Monday, January 15, 2018

Hmm… Very Interesting…

Back when I started hormones back in 2004 as the standard back then I had to have a letter from a therapist in order to begin hormones after a three month evaluation.

So I went for my first appointment, so here I was sitting in an overstuffed leather chair and I was doing a word association test, you know that is where the therapist says “Big” and you respond with the first word that pops into your head. Well I started giggling and the therapist asked me why I was giggling and I said “This is so Freudian.”

So how did Freud view homosexuality?

Well of course this is leading into an article that I read on a Facebook newsfeed…
This advice by Freud on how to cure a gay child might surprise you
Pink News
By Joseph Patrick McCormick 
12th February 2015

Some assume positions on controversial issues such as gay “cure” therapies evolve over time. This letter from Sigmund Freud written in 1935 may debunk that.

The famed father of psychoanalysis an amazing and eloquent response to one parent’s concerns over having a gay child.

In the letter he writes that being gay ” is nothing to be ashamed of”, that it “cannot be classified as an illness” and names Plato, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci as “several of the greatest men”, who were gay.

Continuing, he considers the case of whether he could make the child into a “normal heterosexual”, but instead of “treatment”, recommends “analysis”, to “bring him harmony, peace of mind”.
In the letter that Freud wrote he said,
Dear Mrs [Erased],
I gather from your letter that your son is a homosexual. I am most impressed by the fact that you do not mention this term yourself in your information about him. May I question you why you avoid it? Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them. (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime – and a cruelty, too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis.
Wow! He didn’t say “Lock him up!” or that “He is damned and going to hell!” he goes on to say,
By asking me if I can help, you mean, I suppose, if I can abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality take its place. The answer is, in a general way we cannot promise to achieve it. In a certain number of cases we succeed in developing the blighted germs of heterosexual tendencies, which are present in every homosexual in the majority of cases it is no more possible. It is a question of the quality and the age of the individual. The result of treatment cannot be predicted.
So even Freud was against Conversion Therapy!

So maybe the New Hampshire legislature should consider Dr. Freud’s views on the effectiveness of Conversion Therapy and reconsider voting to ban it.

1 comment:

  1. That's why I always wear a Freudian slip under my skirt! :-)

    ReplyDelete