Sexuality and Discourses of Psychotherapy

Dear Editor

The tenor of Harold Bourne's response (BJP 20(2): 255) to my criticisms (BJP 20(1): 85-90) of his paper, ‘A homosexual turns to women’ (BJP 19(3): 349-54) was unsurprising. His reply is almost entirely ad hominem and fails to respond to any of my or Alec McGuire's substantive points. He implies his age and life experience privilege his position in debate and suggests that I/we wrote in defence of the ‘purity’, ‘innocence’ and ‘health’ of our (sic) sexuality, that I/we lack a sense of humour and I/we were motivated by ‘political correctness’ to ‘muzzle, censor and silence’ him. He also claims that I/we lack the capacity to ‘… stop and think and look deeper … let alone get worried and clinical’. Yet it is precisely the latter capacities that motivated our responses as his paper. We were both suggesting what he had to say, amongst other things, ran contrary to our clinical experience.

My concern was not for political correctness; however I am interested in social justice and accordingly endeavour to extend to clients a commensurate respect and open-mindedness. Learning from this experience inevitably means departures from available but unconvincing metapsychology. I am not, as Bourne suggests, part of a ‘Freud-battering industry’, rather someone who like Freud is interested in revising provisional understandings to reach better understandings. Juliet Mitchell observed that we need to ‘… reflect on the absence of the castration complex, not in our theories but in the cases that confront us’ (Mitchell 1998). So I am interested in asking ‘What kinds of new understandings could be reached if the old ones about so-called “castration anxiety” were eschewed?’ Do we see it because it is there or because it is the vocabulary we have formerly used to describe certain experiences? (For the record, I am well aware that the idea is not used literally in psychoanalytic practice or theory as Jean Arundale's reply appeared to be suggesting I