Conversion Therapy - History

History

Legal scholar Kenji Yoshino argues that the history of conversion therapy can be divided broadly into three phases: an early Freudian period, a period of mainstream approval of conversion therapy during a time when the mental health establishment became the "primary superintendent" of sexuality, and a post-Stonewall period wherein the mainstream medical profession disavowed conversion therapy.

During the earliest parts of psychoanalytic history, analysts granted that homosexuality was non-pathological in certain cases, and the ethical question of whether it ought to be changed was discussed. By the 1920s psychoanalysts assumed that homosexuality was pathological and that attempts to treat it were appropriate, although psychoanalytic opinion about changing homosexuality was largely pessimistic. Those forms of homosexuality that were considered perversions were usually held to be uncurable. Psychoanalysts‘ tolerant statements about homosexuality arose from recognition of the difficulty of achieving change. Beginning in the 1930s and continuing for roughly twenty years, major changes occurred in how psychoanalysts viewed homosexuality, which involved a shift in the rhetoric of psychoanalysts, some of whom felt free to ridicule and abuse their gay patients.