Word: bergler
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Manhattan's Dr. Edmund Bergler, 60, has a distinction unique even for a psychiatrist : over the past 30 years he has examined or treated nearly 1,000 male homosexuals. From this long and intimate professional voyage into a strange world, he has put down some surprising conclusions in a book, published last week, titled 1,000 Homosexuals (Pageant Books; $4.95). Says Psychoanalyst Bergler: ¶ The homosexual is a glutton for punishment and is surely unhappy-consciously or unconsciously...
...demands for more. In Manhattan's Rockefeller Center, Victor is building a podium before a wall-sized photograph of the Boston Symphony, plans to invite passers-by in to conduct behind closed doors. Actually, home conducting may be a healthy thing, according to Manhattan Psychoanalyst Dr. Edmund Bergler: it provides the amateur with sublimating relief from the gnawing "infantile megalomania" that afflicts every man who ever wanted to lift a baton...
Along the way, Bergler takes a roundhouse swing at what he considers another myth-bisexuality. This, he says, "has no existence beyond the word itself-[it] is an out-and-out fraud, involuntarily maintained by some naive homosexuals, and voluntarily perpetrated by some who are not so naive. The theory claims that a man can be-alternately or concomitantly-homo-and hetero-sexual. The statement is as rational as one declaring that a man can at the same time have cancer and perfect health. Some homosexuals are occasionally capable of lustless mechanical sex with a woman . . . They tend to marry...
Usable Guilt. What of cures? Psychiatrist Bergler takes his own profession to task for having been, in the past, too pessimistic. It can effect cures in 90% of cases, he insists, provided that analyst and patient are willing to take the tremendous time and effort to get to the root of the difficulty. By "cure" Bergler does not mean making a guilty homosexual proud of his perversion, but changing his character and, among other things, leading him to normal sexual enjoyment...
...Bergler advises analysts not to attempt the impossible, and suggests these criteria by which they can judge whether a prospective patient offers reasonable hope of cure: he must have inner guilt feelings that can be put to use in treatment; he must accept the treatment voluntarily and actively want to change; he must give up his habit of using homosexuality as a weapon against his family, which (unconsciously) he always hates. The analyst must not begin by attacking the homosexuality head on-or the patient will at once cry that he is being persecuted. Yet the analyst must convince...