Paul Rodney McHugh (born May 21, 1931) is an American psychiatrist, researcher, and educator. He is currently the University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he was previously the Henry Phipps Professor and director from 1975 to 2001. He served as a co-founder and subsequent board member of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, which raised skepticism about adults who claimed to have recovered delayed memories of childhood sexual abuse or incest. Throughout the 1990s, McHugh was active in challenging the idea of repressed memory and related claims of satanic ritual abuse. McHugh opposes allowing transgender people to receive gender affirming surgery. He has described homosexuality as an "erroneous desire", and supported California's 2008 same-sex marriage ban. Scientists such as Dean Hamer argue McHugh misrepresents scientific literature on sexual orientation and gender. McHugh was appointed to a lay panel assembled by the Roman Catholic Church to look into sexual abuse by Catholic priests in the United States.
Early life and education Paul McHugh was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the son of a Lowell High School teacher and a homemaker. He graduated in 1948 from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, then attended Harvard University. In 1952, he graduated from Harvard College and then from Harvard Medical School in 1956. While at Harvard he was "introduced to and ultimately directed away from the Freudian school of psychiatry". After medical school, McHugh's education was influenced by George Thorn, the physician-in-chief at the Harvard-affiliated Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (now Brigham and Women's Hospital). Thorn was disillusioned with Freudian psychiatry and felt that those who devoted themselves to it became single-minded, failing to improve as doctors. Thorn encouraged McHugh to develop a different career path, suggesting that he enter the field of psychiatry by first studying neurology. At Thorn's recommendation, McHugh was accepted into the neurology and neuropathology residency program at the Massachusetts General Hospital, where he studied for three years under Dr. Raymond Adams, chief of the neurology department. McHugh then attended the Institute of Psychiatry in London, where he studied under Sir Aubrey Lewis and was supervised by James Gibbons and Gerald Russell. McHugh next went to the Division of Neuropsychiatry at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.
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