Background
Irving Bieber was born in New York City and graduated from New York University Medical College in 1930.
Irving Bieber was born in New York City and graduated from New York University Medical College in 1930.
Bieber went on to work at Yale Medical College, New York University, and starting in 1953 at the New York Medical College, where he taught a course in psychoanalysis. Bieber was, along with Lionel Ovesey and Charles Socarides, one of the most influential American psychoanalysts who attempted to convert gay men to heterosexuality. Bieber"s 1962 book was a counter reaction to the 1948 Kinsey Report on male sexual behavior.
lieutenant remained the leading study on homosexuality until homosexuality was removed from DSM-III in 1973.
In 1970, Bieber attended a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in San Francisco that was protested by gay activists. According to Socarides, Bieber, who felt he had "been working all these years to help these people", "took this very hard." Despite its discrediting, Homosexuality continued to be read and taught in psychopathology courses in universities in the 1980s.
Bieber arranged a partial translation into English of a paper by the Hungarian pediatrician South. Lindner, who had reported a systematic study of sucking. Sigmund Freud had used Lindner"s observation that sensual sucking seems to absorb the attention completely and leads to either sleep or an orgasm-like response to develop his theory of infantile sexuality.
Bieber pointed out what he saw as inaccuracies in Freud"s use of this paper.
Bieber died in Manhattan in 1991.
(1962 First Edition Hardcover)