PC: No Freud = No "Heterosexuality"?

Combing elements from these threads -- could Freud dying before writing Interpretation of Dreams have led to early 20th Western Society never adopting the strict sexual norms it did OTL, possibly not even considering "homosexuals" to be some sort of sexual opposite?

If not, what might have emerged as sexual doxa instead?

CONSOLIDATION: For those who're wondering -- I'm mainly inspired here by the ideas of Katz and Blank, though I realize they may well be disagreements with their chief thesis.
 
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The various abrahamic cults have hated homosexuality for thousands of years. A book written a hundreds years ago is unlikely to affect that one way or the other. Oppression of homosexuals was a 'popularist' idea in Nazi germany, because it was a broadly christian nation, not because everyone had read Freud.
 
The various abrahamic cults have hated homosexuality for thousands of years. A book written a hundreds years ago is unlikely to affect that one way or the other. Oppression of homosexuals was a 'popularist' idea in Nazi germany, because it was a broadly christian nation, not because everyone had read Freud.

The nazis didnt draw much on christianism, ya know - they presented themselves as kinda anti-it in some points. Or a twisted view on it.
 
The various abrahamic cults have hated homosexuality for thousands of years. A book written a hundreds years ago is unlikely to affect that one way or the other. Oppression of homosexuals was a 'popularist' idea in Nazi germany, because it was a broadly christian nation, not because everyone had read Freud.

Oppression of homosexuals or disdain for homosexual acts?

I'm fairly certain a specifically "gay identity" is relatively new historically speaking.

On this board awhile back, someone posted a suggestion that Richard III and the prince of France enter into a gay marriage. Someone with more knowledge about how things were viewed back then said the Church would condemn them for sodomy and tell them to stop committing it--the idea that the two of them were homosexual wouldn't even occur to them.
 
The various abrahamic cults have hated homosexuality for thousands of years. A book written a hundreds years ago is unlikely to affect that one way or the other. Oppression of homosexuals was a 'popularist' idea in Nazi germany, because it was a broadly christian nation, not because everyone had read Freud.

Ah, but it wasn't until the 20th Century that you started to see mainstream society defining themselves as being "the opposite of homosexual" -- and with that came some very unique changes to mainstream sexuality, as regular people went from thinking "normality" as just being natural to seeing a potential "deviant" in themselves and everybody else. Now that I think about it, in fact, there seems to be a real difference between being "anti-gay", which admittedly has an old lineage, and full-scale homophobia, which has far more social and psychological implications and actually seems to be a lot more recent...
 
The difference between the ancient anti-homosexual prejudices and the systematic persecution by Nazis and others is that homosexual acts were not seen as defining what people are. If someone "lays with a man like with a women", it was considered an act - seen by the society or religious teachings as reprehensible, sin, whatever - but it wasn't understood as something intrinsic to the person in question. It was believed to be just a decision to sleep with a person of the same sex - for some reasons on the level of "taste". You still see the residue of that when American conservatives talk about "gay lifestyle". Only the Nazis started persecuting gays not for specific acts but for what they were. Not that it is any better to punish someone for having sex with another consenting adult, but the Nazis made a qualitative shift for the worse in the way of decision behind it, and they were not alone in the world in this regard.

There have been enough theories about the sexuality spectrum where "gay" and "straight" are just end position and everyone is actually a bit (or more than a bit) bisexual, and only are forced into one or the other corner by societal pressure - I wonder if it becomes mainstream understanding at some point, whether today's gay emancipation movement will be seen as reactionary for forcing people away from the "middle"?
The "biphobia" often discussed on this forum points into this direction...
 
The notion of a "gay community", that is a group of people that share certain outlook, culture, slang, etc... is pretty much a modern development. As its been pointed out, in time past an act would not have defined the person in many ethnic groups. With that in mind, it is quite possible that the perception of homosexuality as a defining characterisitc might not have arisen *however* I'm not sure how much can realy be attributed to Freud since you had other writers like Karl Heinrich Ulrichs who help defined that notion.
 
Butterflying away Masters and Johnson or Kinsey would be worse

Freud managed to coin a bunch of terms expressing normative values based on bourgeois European society as it went through the Industrial Revolution and the profound physical, mental, and emotional dislocations and their effects as people were displaced from the village comforts of religion and kinship in a much more depersonalized urban world.

Those values existed regardless of his work, so he didn't invent them, he just codified them and explored the effects they had on the human psyche.
In no way do I belittle his impact or importance to exploring how humanity deals with stresses and copes with neuroses.

He had a third rail ready to hand in the European bourgeois suppression of sexuality as the means to improve their economic lot and ensure outward conformity. Other areas, the unconscious mind and reflexive thinking behind totems and taboo were also areas he pioneered and others, Jung and Adler, expanded upon.

As mentioned before, from ancient times through the Enlightenment, acts did not equal identity, they were considered sinful and handled individually on a case-by-case basis before science gave us the idea to look for the drives behind the acts and the urge to paint with a larger brush.

To paraphrase Newton, he stood on the work of others and synthesized a much more rational exploration of human behavior but was hardly the only one who could or would do so.

