Psychiatrist, Civil Rights Advocate.
Richard Isay first had to overcome his own ignorance of homosexuality and embrace the fact that he was gay before forcing the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) to do the same. And neither was easy. The Oedipus complex was the dominant paradigm of psychoanalytic theory when he had trained. Homosexuality was seen as a form of so called “arrested development”; an immature and inferior status. This theory propped up much of the then commonplace legal and social discrimination against homosexual people. Isay bought into the construct and underwent a decade of analysis both as part of his training and to “cure” himself of homosexuality. He married Jane Franzblau and had two sons.
The 1969 riots in Manhattan, when police raided the Stonewall Inn, one of few establishments to welcome openly homosexual people, catalysed the emergence of the modern gay rights movement. An early target for activists was classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the diagnostic bible of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Several years of mounting pressure from within and without led the APA to drop that classification in 1973.
Six months later, while at a conference in New York, at the age of 40 Isay walked into a seedy gay porn theatre. “Within a few minutes, because of the intensity of my sexual feelings, I realized that, in fact, I was homosexual,” he wrote in Becoming Gay, an account of his personal journey to accept himself, published in 1996. “For the first time, because my sexual feelings and impulses were so clear and powerful, I did not believe I was sick. I experienced a sense of relief and exhilaration. I knew that homosexuality was the passion I had believed myself incapable of ever experiencing.”
He told Jane that he was gay in 1980. They decided to keep it a secret and stay together for the sake of the children, then aged 10 and 14, for nearly a decade. Jane later wrote of the toll this secret took on the entire family. Isay initially did not publicly disclose his homosexuality but began working with gay patients, helping them come to terms with their orientation. He published Being Homosexual in 1989 in support of the premise that it is a normal variant of human development.
Isay pressed the APsaA to follow the APA and change its views on homosexuality. He became the first openly gay member of the association. Consequently, some colleagues shunned him and stopped referring patients to him. It was only in 1992, under threat of a lawsuit by Isay, with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union, that the APsaA agreed to adopt a non- discrimination statement protecting gay people from discrimination in training and advance- ment in the profession. “He changed the way the psychoanalytic world viewed the subject of homosexuality,” said Jack Drescher, a friend of Isay’s and a leading expert on homosexuality and psychiatry. “He was a pioneer, a very brave man. He was attacked by psychoanalysts. He took a lot of flak.”
In 1979 Isay began a relationship with Gordon Harrell, an artist nearly two decades younger, though he continued to live with his family until 1989. They wed last year, soon after the state of New York legalised same sex marriage. His book Commitment and Healing: Gay Men and the Need for Romantic Love, published in 2006, drew heavily on the experience of that relationship. In a 2008 interview in the magazine Weill Cornell Medicine Isay said of the relationship, “We both prioritise the importance of a committed relationship for our happiness.”
Harrell told Gay City News magazine that they stayed together despite their differences. “We spoke between almost every patient, for over 30 years . . . We eventually became so close that we became part of each other—very happily halves of a greater whole.”
“Dick Isay stood Sigmund Freud on his head,” neurobiologist Simon LeVay told the newspaper. “Freud said it was problematic parent-child relationships that made a child gay; Isay said that it was the gayness of the child that made the parent-child relationship problematic.” Most in the profession have come around to Isay’s perspective.
Richard A Friedman, a colleague at Weill Cornell Medical Center, said that Isay “made the discipline see that their view was based on ideology, not evidence. He pushed the discipline to do what it should have done, and he did not stop. We’re all richer for it.” Last year the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education selected Isay for the Hans W Loewald memorial award. The award recognises an individual’s stature “for original and outstanding contributions to the development of psychoanalytic theory, practice, and application.”
Richard Alexander Isay was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 13 December 1934. He attended Haverford College and the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, going on to complete his psychiatric residency at Yale University, and further training at the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute. He was clinical professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and lecturer in psychiatry at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.
Isay died aged 77 in New York City. In addition to Harrell, he leaves his former wife, Jane, and two sons.
