NEW YORK (AP) - Charles Socarides, the psychiatrist
famous for insisting that homosexuality was a treatable illness and who claimed
to have "cured" hundreds, has died. He was 83.
Socarides, died Dec. 25 of heart failure at a hospital
near his Manhattan home, his family announced. A funeral Mass was held
Friday.
He waged an unsuccessful battle to reverse the American
Psychiatric Association's 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from its list of
mental disorders, and brushed off frequent condemnations by colleagues who
considered his views hurtful.
"Gays ascribe their condition to God, but he should not
have to take that rap, any more than he should be blamed for the existence of
other manmade maladies - like war," he wrote in the Catholic weekly magazine
America in 1995.
Socarides persisted in his views despite having a gay
son, Richard, who became an adviser to President Clinton on gay and lesbian
affairs.
In the 1990s, he was among the founders of the National
Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, a nonprofit group based
in Encino, Calif., "dedicated to affirming a complementary, male-female model of
gender and sexuality."
A native of Brockton, Mass., Socarides decided he
wanted to become a psychoanalyst at age 13 after reading a book on the life of
Sigmund Freud. He graduated from Harvard College, earned his medical degree at
New York Medical College, and got a certificate in psychoanalytic medicine at
Columbia University. He taught at The Albert Einstein College of
Medicine.
Besides his son, he is survived by his wife, Claire;
another son, two daughters and one grandchild.
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