DISCLAIMER - I HAVE NOT READ HIS ORIGINAL WORKS

He DID frame the argument that homosexuality was a sexually immature stage
that could be "cured" with psychotherapy which seems to be the OP's casus belli against him. Everyone has cultural and intellectual blinders on.

Keep in mind his intent/end goal was for psychotherapy to allow individuals to fully participate in society, be productive citizens and not let childhood traumas spoil their adult lives so they could economically thrive, be fecund and good parents to the kids they had, which is bourgeois as it gets.

For him the idea of homosexuality being a valid sexual expression for adults was ludicrous. It would be like tolerating an adult sucking on a pacifier or continuing to play tiddlywinks.

Further work, especially Masters and Johnson and Kinsey's research, exploded some of the myths of homosexuality such as it being something only a few perverts did and that homosexuality didn't prevent folks from being largely law-abiding, productive citizens.

Now, among the common perception has changed re: homosexuality to where it should carry no more stigma than being left-handed. Both are genetically determined and very resistant to "corrective" therapy. People are who they are. We see it as a valid identity that needs no corrective therapy.
 
With that in mind, it is quite possible that the perception of homosexuality as a defining characterisitc might not have arisen *however* I'm not sure how much can realy be attributed to Freud since you had other writers like Karl Heinrich Ulrichs who help defined that notion.
Freud managed to coin a bunch of terms expressing normative values based on bourgeois European society as it went through the Industrial Revolution and the profound physical, mental, and emotional dislocations and their effects as people were displaced from the village comforts of religion and kinship in a much more depersonalized urban world.

Those values existed regardless of his work, so he didn't invent them, he just codified them and explored the effects they had on the human psyche.
In no way do I belittle his impact or importance to exploring how humanity deals with stresses and copes with neuroses.

Do you think there's something to the idea that Freud's ideas were central to straight people becoming "vigilant" (and at times paranoid) about the potential for homosexuality within themselves and their children? That's to say, without Freud society might continue to be "anti-gay" but wouldn't, properly speaking, be homophobic? Because the latter affects a lot more than how homosexual acts are treated in society...
 
The difference between the ancient anti-homosexual prejudices and the systematic persecution by Nazis and others is that homosexual acts were not seen as defining what people are.
I call silliness. If I take an axe and lop your head off I'm a murderer because I've comitted an act of murder. Actions speak louder than words. What I've done and what I do is who I am. The people who write the bible, and killing peole to enforce it down the centuries, understood this. This is why the bible says 'kill gay people', and all the other rules they have. Any time a culture defines itself by silly rules it has to reject those who break the rules, and those who point out that the rules are silly. Without adherance to such rules, such a community loses all sense of identity. (Specifically, it loses the sense of obligation to its rules and rulers.) And good ridance to societies like that.

Israelites weren't systematic against homosexuals, it was only because they were so systematic against everyone else. 'Kill everything that breathes within the city walls' is pretty damn through. It's only when religions are no longer able to follow general rules like 'kill people who doesn't agree with you' that they start to care about little rules, like prohibitions against homosexuality.

Marc Pasquin said:
The notion of a "gay community", that is a group of people that share certain outlook, culture, slang, etc... is pretty much a modern development.
Technically ancient greece was a 'gay community' by that standard. So maybe not so modern...
 
No need to blame Freud.

IMO, Freud wasn't the source of heterosexuality as a norm by any stretch of the imagination.
By and large, since the rise of agriculture and the push by rulers to have a nice surplus population to waste on wars to expand and defend their empires that the onus was put on folks to have a lot of babies, thus the emphasis on heterosexual propagation.

Hunter-gatherer societies OTOH tend to be big believers in ZPG with lots of taboos that prevent unrestrained breeding during the horny-adolescent phase. Usually to breed, they marry late and only have a few kids.

For much of "civilized" human history, individual preferences were given short shrift as long as they didn't interfere with the production of suitable alliances and kids in various cultures.
Some cultures e.g. the Hindu culture made sexual preference totally irrelevant with the numerous ascetic sadhu brotherhoods and fairly open-minded re: whom you played with as long as most folks continued to marry and breed.

As the Enlightenment started questioning the eternal verities of society, it became cool to question monogamy and explore sexual alternatives. Rousseau hearkened to the ideal of the "noble savage", and De Sade just did whatever he damned well felt like but those were privileged nobles, not the bourgeois that actually ran things or the jacquerie i.e. 99% of population.

FWIW, I believe a lot of the Christian allergy to homosexuality goes back to the disciples' visceral rejection of Roman mores, not so much the verses of Leviticus. YMMV.

Where homosexuality and heteronormative mores got explored in the West grew out of the dislocations of the Industrial Revolution and the attempts to define a "national" set of mores for greater social improvement and scientifically "justify" it being the healthiest way to go.
The folks who were heretofore quietly ignored suddenly found themselves in the spotlight as deviants from the new social order all classes had to adhere to.

Freud found himself examining them through the lenses of neurosis to explain why they didn't conform to bourgeois heterosexual mores cobbled up in the mid-19th century for general social "improvement".

