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From the Editor:
In a recent editorial (BJP 20(1)) I wrote that Harold Bourne's article, ‘A homosexual turns to women’, in the views of two readers, James Taylor and A.J. McGuire, counted as ‘words not in our name’. As James Taylor wrote: ‘Unless offence was intended, an apology might be appropriate; and, at least…. Some kind of explanation to the readership’.
We've considered the request for an apology for publication of the article at the Editorial Board and concluded that an apology from the Journal is not needed. This is essentially because we see Bourne's article as promoting debate. We recognize that his view of homosexuality may not be shared by others, but we think such differences of view should be debated. Board members and I are respectful of the issues raised by our correspondents, while supporting Harold Bourne's right to argue his own case.
Dr Bourne has effectively answered James Taylor's point about whether the patient consented to the paper being published.
I also recognize the profound difference of idiom between Harold Bourne and his critics, and I want to share some reflections of my own about multiplicities of meaning, focusing on James Taylor's letter. Basing his analysis of Bourne's text on an interesting and productive reading of Foucault and other scholars' work on the formation of general social and psychic categories in relation to dominance/submission and the situation of minorities, Taylor goes on to identify strong and outdated prejudice in Bourne's reading of an individual case. But here there is an assumption about fixity of meaning which in my view can be problematic if the clinical signifiers in the main lead to one conclusion only: homophobia on the part of Harold Bourne. Little remains provisional, or open to more than one interpretation (cf. also Danielle Quinodoz's discussion of ‘a polysemous form of language’ (2003, pp. 1477-8)). Conclusions are hard and fast.
On the other hand, if Bourne's article was, or was experienced as, inflam