An outstanding psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and MD, Edmund Bergler wrote 25 books on psychology and 273 articles in leading professional journals. His books cover topics such as child development, neurosis, midlife crises, marriage difficulties, gambling, self-destructive behavior, and homosexuality. Bergler was rightfully recognized as an expert of his time in terms of homosexuality. The following are excerpts from his work.
Recent books and productions have attempted to portray homosexuals as unhappy victims who deserve sympathy. The appeal to the lacrimal glands is unreasonable: homosexuals can always resort to psychiatric help and be cured if they want to. But public ignorance is so widespread on this issue, and the manipulation of homosexuals by public opinion about themselves is so effective that even intelligent people who were definitely born yesterday did not fall for them.
Recent psychiatric experience and research has unequivocally proven that the supposedly irreversible fate of homosexuals (sometimes even attributed to non-existent biological and hormonal conditions) is actually a therapeutically altered unit of neurosis. The therapeutic pessimism of the past is gradually disappearing: today psychotherapy of a psychodynamic direction can cure homosexuality.
By cure, I mean:
1. a complete lack of interest in their gender;
2. normal sexual pleasure;
3. characterological change.
