On Thursday, 9/11/97, at 8pm, psychologist Joseph Nicolosi addressed a middling crowd in the Hesburgh Library Auditorium on the subject "Healing Homosexuality".
Putatively, Joseph Nicolosi's visit to Notre Dame was intended to acquaint us with (scientific, folk psychological ?) evidence supporting his brand of reparenting therapy for homosexuals. But Nicolosi's talk raised many more questions than it answered. Who is that guy? What does he have a license to practice? Anything? Anywhere?
His organizational webpage, http://www.narth.com, identifies him as Director, Thomas Aquinas Psychological Clinic, Psychologist. He holds a Ph.D. form the California School of Professional Psychology. Under California's "generic" licensure of psychologists, Nicolosi need have never had clinical supervision in therapy for sexual orientation, nor for behavioral or psychodynamic therapy for preschool children.
Nicolosi's visit to Notre Dame Thursday, 9/11/97, offered an opportunity to put both his psychoanalytic brand of "reparative" or reparenting therapy in the context of the explicit rejection of that therapy, by both the American Psychoanalytic Association and the American Psychological Association.
Each of these bodies issued the first reports in 1974, reversing the dictum which had stood on no firmer ground than that of the Freudian tradition, declassifying homosexuality as a mental disorder, authoritatively asserting that no scientific evidence supports the claim that homosexuality is symptomatic of a mental disorder. Those reports specifically undercut the scientific credibility of Nicolosi's psychoanalytic mentor, Irving Bieber.
The best way to rebut a claim that your view lacks scientific evidence is to supply scientific evidence.
The best way to get 51% of the vote at either APA in 1974 would have been to present scientific evidence that homosexuality is a developmental disorder, a sort of psychosexual "arrested development" maintaining an individual in some (androgynous?) condition necessary and frequently sufficient for the development of homosexual erotic behavior, itself inevitably maladaptive or "ego dystonic". (Stay tuned.) No such evidence was presented and none has been published. (note #1) That minority of neo-Freudian psychoanalysts who practice "reparenting" or "reparative" theory typically do not publish accounts of their procedures, and the absence of scrutiny via impartial "peer review" or "clinical supervision" has led to tragic results. (#2 ). In a familiar phrase, reparenting therapy is risky business, placing patients in highly suggestible, pseudo-childlike, relation to their therapist. (3#)
At the New School for Social Research Nicolosi's early mentor was Irving Bieber, now emeritus in psychiatry at Albert Einstein Medical College, NYC. Bieber, et. al., in Homosexuality: a psychoanalytic study, Basic Bks, 1962, saw "homosexuality as always pathological and incompatible with a happy life." Echoing Bieber, Nicolosi "Reparative therapy of male homosexuality," (#4) has stated, "I do not believe that the gay life-style can ever be healthy, nor that the homosexual identity can ever be completely ego-syntonic," p. 13. In layman's language Nicolosi means he considers that gays are unable to face the reality of the flawed developmental course that led to their "illness." In other words, if you're gay, and your experience doesn't conform to the Bieber-Nicolosi model, you're in denial. How convenient. Irrefutable? Hardly, empirically vacuous is the better judgement. Douglas C. Haldeman (# 5) notes Bieber's claim for reparative therapy of homosexuality: a "27% success rate in heterosexual shift (from homosexuality) after long-term therapy. Haldeman, President of the APA's Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian, Gay and Bixexual Issues, states of these successes, "only 18% were exclusively homosexual in the first place! 50% of the successfully treated subjects were more appropriately labeled bisexual." Haldeman's s most devastating methodological critique of the Bieber school is its failure to move beyond a simple dichotomous classification of male sexual orientation.
Joseph Nicholosi clearly fails to recognize that individual human differences in sexual orientation vary along many continua, that they are, in a word, multidimensional. Hence, Nicolosi's therapy may succeed in improving one's satisfaction with body image, negative feelings about parents, and the like. But when it claims to documentation of "conversion", Nicolosi is all waffle. Since Joseph Nicolosi has published nothing listed in Psych Info for the last decade, it will be difficult to find peer reviewed presentations of his viewpoint.
