A New Jungian Theory of Male Homosexual Personhood: Individuation as Gay [1991]

The male homosexual person as a topic has received remarkably meager attention from Jungian psychology, as Samuels noted in his seminal review of the field (1985). Although Jung had little to say, certain of his brief remarks have shaped the subsequent treatment of this subject by analytical psychologists. Robert Hopcke has shown in his exhaustive and detailed review of Jung’s writings on homosexuality and homosexuals (1987b, 1988) that Jung held five distinct attitudes toward homosexuality and advanced three different theories of its etiology. Among these attitudes, Jung believed that “homosexuality is a result of psychological immaturity and, consequently, [is] abnormal and disturbed” (Hopcke, 1988, p. 68). Along with this view, he held the theory that male homosexual personhood is the result of an infantile relationship to the feminine, variously termed a “mother complex,” “anima identification,” and “unconscious matriarchal psychology” (Hopcke, 1988, p. 73). Until recently this view and theory have dominated the scant discussion about the male homosexual person that has occurred in analytical psychology, while Jung’s other views about homosexuals have been accorded little consideration. Only in the past few years have analytic writers begun to question this arrangement (Hopcke, 1987b, 1988; Kelsey and Kelsey, 1987; Monick, 1987; Singer, 1976; Steele and Stockford, 1985; Stevens, 1983). Eugene Monick, in his analysis of the homosexual immaturity and femininity positions of analytic psychology, concludes that they are at heart “naturalistic fallacies” (1987, p. 116; see Hillman, 1975, pp. 84ff). He asks, is one man more in tow of the Great Mother because he avoids her earthly counterpart while another is less so because he cannot live without her? Is one man frozen in the Great Mother’s embrace because he is not drawn to her breast while another is free of her chains because he is? (Monick, pp. 119-120)