The History Of Conversion Therapy

ABSTRACT

Conversion Therapy is the psychological treatment or counselling whose aim is to change a person’s sexual orientation from homosexuals or bisexuals to heterosexuals. Such treatments are critical and are known to have little effect on a person’s sexual orientation. They have been criticized as a form of pseudoscience (a collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method).The main organization advocating secular forms of conversion therapy is National Association of Research and Therapy of Homosexuality. Conversion therapy is also known by the name of reparative therapy. Recent techniques used in United States are moderate and have been limited to counselling, visualization, social skills training

Then comes the post Stonewall period when the mainstream medical profession disavowed conversion therapy. As psychoanalysis developed in the 19th century, medicine began classifying a whole range of behaviours that were considered, at the time, socially unacceptable. The Desire of converting homosexuals to heterosexuals goes way back to 1920’s when Sigmund Freud wrote about a lesbian girl whose father wanted to convert her to heterosexuality. Freud voiced modern psychologist’s opinion that changing sexual orientation was difficult and unlikely. One of the most eminent advocates of conversion therapy in 1940’s and 50’s was Edmund Burgler who saw homosexuality as a perverted behaviour and believe that it could be ‘cured’ with a punishment based confrontational therapy style. The move towards sorting gay individuals as debilitated was enormously exacerbated amid World War II when the Nazis abused psychoanalysis therapy. By the late 1960 and early 1970 Dr. Evelyn Hooker challenged this assumption that gay people are mentally ill. Through scientific measures she proved that homosexuals and heterosexuals are no different .By 1973, American Psychiatric Association was forced to remove homosexuality as an illness from the Diagnostic and statistical manual. In

A person might be physically attracted to a man but might be emotionally attached to a woman or he might not think that he is gay but likes to have sex with men. He talks about sexual fluidity and questions whether bisexuality exist. He talks in detail about ‘Heterosexuality’ and how it is not a new concept for us. He has taken up an extract from Kathy Baldock’s book Walking the bridgeless cannon to show what heterosexuality actually meant and not what we think it