A scientific authority has set out to dispel the public’s touchy ignorance concerning homosexuality. It’s high time it was being done, he says, because homosexuality thrives as a social problem on ignorance and only knowledge can the public deal with it. According to Mr. Edmund Bergler, this knowledge in a nutshell is: “That there’s nothing glamorous about suffering from the disease known as homosexuality, that the disease can be cured, and that this apparently sexual disorder is invariably coupled with severe unconscious self-damage that will inevitably show up outside the sexual sphere as well, because it embraces the entire personality.” Dr. Bergler has made himself a leading spokesman of the psycho-analytic psychiatric point of view.

He is an outstanding medical critic of the late Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey’s statistical findings concerning homosexuality. He has been lecturing medical audiences, and he has now written a for thoughtful laymen: Homosexuality: Disease Or Way Of Life? In a foreword, he wrote: “I am thinking of the mass of young people- unhappy, bewildered, uninformed, sometimes suicidal caught, or about to be caught in a net: I am thinking of those young people who, because of an appalling unavailability of accurate information, erroneously cona sider their homosexual difficulties to be their final destiny . .

. I am also thinking of the unhappy parents of young homosexuals, and especially their mothers.” In no case whatever, he asserted, is homosexuality other than a neurotic disease. He denied emphatically that there can be any “party” between homosexuality and heterosexuality. “Heterosexuality per se does not guarantee emotional health,” he said. “There are 1 innumerable neurotics among| heterosexuals, too.

But there also exist healthy heterosexuals, and there are no healthy homosexuals.” Answering the question, “What makes a homosexual?” h he said: “Homosexuality is neither a biologically determined destiny, nor incomprehensible ill luck. It is an unfavorable unconscious solution of a conflict that faces every child.” He listed 12 seemingly different surface pictures of homosexuality but all “merely represent a series of elaborations of the homosexual’s basic dilemma, unconscious masochism.” As for the suggestion that there is a “bisexual” state, he said: It “is an out-and-outl fraud . . . bisexuality has no existence beyond the word itself.

Not all cases of homosexuality are curable, he said, but only those in which the sick person “really wants ‘to be cured.” Nevertheless the social problem should be dealt with medically, from a background of medical knowledge. He advocated out-patient departments of general hospitals for the psychiatric treatment of homosexuality. He blamed the Kinsey finding that a substantial proportion of all men have had homosexual experiences, for an intensification of the disease as a social problem, saying there now were “statistically – induced pseudo – homosexuals.” The Kinsey finding is false, he said, but it has emboldened homosexuals into “virtually asking for minority status.” That he would not grant. They’re sick people, he said. Therefore heal them..