IST (Insulin-Shock-Therapy)

Psychoanalytic observations of schizophrenics subjected to insulin shock therapy provides another opportunity for an understanding of the role of latent homosexuality in the origin of paranoid schizophrenia. In particular, these observations illustrate the important role played by the homosexual disappointment and the homosexual panic. The cathartic discharge provoked by the insulin coma creates a release of repressed libidinal impulses. The ambivalent homosexual attitude becomes split into its two components, with the positive one invested ideally in the transference reaction and thus accessible to analytic interpretations and working through.

Psychoanalytic investigations have demonstrated the affinity between homosexuality and the schizophrenic break. In certain complex cases of latent homosexuality, the counter-cathexis, built by the ego in order to maintain the dissociation of the psychotic core from the rest of the ego, is so precarious that the psychotic invasion occurs, as it were, spontaneously and periodically.

[ "Homosexuality and Psychosis in Perversions, Psychodynamics and Therapy" -- by Gustav Bychowski, M.D. Edited by Sandor Lorand, M.D. Random House, Inc. New York. 1957, p. 105. ]