LGBTQ Psychological History: Robertiello Voyage From Lesbos and Midcentury Lesbian Psychoanalysis, 1959 First Edition

Richard Robertiello

First Edition

Robertiello, Richard C. Voyage From Lesbos. 1959. Presents a psychoanalytic case study of a lesbian patient within mid-twentieth-century American psychiatry, documenting clinical approaches that classified homosexuality as a psychological disorder subject to treatment. The work supports research into LGBTQ history, the medicalization of sexuality, and the role of psychoanalysis in shaping institutional attitudes toward lesbian identity. In Cultural / Representational Mode, the material reflects psychiatric and medical discourse surrounding female homosexuality, illustrating how lesbian identity was framed through Freudian theory and offering insight into the social and scientific assumptions governing sexuality in the United States prior to the gay rights movement.

Robertiello, Richard C. Voyage From Lesbos: The Psychoanalysis of a Female Homosexual. New York: The Citadel Press, 1959. First edition. The text centers on a patient identified as “Connie,” described at the outset as an “active homosexual,” and follows the course of treatment through psychoanalytic sessions emphasizing dream interpretation, family dynamics, and the resolution of an Oedipal framework. Robertiello narrates the therapeutic process as leading to the patient’s “renounce[ment]” of homosexuality and transition to what he defines as “a heterosexual life,” presenting this outcome as clinical success. The narrative preserves detailed accounts of analytic sessions, interpretive frameworks, and the language used by psychiatric practitioners to define and regulate sexual identity. The work demonstrates how midcentury clinicians pathologized same-sex desire while positioning psychoanalysis as a corrective method.

Single volume. Page count not stated. Original binding in unclipped dust jacket. Jacket moderately edgeworn with rubbing to panels and chipping at top of spine. Binding square and tight; textblock clean and unmarked. Overall very good in very good dust jacket. Published more than a decade before the removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and contemporaneous with early homophile organizing such as the Daughters of Bilitis, the book remains a primary document of pre-liberation psychiatric thought and its impact on the conceptualization of lesbian identity in the United States.

Item #22833

Price: $200.00