Robert Stoller was born on December 15, 1924, in
Crestwood, New York. His parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants. In 1958, a patient pseudonymously referred to as
Agnes was referred to Stoller and
Harold Garfinkel. At the time, Agnes was 17 years old and pretended to be intersex in order to receive
gender confirming surgery. Years later, Stoller learned that Agnes was actually a transgender girl who had been stealing her mother's estrogen supplements since 12 years old. Upon learning this, Stoller recalled the papers he had written and retracted his earlier findings at the 1968 International Psychoanalytic Congress in Copenhagen. However, these criteria became widely influential and most patients would use the "winning psychosexual history", as therapy shifted from analysis of transgender people to a stepping stone to transition. In his most notable contribution,
Perversion (1975), Stoller attempts to illuminate the dynamics of sexual
perversion and
normalize it. Stoller suggests that perversion inevitably entails an expression of unconscious aggression in the form of revenge against a person who, in early years, made some form of threat to the child's core gender identity, either in the form of overt trauma or through the frustrations of the
Oedipal conflict. In
Sexual Excitement (1979), Stoller finds the same perverse dynamics at work in all sexual excitement on a continuum from overt aggression to subtle fantasy. In focusing on the unconscious fantasy, and not the behavior, Stoller provides a way of analyzing the mental dynamics of sexuality, what he terms "erotics," while simultaneously de-emphasizing the pathology of any particular form of behavior. Stoller does not consider
homosexuality as a monolithic behavior but rather as a range of sexual styles as diverse as
heterosexuality. Many of Stoller's books, like
Splitting (1973), are devoted to the documentation of the interviews on which he based his research. Stoller died in a traffic accident near his home in 1991. ==Selected publications==