In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life

Yale history professor Kunzel (Criminal Intimacy) incisively probes the relationship between psychiatry and queerness in the U.S., from the birth of psychoanalysis in the 19th century to the 1973 removal of homosexuality as a disorder from the DSM and beyond. Kunzel traces how mid-20th-century American psychiatrists fashioned an “optimistic” view of homosexuality as “curable” (partly as a result of “postwar American confidence”), while European “pessimism” tended to frame homosexuality as innate. She further theorizes that the postwar fixation on homosexuality as a threat to “American values” helped elevate psychiatrists’ status, as they became experts on so-called “problems of everyday life.” Anchoring her work in the case files of Washington, D.C., psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Karpman, who from the 1920s through the 1950s insisted his patients record their lives in letters and journals, Kunzel mixes nuanced historical analysis with a revealing window into the experiences of those being treated, including their resistance to narratives of homosexuality and gender variance as conditions to be fixed. (“I like this freedom of being able to have love with a beautiful, talented, brilliant, strong, and accomplished woman,” one female patient wrote to Karpman in the 1940s. “Can this not be my cure, instead of making me normal?”) The result is a valuable history of the pain and confusion caused by attempts to pathologize sexual differences. (Apr.)