Source: Bob Roehr freelance journalist, Boston, USA
Richard Isay first had to overcome his own ignorance of homosexuality and embrace the fact that he was gay before forcing the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) to do the same. And neither was easy. The Oedipus complex was the dominant paradigm of psychoanalytic theory when he had trained. Homosexuality was seen as a form of so called “arrested development”; an immature and inferior status. This theory propped up much of the then commonplace legal and social discrimination against homosexual people. Isay bought into the construct and underwent a decade of analysis both as part of his training and to “cure” himself of homosexuality. He married Jane Franzblau and had two sons.
The 1969 riots in Manhattan, when police raided the Stonewall Inn, one of few establishments to welcome openly homosexual people, catalysed the emergence of the modern gay rights movement. An early target for activists was classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the diagnostic bible of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Several years of mounting pressure from within and without led the APA to drop that classification in 1973.
Six months later, while at a conference in New York, at the age of 40 Isay walked into a seedy gay porn theatre. “Within a few minutes, because of the intensity of my sexual feelings, I realized that, in fact, I was homosexual,” he wrote in Becoming Gay, an account of his personal journey to accept himself, published in 1996. “For the first time, because my sexual feelings and impulses were so clear and powerful, I did not believe I was sick. I experienced a sense of relief and exhilaration. I knew that homosexuality was the passion I had believed myself incapable of ever experiencing.”
He told Jane that he was gay in 1980. They decided to keep it a secret and stay together for the sake of the children, then aged 10 and 14, for nearly a decade. Jane later wrote of the toll this secret took on the entire family. Isay initially did not publicly disclose his homosexuality but began working with gay patients, helping them come to terms with their orientation. He published Being Homosexual in 1989 in support of the premise that it is a normal variant of human development.
Isay pressed the APsaA to follow the APA and change its views on homosexuality. He became the first openly gay member of the association. Consequently, some colleagues shunned him and stopped referring patients to him. It was only in 1992, under threat of a lawsuit by Isay, with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union, that the APsaA agreed to adopt a non- discrimination statement protecting gay people from discrimination in training and advance- ment in the profession. “He changed the way the psychoanalytic world viewed the subject of homosexuality,” said Jack Drescher, a friend of Isay’s and a leading expert on homosexuality and psychiatry. “He was a pioneer, a very brave man. He was attacked by psychoanalysts. He took a lot of flak.”
In 1979 Isay began a relationship with Gordon Harrell, an artist nearly two decades younger, though he continued to live with his family until 1989. They wed last year, soon after the state of New York legalised same sex marriage. His book Commitment and Healing: Gay Men and the Need for Romantic Love, published in 2006, drew heavily on the experience of that relationship. In a 2008 interview in the magazine Weill Cornell Medicine Isay said of the relationship, “We both prioritise the importance of a committed relationship for our happiness.”
Harrell told Gay City News magazine that they stayed together despite their differences. “We spoke between almost every patient, for over 30 years . . . We eventually became so close that we became part of each other—very happily halves of a greater whole.”
“Dick Isay stood Sigmund Freud on his head,” neurobiologist Simon LeVay told the newspaper. “Freud said it was problematic parent-child relationships that made a child gay; Isay said that it was the gayness of the child that made the parent-child relationship problematic.” Most in the profession have come around to Isay’s perspective.
Richard A Friedman, a colleague at Weill Cornell Medical Center, said that Isay “made the discipline see that their view was based on ideology, not evidence. He pushed the discipline to do what it should have done, and he did not stop. We’re all richer for it.” Last year the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education selected Isay for the Hans W Loewald memorial award. The award recognises an individual’s stature “for original and outstanding contributions to the development of psychoanalytic theory, practice, and application.”
Richard Alexander Isay was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 13 December 1934. He attended Haverford College and the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, going on to complete his psychiatric residency at Yale University, and further training at the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute. He was clinical professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and lecturer in psychiatry at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.
Isay died aged 77 in New York City. In addition to Harrell, he leaves his former wife, Jane, and two sons.
Source: Bob Roehr freelance journalist, Boston, USA
Psychiatrist, Civil Rights Advocate.
