LAUSR

This comment on Sandmeyer’s paper agrees that there were biases in the way Kohut understood homosexuality in his supervision of Jule Miller. Both were constrained by the theory in which they were shaped. That theory was in turn imbedded in centuries, if not millennia, of ingrained religious and cultural attitudes. Freud broke down some of the prejudicial attitudes toward homosexuality with his idea of bisexuality, but his fixation on drive theory and the Oedipus Complex required an understanding of homosexuality as regressed and infantile. Kohut’s remarkable contribution regarding the acceptance of homosexuality was at the level of theory. The idea of the self as holistic and his new theory of empathy envisions homosexuality as simply one of many ways of loving but doesn’t privilege any one. Kohut himself couldn’t quite live up to the full implications of his own theory.