviewsof Journey into Manhood’s Rich Wyler and ex-ex-gay Peterson Toscano this morning on the subject of sexual orientation change.
The segment omitted some key details of Rich Wyler’s involvement in gay change therapy. I posted my quick thoughts on the subject over at Religion Dispatches.
Most troubling to me about the portrayal of what Rich advocates is the omission of the touch therapy and highly provocative, ball bat wielding elements of JiM. The NPR reporter Alix Spiegel made Rich’s work sound like calm cognitive therapy. Hardly.
Here is a Nightline segment about JiM:
As I pointed out at RD, JiM is fringe even in ex-gay circles.
Category: psychology
New study: Sexual behavior changes but not sexual orientation
Media have been all over the Bachmann clinic story this week with lots of related discussion about how much, if at all, sexual orientation changes. As a part of this discussion, I noted that a study I am writing up found that over all married gay people assess themselves as growing more same-sex attracted over time.
Along the way, colleague Mark Yarhouse wrote to remind me that he found something similar in a study recently reported in the new issue of the Christian journal Edification (check out the entire journal for background on the whole arena of evangelicals in the study of sexual identity).
The study Mark referred to was authored by his team at Regent University and titled, “Characteristics of Mixed Orientation Couples: An Empirical Study” (start reading at page 41). The sexual minority participants had been married an average of just over 16 years and the average age was 45. While it was not a study of efforts to change, one could reasonably assume that if a group had participants who had shifted orientation very much, then this would be the group. However, that is not what they found, at least not at the level of attraction. See Table 5 below:
You will have to click the table to see it more clearly, but the table demonstrates that the Kinsey scores shift more toward the heterosexual side when the participants were asked about their sexual behavior but when asked about their attractions, fantasies, and emotional attachments, there was no change. The Kinsey Expanded scale included an average of participant Kinsey assessment of behavior, attractions, fantasies and emotional attachments.
The authors summarized the results:
The mean score of the Kinsey behavior scale before marriage was 3.60, which falls in between the Largely heterosexual, but more than incidental homosexual and Equal amounts of heterosexual and homosexual categories. The mean score of the Kinsey behavior scale currently was 2.80, which falls in between the Largely heterosexual, but incidental homosexual and Largely heterosexual, but more than incidental homosexual categories.
On the Kinsey Expanded version, the mean score for both before marriage and the current assessment were 4.33 and 4.57 respectively. Both of these scores fall in between the
Equal amounts of heterosexual and homosexual and Largely homosexual, but more than incidental heterosexual categories.
I need to ask Mark, and perhaps he can comment, what the Expanded Kinsey result would look like if the behavioral Kinsey score was removed from the average of all Kinsey scores. Perhaps, the attraction, fantasy, etc., scores would rise moderately.
At any rate, the results are consistent with what I am finding as well. People adapt their behavior to their beliefs and commitments but their orientation does not shift, on average.
In all of the bluster about change therapies and clinics, I think evangelicals need to face what evangelical academics are finding in research. Also, a word to the media, both Christian and mainstream, quoting advocacy groups will get you two sides for dramatic tension, but if you want to know how research informs the questions you are asking, please consult those who, despite their religious loyalties, will report accurately.
Politifact rates Tim Pawlenty's views on sexual orientation
On the July 10 Meet the Press program, Tim Pawlenty was asked by David Gregory whether or not homosexuality is a choice and if it is genetically caused. Politifact rated Pawlenty’s answers and overall did a pretty good job of it.
They rated Pawlenty as mostly true on the genetics question but false on the question of choice. Go give it a read. Also, what do you think of this money quote from Michael Bailey?:
“If you can’t make a male attracted to other males by cutting off his penis, castrating him, and rearing him as a girl, how likely is any social explanation of male homosexuality?” Bailey asks.