Richard Isay first had to overcome his own ignorance of homosexuality and embrace the fact that he was gay before forcing the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) to do the same. And neither was easy. The Oedipus complex was the dominant paradigm of psychoanalytic theory when he had trained. Homosexuality was seen as a form of so called “arrested development”; an immature and inferior status. This theory propped up much of the then commonplace legal and social discrimination against homosexual people. Isay bought into the construct and underwent a decade of analysis both as part of his training and to “cure” himself of homosexuality. He married Jane Franzblau and had two sons.
The 1969 riots in Manhattan, when police raided the Stonewall Inn, one of few establishments to welcome openly homosexual people, catalysed the emergence of the modern gay rights movement. An early target for activists was classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the diagnostic bible of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Several years of mounting pressure from within and without led the APA to drop that classification in 1973.
Six months later, while at a conference in New York, at the age of 40 Isay walked into a seedy gay porn theatre. “Within a few minutes, because of the intensity of my sexual feelings, I realized that, in fact, I was homosexual,” he wrote in Becoming Gay, an account of his personal journey to accept himself, published in 1996. “For the first time, because my sexual feelings and impulses were so clear and powerful, I did not believe I was sick. I experienced a sense of relief and exhilaration. I knew that homosexuality was the passion I had believed myself incapable of ever experiencing.”
He told Jane that he was gay in 1980. They decided to keep it a secret and stay together for the sake of the children, then aged 10 and 14, for nearly a decade. Jane later wrote of the toll this secret took on the entire family. Isay initially did not publicly disclose his homosexuality but began working with gay patients, helping them come to terms with their orientation. He published Being Homosexual in 1989 in support of the premise that it is a normal variant of human development.
Isay pressed the APsaA to follow the APA and change its views on homosexuality. He became the first openly gay member of the association. Consequently, some colleagues shunned him and stopped referring patients to him. It was only in 1992, under threat of a lawsuit by Isay, with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union, that the APsaA agreed to adopt a non- discrimination statement protecting gay people from discrimination in training and advance- ment in the profession. “He changed the way the psychoanalytic world viewed the subject of homosexuality,” said Jack Drescher, a friend of Isay’s and a leading expert on homosexuality and psychiatry. “He was a pioneer, a very brave man. He was attacked by psychoanalysts. He took a lot of flak.”
In 1979 Isay began a relationship with Gordon Harrell, an artist nearly two decades younger, though he continued to live with his family until 1989. They wed last year, soon after the state of New York legalised same sex marriage. His book Commitment and Healing: Gay Men and the Need for Romantic Love, published in 2006, drew heavily on the experience of that relationship. In a 2008 interview in the magazine Weill Cornell Medicine Isay said of the relationship, “We both prioritise the importance of a committed relationship for our happiness.”
Harrell told Gay City News magazine that they stayed together despite their differences. “We spoke between almost every patient, for over 30 years . . . We eventually became so close that we became part of each other—very happily halves of a greater whole.”
“Dick Isay stood Sigmund Freud on his head,” neurobiologist Simon LeVay told the newspaper. “Freud said it was problematic parent-child relationships that made a child gay; Isay said that it was the gayness of the child that made the parent-child relationship problematic.” Most in the profession have come around to Isay’s perspective.
Richard A Friedman, a colleague at Weill Cornell Medical Center, said that Isay “made the discipline see that their view was based on ideology, not evidence. He pushed the discipline to do what it should have done, and he did not stop. We’re all richer for it.” Last year the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education selected Isay for the Hans W Loewald memorial award. The award recognises an individual’s stature “for original and outstanding contributions to the development of psychoanalytic theory, practice, and application.”
Richard Alexander Isay was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 13 December 1934. He attended Haverford College and the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, going on to complete his psychiatric residency at Yale University, and further training at the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute. He was clinical professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and lecturer in psychiatry at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.
Isay died aged 77 in New York City. In addition to Harrell, he leaves his former wife, Jane, and two sons.
