Happy Italy? The Mediterranean Experience of Homosexuality, Psychoanalysis, and the Mental Health Professions

SUMMARY

The authors outline the history of the relationship between Italian psychoanalytic and psychiatric institutions and homosexuality. In a “don't ask-don't tell” climate, this history evolved between post-war Italy's ideological polarization between Catholicism and postwar Marxism as well as between two different “local cultures”: Middle-European and Mediterranean. In a review of the Italian psychoanalytic, psychological and psychiatric literature from 1930 to the present, there is a dearth of articles dealing with homosexuality. In the articles that do exist, most link homosexuality with psychopathology or developmental arrests. There is no discussion of the concept of internalized homophobia in the Italian literature. The authors present some early, empirical research in which they assess attitudes toward homosexuality among members of Italian psychoanalytic institutions, both Freudian and Jungian. Preliminary data indicates a greater antihomosexual bias in Freudian institutes. The authors conclude that in the last ten years the cultural climate and the clinical attitude have changed and that the Italian mental health community is beginning to come to terms with its own antihomosexual biases.

KEYWORDS:

• Analytical psychology
• discrimination
• “don't ask don't tell,”
• homophobia
• homosexuality
• Italian psychoanalysis
• Italian psychiatry
• psychoanalytic training
• theories of homosexuality