Healing Homosexuality, (#6) cowritten with a journalist, has a subtle veneer: that reparative therapy is not for every homosexual is a theme that dominates the introductory paragraphs of every chapter. But the core of the chapter always comes back to the Freudian claim that THE homosexual is the product of a dysfunctional family, typically with a dominating mother and an absent father. There is no empirical support for that claim anywhere in the published literature. We are simply asked to continue the Freudian tradition of labelling homosexuality a mental disorder, in the category of developmental disorders caused by inadequate parenting. Freud's own rather different views on this topic were merely speculative. The tradition has not succeeded in offering adequate empirical warrant for its varying interpretations of the master. Nicolosi's version of this antiquated view of male homosexuality is that it is caused by a developmental disorder resulting from a home in which the mother is dominant and the father "absent" (cold, aloof, uncaring.)
Most importantly, Nicolosi repeatedly claimed in his talk at ND that the "sissy boy" syndrome (in evidence by age 3) is a remarkably strong predictor (r =.67 -- .75) of male homosexuality; and claimed great success in "repairing" homosexuality at age three! The first claim (predictive) is a gross mispresentation of a much subtler point. (#7) The second claim (reparative) borders on a public confession of unethical behavior given the APA strictures on informed consent and its cautions about excepting informed consent from a surrogate (a parent or other family member) who may be acting on wide spread social prejudice rather in the best interests of the child's mental health.
A good brief account of the current status of the speculative Freudian model relied on by Nicolosi is provided in the widely acclaimed textbook my Michael and Sheila Cole. (#8).
Cole & Cole, citing a recent critique of the relevant implications of Freudian thought in current developmental research, (#9), identify research constituting an empirically well supported and intuitively obvious counterexample to the Bieber-Nicolosi thesis: "disturbances in identity formation are caused by environmental factors (abuse, seduction)," NOT by "inabilities to resolve sexual desires inherent in the developmental process. "(#10)
Cole and Cole also cite approvingly the work of sociologist Richard Troiden:
In the Wall Street Journal (Jan 9, 1997) , Nicolosi and his colleagues sought to circumvent censure by the American Psychological Association with the plea "Don't unhappy homosexuals deserve a chance to change?" But three and four year old boys need not be unhappy because they dislike rough and tumble play and like classical music. Their happiness requires nothing more than the love and support a "good enough" parent would give any child: understanding and help in building self-esteem, even in the face of cruel peer pressure, thoughtful assistance in building social skills in hostile situations. When Joseph Nicholosi implied that parents can and should stamp out the disease of homosexuality by packing little Billy off to the Thomas Aquinas Psychological Clinic to be reprogrammed to enjoy genuine male physicality, he revealed a completely unscientific bias, with no shred of clinical credibility. According to Nicolosi, no need to worry about the "gay gene," he will save the day, converting your "sissy boy" into the macho kid you thought you always wanted.
The 3 yr old can't consent to such treatment, nor even understand the question, "When Joe slugs you, why don't you slug him back?" But Joseph Nicolosi knows that such behavior in a male child can embarrass parents. He also knows, and here's the scary part, that these parents can give informed consent for "reparative therapy", for their child.
Don't worry about the gay gene, it operates indirectly. Joseph Nicoloisi and his ilk would eliminate the nascent childish behaviors they think lead to male homosexuality, with the intention of eventually erasing homosexuality from the face of the earth. In the name of the natural law! I hope that scares you half as much as it scares me.
Go to APA on Appropriate Therapy Regarding Sexual Orientation.
If you still care, but can't figure it out for yourself, this is HOME
or go to APA Press Releases (8/97)and other documents on sexual orientation
Websites of possible relevance, "crossfire" style.