Source: Bob Roehr freelance journalist, Boston, USA
Richard Isay first had to overcome his own ignorance of homosexuality and embrace the fact that he was gay before forcing the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) to do the same. And neither was easy. The Oedipus complex was the dominant paradigm of psychoanalytic theory when he had trained. Homosexuality was seen as a form of so called “arrested development”; an immature and inferior status. This theory propped up much of the then commonplace legal and social discrimination against homosexual people. Isay bought into the construct and underwent a decade of analysis both as part of his training and to “cure” himself of homosexuality. He married Jane Franzblau and had two sons.
The 1969 riots in Manhattan, when police raided the Stonewall Inn, one of few establishments to welcome openly homosexual people, catalysed the emergence of the modern gay rights movement. An early target for activists was classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the diagnostic bible of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Several years of mounting pressure from within and without led the APA to drop that classification in 1973.
Six months later, while at a conference in New York, at the age of 40 Isay walked into a seedy gay porn theatre. “Within a few minutes, because of the intensity of my sexual feelings, I realized that, in fact, I was homosexual,” he wrote in Becoming Gay, an account of his personal journey to accept himself, published in 1996. “For the first time, because my sexual feelings and impulses were so clear and powerful, I did not believe I was sick. I experienced a sense of relief and exhilaration. I knew that homosexuality was the passion I had believed myself incapable of ever experiencing.”
He told Jane that he was gay in 1980. They decided to keep it a secret and stay together for the sake of the children, then aged 10 and 14, for nearly a decade. Jane later wrote of the toll this secret took on the entire family. Isay initially did not publicly disclose his homosexuality but began working with gay patients, helping them come to terms with their orientation. He published Being Homosexual in 1989 in support of the premise that it is a normal variant of human development.
Isay pressed the APsaA to follow the APA and change its views on homosexuality. He became the first openly gay member of the association. Consequently, some colleagues shunned him and stopped referring patients to him. It was only in 1992, under threat of a lawsuit by Isay, with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union, that the APsaA agreed to adopt a non- discrimination statement protecting gay people from discrimination in training and advance- ment in the profession. “He changed the way the psychoanalytic world viewed the subject of homosexuality,” said Jack Drescher, a friend of Isay’s and a leading expert on homosexuality and psychiatry. “He was a pioneer, a very brave man. He was attacked by psychoanalysts. He took a lot of flak.”
In 1979 Isay began a relationship with Gordon Harrell, an artist nearly two decades younger, though he continued to live with his family until 1989. They wed last year, soon after the state of New York legalised same sex marriage. His book Commitment and Healing: Gay Men and the Need for Romantic Love, published in 2006, drew heavily on the experience of that relationship. In a 2008 interview in the magazine Weill Cornell Medicine Isay said of the relationship, “We both prioritise the importance of a committed relationship for our happiness.”
Harrell told Gay City News magazine that they stayed together despite their differences. “We spoke between almost every patient, for over 30 years . . . We eventually became so close that we became part of each other—very happily halves of a greater whole.”
“Dick Isay stood Sigmund Freud on his head,” neurobiologist Simon LeVay told the newspaper. “Freud said it was problematic parent-child relationships that made a child gay; Isay said that it was the gayness of the child that made the parent-child relationship problematic.” Most in the profession have come around to Isay’s perspective.
Richard A Friedman, a colleague at Weill Cornell Medical Center, said that Isay “made the discipline see that their view was based on ideology, not evidence. He pushed the discipline to do what it should have done, and he did not stop. We’re all richer for it.” Last year the International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education selected Isay for the Hans W Loewald memorial award. The award recognises an individual’s stature “for original and outstanding contributions to the development of psychoanalytic theory, practice, and application.”
Richard Alexander Isay was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 13 December 1934. He attended Haverford College and the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, going on to complete his psychiatric residency at Yale University, and further training at the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute. He was clinical professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and lecturer in psychiatry at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.
Isay died aged 77 in New York City. In addition to Harrell, he leaves his former wife, Jane, and two sons.
Source: Bob Roehr freelance journalist, Boston, USA
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Photo by Gordon Harrell, Mr. Isay's husband.
