Kurt friend

Kurt Freund (born January 17, 1914 in Chrudim , † October 23, 1996 in Toronto ) was a Czech - Canadian psychiatrist and sexologist .

Freund was born into a German-speaking Jewish family. He married Anna Hloun in 1942, but divorced again in 1943 in order to protect his wife and daughter from anti-Semitic persecution. In 1945 he married the same woman again. His parents and brother perished in the Holocaust .

Freund received the order from the Czechoslovak army to distinguish between real homosexuality and those pretended to be released, and developed a device for penile plethysmography to measure the degree of sexual arousal. Later he was one of the first to advocate the theory that homosexuality is already prenatally or genetically expressed and cannot be treated. He therefore advocated the decriminalization of homosexuals. Conversion therapies are pointless, as he concluded from a large series of studies in the 1950s.

Freund received his doctorate in Prague and completed his habilitation there in 1962. He became a doctor and psychiatrist. With his research on homosexuality, he influenced the legislation in Czechoslovakia and the GDR in the direction of de-discrimination. In 1968 he emigrated to Canada after the breakup of the Prague Spring and taught at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto . After a cancer diagnosis, he committed a drug cocktail in 1996 using suicide .

Fonts

• Homosexuality in men. S. Hirzel Verlag, Leipzig 1963
• Homosexuality. rororo, Reinbek 1969

literature

• Ray Blanchard: In Memoriam Prof. Dr. sc. med. Kurt Freund (1914 to 1996). In: Sexology. Volume 2, No. 4, 1997, pp. 140-141 ( digitized version )