There is No There There: A Discussion of “Narcissism and Self-Esteem Among Homosexual and Heterosexual Male Students”

Abstract

“Narcissism and Self-Esteem among Homosexual and Heterosexual Male Students,” states as its aim:

Acknowledging the changes both homosexuality and narcissism went through, the present study aims at empirically reviving the discussion about the association between these two phenomena. Based on the Freudian assumption that homosexual individuals develop on a narcissistic basis and look for a young man who resembles themselves, the hypothesis of this study predicts that their level of narcissism would be higher and level of self-esteem would be lower compared to their heterosexual counterparts. (Rubinstein, this issue).

Notes

Two well-regarded texts that make a stab at synthesis are LaPlanche and Pontalis (1973) and Moore and Fine (1990). However, each in its own way limits the theoretical voices heard.

The absence of a synthesizing psychoanalytic voice is not simply due to a preference for a case history approach. Another difficulty lies in the insularity between different schools of analytic thought, not only from each other, but from nonanalytic disciplines as well (Stone, 1997). According to Lewes (1988), analysts responded critically—and at times ferociously—to the Kinsey Reports (1948, 1953) whose findings about human sexuality entered into popular awareness and challenged psychoanalytic orthodoxies of that time. Less publicized (and consequently engendering fewer analytic responses) was the work of Evelyn Hooker (1957), who demonstrated through impartially interpreted projective tests that a group of 30 nonpatient homosexual men showed no more psychopathology than heterosexual controls. None of these findings would persuade orthodox psychoanalysts to abandon their sexual theories in their ultimately self-destructive battle with the American Psychiatric Association (APA). After failing to make a case for analytic theories of homosexuality in APA's scientific committees, psychoanalytic psychiatrists petitioned the APA to force a referendum in which the general membership could vote on the 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from the DSM-II (Bayer, 1981; Drescher and Merlino, 2007; Drescher, 2008). After that loss, orthodox analysts circled the wagons and their official organization only incorporated policies that normalized homosexuality in 1991 and 1992 after the threat of an anti-discrimination lawsuit (Isay, 1996; Roughton, 1995).

Moore and Fine (1990) attribute coinage of the term narcissism to “Paul Nacke in 1899, based on Havelock Ellis's correlation of the Greek myth of Narcissus with a case of male autoerotic perversion” (p. 124).