He had the genesis of neurosis right. He didn't quite have the interest or the tools to completely explore or parse the nature vs nurture components of sexual identity.

He saw it as completely nurture-based phenomenon- case closed- not just because he didn't have the tools to explore endocrinology, PET scanning to see which areas of the brain light up when folks see something that arouses them, etc.
He wanted to open the door to hope and progress, that folks could get over whatever "neurosis" with proper guidance via psychotherapy.

I've only had two classes in psych and one in cultural anthropology, so folks with more background are freely invited to take my comments with a grain of salt.

So we've explored where Freud was coming from.
I find Katz and Blank the kind of tedious self-justifying twits who try to apply 21st century PC Zeitgeist to other eras that give social history a bad name.

Foucault has so much fun savaging straight society because he's gay, French, and so determined not to play by the rules that it distorts his social theories into hammerspace.

He's a brilliant guy, but even a broken clock's right twice a day AFAIC. My main argument is that opinion trumps objectivity in social history in supposed professional social "scientists". That's why I'm not a social historian.

It's only been since we've been so successful at death control that with modern sanitation and immunization that kids regularly lived to adulthood the last six generations or so that we can have replacement population with a really low birth rate.
With Social Security, you don't have to have a mob of kids to take care of you into senescence. People thus have a lot more room to fully express whatever sexuality calls to them without the social onus for everyone to breed or pair off with a socially suitable mate as has been the fate of the vast majority of humanity throughout history.

(I know I'm dodging the issue of homosexuals desiring to have/raise kids. Biologically, they can be homosexual 99% of their fertile lives and still replace themselves BEFORE the advent of IVF and other modern fertility tech. Individuals can be mature, nurturing parents regardless of sexual preference, religion or lack of same.)

So from my perspective, homosexuality is a socially neutral phenomenon. Individually, developing a working philosophy and positive social role has zip to do with sexual preference.
It's how you're straight, gay, bi, asexual, whatever that matters, not whether you are straight, gay, both, or neither.
 
On 'roman mores' - note guy that romans had mocked and sneered at greeks for THIS reason. They had a certain homophobia itself. Well, mocking the er.. 'recieving ones' at very least, very 'unmanly' to them.
 
Where homosexuality and heteronormative mores got explored in the West grew out of the dislocations of the Industrial Revolution and the attempts to define a "national" set of mores for greater social improvement and scientifically "justify" it being the healthiest way to go.
The folks who were heretofore quietly ignored suddenly found themselves in the spotlight as deviants from the new social order all classes had to adhere to.

If I'm understanding you correctly, the transition from "anti-gay" to "homophobia" was really an inevitable result of the emergence of the "progressive" industrial society?

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I guess he meaned stuff like the Victorian moralism...

Right -- or "Prussian National Morality", or what have you...
 
Yes I meant the Victorian model of social progress

Roughly 1870 was where Italy and Germany united and nationalism was all the rage. Discarding regional identities in favor of the New Italian, German, Briton, etc was the big push.

What I'm saying is in that scramble to define what was an ideal citizen, think of the Scout oath. They wanted thrifty, productive, obedient, predictable souls who played the game without bucking their employers, the government or Church.
Heterosexuality was assumed as the default state and no overt provisions made for acceptable homosexuality in adults were ever made except possibly in older "companions" for nubile women to keep them virgin until marriage and of course the Catholic Church's *cough*"celibate" *cough* orders. :rolleyes::rolleyes:

People with options (money and/or isolation) typically could do what they liked. That option disappeared as more and more people had access to and communication with more "cosmopolitan" influences, thus flattening out a lot of regional differences.
If you think that's tilling a fertile ground for fascism, or at least reflexive jingoism-- you get a cigar or a rose, whichever you prefer! :D:D
Tolerance for deviating from that norm became traitorous, not just eccentric as it had been for centuries.

I've always been stupified by the pretzel logic in the US banning homosexuals from military service b/c they might be "security" risks. *facepalm*
Don't give the KGB or whichever hostile agents a handle to blackmail them with, you bozos! :mad::mad::mad:

It made me sick anytime somebody with twelve years's exemplary service as an effective soldier/sailor/marine/airman would get flushed in a divorce or lovers' spat where they got outed or some new CO would go on a rampage trying to boot anyone remotely offbeat, no matter how effective and dedicated they happened to be to look "effective".

Anyhow back to the assumption of heterosexuality as default/good state-
see my previous post- that's not news.
It's only when folks got pressed into cookie-cutter models of "proper" behavior that it became a source of ostracism and persecution for oddballs during spasms of religious or secular fanaticism about proper conduct e.g. English Civil War, Salem witch trials, and rise of nationalism during the late 1800's from which the great purges of Germany and Soviet Union birthed to rid themselves of whomever offended the new order, thus bringing utopia closer.
 
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Technically ancient greece was a 'gay community' by that standard. So maybe not so modern...

I'm talking about "community" in the sense of a group within a larger group. To have sex with someone of the same gender (and incidently they weren't all open as people are lead to believe) didn't define you as a distinct member of society.
 
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