Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

About 250 attended the overdue conference in January 2012 on ‘Psychoanalysis and homosexuality: Moving on’. It was more a milestone on a long journey than a destination. It would have been helpful to know the demographics of the attendees in terms of professional affiliation, location, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender. My impression was that many of the attendees were not members of the BPC (British Psychonalytic Council) and were not psychoanalysts. If this is a correct assumption, it is sad, and needs thinking about in terms of the ‘What next?’ question.

I am in a rather anomalous position being the recipient of a NOW, a BCP sponsored award for outstanding professional leadership but not a member of the BPC, although clinically finding myself much more in sympathy with it than some colleagues in the UKCP (United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy). There was a strong sense of déjà vu: it was as if the last 30+ years, since it was made clear to me that training as a psychoanalyst was not for gay people, had never occurred. I had gone to make my career in provincial settings where being out as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist who was gay never seemed a big deal, and the influence this has enabled me to have on clinical practice with LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) patients and in specialist psychoanalytic psychotherapy training has been at the core of my work.

Hearing the history of the psychoanalytic engagement with homosexuality and the consequent perversion, domestication and gradual growing heteronormativity of psychoanalysis as the twentieth century wore on was, of course, as it always is, useful. My problem was that I have been banging on about it for so long: I had to remind myself that for some present it might have been news. It was hard to believe that recent products of training in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy had not been through all of this. If not, why not, I asked myself? If training is integrating divers