Roots of reparative therapy – Sandor Rado and the reparative adjustment
This week I am surveying some roots of reparative drive theory – the view that homosexuality is a reparative, but pathological, response to a broken attachment with one’s same-sex parent. For reparative therapists, same-sex attraction is an attempt to gain connection to the appropriate sense of gender lost or defended against due to poor attachment with the same sex parent.
While Freud had several things to say about homosexuality, he often wrote about sexual departure from heterosexuality in terms of failure during the Oedipal phase of psychosexual development. In the case of homosexuality, a young boy might come to identify with mother due to unwillingness or inability to give up the mother’s love. He may identify with her to the degree that he wishes to possess what she possesses, a man. There is more to Freud’s views on this but my point here is not to offer a comprehensive account. I want to move to those who revised his views of sexuality, today in particular, Sandor Rado.
In objecting to Freud’s views of bisexuality, Rado introduced the concept of non-heterosexual behavior as a “reparative adjustment.” In a 1940 paper, Rado wrote:
The basic problem, to state it briefly, is to determine the factors that cause the individual to apply aberrant forms of stimulation to his standard genital equipment. Following up this line of inquiry, we find that the chief causal factor is the affect of anxiety, which inhibits standard stimulation and compels the “ego action system in the individual” to bring forth an altered scheme of stimulation as a “reparative adjustment” (12, IJ).
Both the inhibitory and thereparative processes begin far back in early childhood, leading up to the picture which we encounter in the adult. The reparative adjustment may allow the individual several alternatives of morbid stimulation, or may take the form of a rigid and inexorable pattern on which he depends for gratification. This approach, of which we can give here only the barest suggestion, has in practice unfolded a wealth of clinical details leading to a theory that is free of inconsistency and that serves as a reliable guide to treatment. (p. 466)
In this paper, Rado does not drawn out what kind of reparation takes place in various forms of non-heterosexual behavior. He does conclude that whatever they are, they start in childhood and they in some way increase anxiety which requires a reparative adjustment. Anxiety is the culprit that make gays. Nicolosi has his “Grey Zone” which sounds like Rado’s anxiety. And as we all know, straights are relaxed and anxiety free.
On the other hand, Rado does not completely discount “constitutional factors,” which apparently open the door for biological influence. In fact, Rado seems more open minded to these factors than his heirs at NARTH.
It also demands a change in outlook toward the underlying problem of constitution. If we assume, as we must, that constitutional factors may have an influence on morbid sex developments, we are now justified in considering this influence to be of two kinds: one preparing the ground for the inhibitory action of anxiety, the other modulating the course of the reparative adjustment. In considering the factors so involved we must not overlook the possibility of general, i.e., non-sexual factors, as well as innate defects of the sexual action system of as yet unknown character. It is well to recall, lest we underestimate this eventuality, that we are still in the dark even as regards the physiological mechanism of such an elementary phenomenon as sexual attraction. Still another possibility is of course the presence of elements of the action system of the opposite sex such as reflexes, or rather chains of reflexes, susceptible to resuscitation by hormones or other agents. However, not until somatic research has disclosed such elements shall we be able to determine by psychological methods their role in shaping morbid sex behavior. (p. 467)
Rado here shows much more respect for biological influences than demonstrated by today’s reparative therapists. Rado assumes (without empirical evidence) a reparative mechanism but to his credit, he recognizes that biological factors would have to mediate the response. In other words, homosexuality, even for Rado, is more complex than a set of family dynamics or a specific kind of attachment break. If environmental factors have any relevance, they would surely be mediated by nature.
Rado also noted that at the time almost nothing was known about brain and sexual attraction. He seemed open to being corrected in his thinking based on what he called somatic research. He also called upon psychoanalysts to give deference to researchers in discovering and elucidating the biological elements of sexuality.
We do know much more about sexuality and have brain studies which demonstrate significant differences associated with sexual orientation. In my view, NARTH supporters only incorporate one aspect of Rado’s suggestions.
