Sexuality, therapeutic culture, and family ties in the United States after 1973.

Abstract

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association voted to remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2nd ed.; DSM-II; American Psychiatric Association, 1968). Clinicians subsequently began conducting psychotherapy with gays and lesbians not in order to change their sexuality but to address the psychological effects of homophobia and associated problems. Family-related issues such as the impact of coming out to relatives became an important dimension of psychotherapy that normalized same-sex desire, identity, and relationships, even amid contemporary invocations of family values as grounds for opposing gays and lesbians' political claims. This article examines family therapy's gradual recognition of gay and lesbian families as emblematic of the historically changing relationship among psychotherapy, sexuality, and family during the 1970s to 1990s. Although early family therapists of the 1950s and 1960s were largely unconcerned with treating homosexuality as a psychiatric problem, they also generally did not recognize same-sex relationships as a possible configuration of family life because their models presumed a heterosexual nuclear family. By the 1980s and 1990s, many family therapists came to see sexuality as a dimension of family life that might shape the issues for which couples and families sought treatment but that did not warrant treatment itself. Homosexuality's depathologization in 1973 thus signaled the opening, not the closing, of lesbian and gay issues in family therapy because the cultural trends and social movements that led to homosexuality's removal from the DSM-II would, by the 1990s, also contribute to expanding family therapists' notion of "family." (PsycINFO Database Record

Histories of psychology after Stonewall: Introduction to the special issue.

“…Important as these histories are, they do not always resonate with all members of LGBTQIϩ communities today, particularly those whose issues were not settled-or even addressed-by the events of the early 1970s. These narratives omit, for example, how bisexuality is selectively affirmed and erased in successive waves of psychological thinking (Barker, 2007), the ongoing erasure and medicalization of transgender lives in psychology (Tosh, 2015), the continued androcentrism of psychological research on sexual minorities in which lesbian and bisexual women are poorly recognized (Lee & Crawford, 2012), the important history of psychologists' response to HIV/AIDS (see Morin, 1988), and the ways in which the "lesbian and gay affirmative" approach only ever managed to affirm adults such that it has remained "open season on gay kids" in the helping professions for decades (Hegarty, 2018;Sedgwick, 1991;Weinstein, 2018). Many countries are not addressed here (but see also Jowett, 2016).…”

“…It was the success of these movements that led psychologists to appreciate the early insights of scholars such as Kessler and McKenna into the logic of gender attribution (Kessler & McKenna, 1978; McKenna & Kessler, 2000). Only in the past 10–15 years have history of psychology journals begin to include publications on: GBTQI+ psychology (e.g., Chiang, 2008; Hammack & Windell, 2011; Hubbard, 2017; Pettit, 2011; Serlin, 2012; Weinstein, 2018).…”

History and the topsy-turvy world of psychotherapy.

“…And it morphed again in the 1970s and 1980s as new therapies evolved to meet the needs of an almost algorithmic expansion of new kinds of selves. Debbie Weinstein (2018) shows how, after the American Psychiatric Association depathologized homosexuality in a landmark 1973 decision, American marriage and family therapists came to embrace both homosexuality and gay families as normative experiences.…”