The snows of yesteryear?

I can still remember the sense of shocked disbelief I had, some 13 years ago, when I was first told anecdotally that psychoanalysts generally considered homosexuality to be a disorder or even a perversion. At that point I had had no contact with psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic psychotherapy as a clinical practice. My relationship with psychoanalytic thought, other than through popular culture, was as a philosophy undergraduate studying philosophy of mind and later brushing across the Lacanian version that held sway in what we called film theory. For all my unfamiliarity, I had always associated psychoanalysis with the most forward-thinking, sophisticated and insightful enquiry into the human condition, especially the area of sexuality.

Around the same time in 1998, I attended the Inaugural Annual Lecture of the (then) British Confederation of Psychotherapists (BCP), later to become the British Psychoanalytic Council (BPC), given by the philosopher Richard Wollheim. It was he who had persuaded me, a fully paid-up empiricist, that Freud had successfully added the unconscious to the inventory of the human mind. Wollheim began with the same theme in the lecture, and then, following an elaboration of how things become unconscious, moved to another crucial innovation of Freud's thought, the concept of a ‘developmental story’. Conceding that, for Freud, the developmental story culminates in a heterosexual personality, Wollheim was adamant there was no justifiable shift from the notion of a developmental trajectory to something that is normative and, concomitantly, something that is more pathological. This was a relief, although I remember feeling that this welcome assertion had not entirely waved the problem away. There does seem to be something intrinsically teleological about a ‘developmental story’, with an Ought wrapped around an Is.

I had no inkling at the time I would become chief executive of the BPC eight years later, but when I was appointed I had a vague sense th