Roots of reparative therapy – Momism as a root of homosexuality
Yesterday, I quoted the bookjacket of Their Mothers’ Sons by Edward Strecker which proposes smothering mothering as a culprit for the failure of boys to become men. Today, I want to quote a bit more from the book, specifically in reference to homosexuality. Of course, Strecker sees mom as being at root of the gay.
First, I provide Strecker’s basic diagnosis of the sad lot of sons who find themselves in mom’s grips. Strecker’s laboratory was war. He lamented that over 3 million men dodged the draft or were discharged for psychiatric reasons during World War II. Strecker acknowledged for all people there is a inner battle between self-preservation and fighting for the greater good. Some men became valient fighters, even accepting with grace their wounds, whereas others wilted in the face of the demands of war. Why the difference? According to Strecker, it comes down to maturity. He wrote:
Why did the desire for self-preservation defeat one group of men, the their discredit, and not the other? The answer in ninety percent of the cases can be given in one word, IMMATURITY. The majority of men who failed, like the majority of men who fail for the same reasons in ordinary life, were IMMATURE. (p. 21; emphasis in the original).
So what causes immaturity?
You guessed it.
Mom.
Strecker wrote:
Maturity is not an inborn trait; it is not hereditary. It is the result of early background, environment, training, and unselfish parental love…Given the opportunity of having known when he was eight to twelve years old, any one of the men who failed in his opportunity to serve in the armed forces because of neuropsychiatric tendencies, and, particularly, of having known his mother, a competent psychiatrist could have forecast with reasonable accuracy the boy’s future immaturity. In the vast majority of case histories, a “mom” is at fault. (p. 23).
For Strecker, immaturity, and therefore mom, is also at root of homosexuality. While he does allow for “biological deviations” as involved in homosexuality, he also implicates “mom and her wiles.” Strecker provides a letter from a teen who calls himself a “sissy” and a “mother’s boy.” The young man also describes homosexual attractions. Strecker’s then diagnoses the causes of the boy’s homosexuality from his letter.
The essential parts are there, and unedited, and a study of them shows two familiar types of silver cords – “you will never find anyone quite as pretty and worthy of you as mom,” and “sexual intercourse is a horrible affair in which the husband is the beast.” Mom, as the paints her in his letter, in undoubtedly the ‘pretty addlepate’ who by her actions and what she has said and implied has poisoned the boy’s mind against normal, mature heterosexual living. In various ways, mostly devious, he has been made to know that no girl could measure up to his mom, so he veered away from the normal companionship with girls that a part of every high school boy’s life. Sex was degrading, unnatural, undesireable — his mom had told him so. Naturally, when completely entwined by these two silver cords, his normal, healthy masculine instincts were stifled. The result — a tendency toward abnormal sex life.
Strecker also points to mothers who really wanted girls as another force behind some homosexuality. He then invokes one of the many psychoanalytically based theories by suggesting that some men remain in love with mother past their childhood which results in overwhelming guilt. This guilt is then transferred to other girls and women as an adult. Thus,
heterosexuality in a complete way is impossible for him to achieve and he may turn to homosexuality in his need for some sex outlet, as the lesser evil. (p. 131)
Lesbians are almost ignored but not quite. Strecker saves some blame for dad:
All the same forces operate against the daughters of immature fathers — pops — as well as against the sons of moms. The pop who mentally seduces his daughter may implant a tendency toward lesbianism.
Strecker concludes:
I want to repeat that while innate factors often go into the making of homosexuality, yet the environmental influence is strong enough so that moms and pops are to blame. (p. 132)
Dr. Strecker provides no references or evidence for his statements beyond the letter from the young man. Readers are apparently expected to believe him because he is a psychiatrist and an advisor to the armed services. Strecker puts much more weight on mothering than current reparative therapists do, but, in my view, Strecker, writing in 1946, would fit in quite well at the 2011 NARTH conference.