Over the years, psychoanalysis, and the work of Sigmund Freud in particular, have been rebutted from a variety of perspectives and with diverse theoretical aims. While psychiatrist and existential thinker Karl Jaspers rejected Freud's "scientistic superstition" (Wissenschaftsaberglaube), philosopher of science Karl Popper has seriously questioned the epistemological cogency of psychoanalysis.

Further, the therapeutic efficacy of psychanalysis has been in dispute (Adolf Grünbaum), and the personal ethics of its founder has been called in question (Thomas Szasz, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson). Against the backdrop of a growing skepticism toward psychoanalysis, it is significant that literary historian Harold Bloom includes Freud in his opus The Western Canon on account of his being "the great mythmaker of our time, fit rival to Proust, Joyce, and Kafka as the canonical center of modern literature." Conceding that, as a therapy, "psychoanalysis is dying, perhaps already dead," Bloom contends that the canonical survival of Freud is linked with his "description of the totality of human nature." In his view, Freud "is the mind of our age, as Montaigne was the mind of Shakespeare's."

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A form of behavior modification that employs unpleasant and sometimes painful stimuli, aversion therapy was one of the more popular treatments for homosexuality and cross-dressing in the 1950s and 1960s.

In recent years there has been a push for glbtq-sensitive counselor training and glbtq-affirmative counseling, which, although occurring slowly and encountering resistance, marks a significant move in a positive direction.

Glbtq family therapy is a relatively new field that merges gay-affirmative therapy with family systems theory; its goal is to help glbtq people create and maintain healthy families.

Feminist literary theory is a complex, dynamic area of study that draws from a wide range of critical theories.

Although gay, lesbian, and queer theory are related practices, the three terms delineate separate emphases marked by different assumptions about the relationship between gender and sexuality.

Patriarchy, literally "the rule of the fathers," is a social system in which men hold positions of power and women are oppressed and glbtq people are treated negatively.

Psychotherapy, the clinical process of treating mental and emotional health problems, has recently been energized by a movement to depathologize homosexuality and to enhance the dignity and self-respect of glbtq clients.

Reparative therapy is a dangerously misguided attempt, supported by homophobic religious organizations, to change a person's sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual.

Women's studies, an interdisciplinary academic field that was inaugurated at major universities around 1970, is now offered at every conceivable type of academic institution throughout the world.

One of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, Foucault has had an enormous influence on our understanding of the lesbian and gay literary heritage and the cultural forces surrounding it.

Although she did not explicitly identify herself as a lesbian, Anna Freud, youngest daughter of Sigmund Freud and herself a psychoanalyst, was decidedly not heterosexual in any typical sense.

The founder of psychoanalysis and the discoverer of the unconscious, Sigmund Freud initiated a fundamental transformation in the self-understanding of Western men and women, including especially the role of sexuality.

German-born Magnus Hirschfeld deserves recognition as a significant theorist of sexuality and the most prominent advocate of homosexual emancipation of his time.

Leftist Guy Hocquenghem produced a considerable canon of queer theory and experimental fiction, much of it still unknown outside France.

German-born philosopher Herbert Marcuse had an enormous influence on theories of sexual liberation, particularly in the early post-Stonewall gay movement and on the left.

Paragraph 175 was the German law prohibiting sex between men; strengthened by the Nazis, it was the statue under which homosexuals were sent to concentration camps.

Marcel Proust is the author of A la recherche du temps perdu, one of the major achievements of Modernism and a great gay novel.

Adrienne Rich, who aestheticized politics and politicized aesthetics, is America's most widely read lesbian poet.

As one of the key figures that western civilization has used to define itself, William Shakespeare stands in a complicated, fiercely contested relationship to homosexuality.

The controversial lesbian author and theorist Monique Wittig has produced some of the most challenging fictional and theoretical work of second-wave feminism.