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.
Read more about this topic: Conversion Therapy
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
“The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art’s audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.”
—Henry Geldzahler (1935–1994)
“I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passé abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)