Challenging identities; lesbians, gay men, and psychoanalysis

Abstract

Many psychotherapists across a range of modalities remain unaware that, from the late nineteenth and twentieth century on, lesbians and gay men were pathologized in classical psychoanalytic theories. For decades lesbians and gay men had been deemed ‘unfit’ to train as psychoanalytic practitioners due to failures in their early sexual development. In this article I describe the history of the challenges for lesbian and gay clients, applicants to training, trainees, and qualified psychotherapists in the UK from 1986. As emphasised by the French philosophers, Ricoeur and Doss, the work of remembering is vital if we are to prevent the repetition of failures from the past. It is important to recognise history is never linear and points of achievement are never stable; in the past four years, for example, homophobic hate crimes have trebled in the UK. I describe how lesbian and gay psychoanalytic psychotherapists, along with establishing counselling and psychotherapy services accessible to lesbians and gay men, organised conferences, spoke publicly, published, and demonstrated. Our challenges to heteronormative psychoanalytic theorising included an engagement with other disciplines such as fiction, biography, and poetry written by lesbians and gay men, post-colonial theorising, queer theory, and philosophical texts. Challenging universalising interpretations of the ‘causes’ of ‘homosexuality’ we emphasised the critical importance of attending to differences in individuals’ experiences of their sexualities and identities. In 2015 the crucial Memorandum of Understanding which protects the public through a commitment to end the practice of ‘conversion therapy’ was signed by twenty organisations (amended in 2017 to include gender), including psychoanalytic training organisations, and released at the Department of Health. This was widely welcomed after nearly thirty years of fighting for recognition of the effects of the pathologizing of lesbian and gay sexualities on people’ lives, including those of people who identify as heterosexual.