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Dear Editor
I imagine that others will have shared my disquiet in reading Harold Bourne's paper, published recently in the BJP (19(3): 349-54).
One had hoped that the attitudes towards homosexuality in Bourne's paper were things of the past; certainly, to read it is to enter the thought-world of the 1950s or 1960s. The outlook announces itself with the title: ‘A homosexual turns to women’. To take a related type of case, it is far from infrequent that a married man in early middle-age realizes, out of a deep and persistent distress, that continuing to deny his gay sexuality is an impossiblity, that he married chiefly because of societal pressures, and that wholeness and healing require an acceptance of his gayness. Would Bourne, one wonders, want to categorize that as ‘A heterosexual turns to men’? The assumptions being made by Bourne about sexuality show themselves, too, in such phrases as ‘submerging amongst those who cannot turn to women - the minority we call homosexual’, which indicates gay identity is being seen in terms of inability and lack of capacity. As well as this, there is the egregious presupposition that there is such a thing as a ‘class background for homosexuality’, something which no reputable scholar would now maintain.
The level of argument shown in Bourne's paper is routinely jejune. He produces, for example, elaborate hypotheses as to the significance of particular dreams and phantasies. Yet there is no consideration, or even apparent recognition, of the possibility that these dreams and fantasies can be just as readily analysed with conclusions diametrically opposite to those Bourne draws. In the first dream, of the jumping-pit, Bourne characterizes