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Dear Editor
As a psychotherapist, a subscriber and a contributor to your journal, I am writing for two reasons.
The first is to acknowledge and support your editorial note re the term ‘certain rabid Kleinians’ (BJP 19(3): 399). I am not a Kleinian but agree the phrase was indeed inflammatory and as you said ‘… not seemly for a learned journal’. The second is that I hope in a future journal you will be willing to publish a similar apology with regard to the article you published by Harold Bourne, entitled ‘A homosexual turns to women’ (BJP 19(3): 349-54). In my opinion his article is both heterosexist and homophobic and, thus, inflammatory and offensive. I will make what I hope will be sufficient points to demonstrate that the publication of the article was ‘… not seemly for a learned journal’.
My position is that, where conclusions as to anyone's mental health or illness are offered on the basis of their sexual orientation, what is communicated clinically serves to cover the prejudice of the clinician. Instead, I suggest that it is the quality of the client's object relations and their understandings of the world around them that assist us when we weigh up these matters. There is little explanatory value in generalizing anything from one badly, because partially, reported case and it is unhelpfully reductive to conflate sexual orientation or practice(s) with the related but necessarily more elaborate narratives that surround sexuality/sexual identity, gender and mental illness. What Bourne offers, by his own account, is a ‘Clinical Communication’ in which ‘most details … are omitted …’ (p. 349), and through which ‘… nothing really important had taken place’ (p. 354). From the outset of the treatment to its conclusion his patient clearly displays psychotic understandings of anatomy, sexing, gender and both same sex and opposite sex relations. Put another way, in spite of the treatment, he remains unable to symbolize and this inability causes him a variety of ongoing dis