Some sermons fall to their death on the church floor. Others stay on in the memory for a long time afterwards. This one, from decades ago, remains with me, as emotionally vivid as the day it was preached. The priest was gay, but had long struggled to reconcile his sexual desire with the church’s historic teaching on homosexuality. So, as a young man, he sought out conversion therapy in the form of electrical aversion therapy. And understandably frightened at the prospect of being held down and given electric shocks he would down several G&Ts prior to treatment. “I’m still gay,” he explained “but I now hate the taste of gin”.
The practice of conversion therapy was overwhelmingly renounced by The Church of England in the summer of 2017. Leading the debate in the General Synod, Jayne Ozanne, described the breakdowns she had suffered as a result of it, of the periods she would spend in hospital. Conversion therapy, she said, is “abuse from which vulnerable adults need protecting”. The Church agreed.
Four years on and the Government says it is going to bring forward plans to ban conversion therapy “shortly” — though last week three members of the Government’s LGBT+ advisors panel resigned because it wasn’t happening soon enough. But notwithstanding this slowness, and despite objections from the Evangelical Alliance, a ban is coming. And a good thing too. Conversion therapy combines quack science with homophobic bullying — and the sooner it goes, the better.
It is interesting that what makes conversion therapy so unpalatable to many is not just that it originates in a negative judgment on homosexuality, but also because the whole history of conversion can feel like a kind of violence committed against the integrity of other people. There’s the forced conversions of Jews to Christianity in the middle ages and — despite the Quranic principle that there must be “no compulsion in religion” — of non-Muslims to Islam in places such as Egypt and Pakistan. It feels like a fundamental breach of the idea that we ought to respect the integrity of the other, and of their beliefs.
But perhaps it’s not quite so straightforward. That’s certainly what a new book by Adam Phillips On Wanting to Change suggests, by offering the perspective of a psychoanalyst. For psychoanalysis — perhaps surprisingly, given Freud’s Jewishness — was invented as a kind of conversion therapy. So, for instance, in an early paper “The Neuro-Psychosis of Defence” (1894), Freud writes: “In hysteria the incompatible idea is rendered innocuous by its sum of excitation being transformed into something somatic. For this I should like to propose the name of conversion.” In other words, what psychoanalysis proposes, at least in this very early stage of its development, is that some deep inner psychological disturbance can be “converted” into a kind of physical expression (“something somatic”) that can thus be more easily managed. As Freud’s colleague Ferenszi wrote in 1912: “The neurotic gets rid of the affects that have become disagreeable to him by means of the different forms of displacement (conversion, transference, substitution).”
Whatever one makes of the difficult ideas that are going on here, it is clear that conversion has an appeal far beyond its employment by religious fundamentalists. Indeed, as Phillips notes, it can be seen as a part of the much wider, and increasingly secular, language of change and personal development that has become something of an industry among those who offer to help people address the things that make them unhappy. But what, Phillips asks, is conversion seen as an answer to here? What is it attempting to put right?
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