Cold War Pavlov: Homosexual aversion therapy in the 1960s

Abstract

Homosexual aversion therapy enjoyed two brief but intense periods of clinical experimentation: between 1950 and 1962 in Czechoslovakia, and between 1962 and 1975 in the British Commonwealth. The specific context of its emergence was the geopolitical polarization of the Cold War and a parallel polarization within psychological medicine between Pavlovian and Freudian paradigms. In 1949, the Pavlovian paradigm became the guiding doctrine in the Communist bloc, characterized by a psychophysiological or materialist understanding of mental illness. It was taken up by therapists in Western countries who were critical of psychoanalysis and sought more ‘scientific’ diagnostic and therapeutic methods that focused on empirical evidence and treating actual symptoms. However, their attitude towards homosexuality often played a decisive role in how they used aversion therapy. Whereas Czechoslovakian researchers cautioned readers about low success rates and agitated for homosexual law reform in 1961, most of their anglophone counterparts selectively ignored or misrepresented the results of ‘the Prague experiment’, instead celebrating single-case ‘success’ stories in their effort to correct ‘abnormal’ sexual orientation. In histories of queer sexuality and its pathologization, the behaviourist paradigm remains almost entirely unmapped. This article provides the most detailed study to date of aversion therapy literature from both sides of the East/West border. In doing so, it contributes to the project not only of ‘decentring Western sexualities’, but of decentring Western sexological knowledge. Given its Pavlovian origins, the history of homosexual aversion therapy can be fully understood only in the context of Cold War transnational sexological knowledge exchange.

Lesbian and bisexual women's experiences of aversion therapy in England

“…1 For example, Tommy Dickinson's Curing Queers (2015) explored the experiences of ‘homosexual’ and ‘transvestite’ men and the nursing staff who administered aversion therapy in Britain. Yet despite this, the behaviourist therapeutic paradigm remains ‘almost entirely unmapped’, and there has been, up to very recently, ‘an astonishing lack of historical scholarship on the history of aversion therapy’ ( Davison, 2020a : 91). For example, Rutherford (2006 , 2009 ) explored the history and ethics of applied behavioural analysis in the US context, but did not include aversion therapy for sexual orientation.…”

“…According to Davison (2020a) , the use of aversion therapy to treat homosexuality spanned a period of about 60 years, comprising three distinct ‘waves’ during the middle of the 20th century. A few recorded cases in the US during the 1920s and 1930s ( Max, 1935 ) were followed by extensive research trials in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, known as the ‘Prague experiments’.…”

“…Although British behavioural psychologists did not ‘invent’ aversion therapy, it has been suggested that they were the most positive about its efficacy in treating homosexuality. For example, Davison (2020a) argues that some British behaviourists ignored, or at least downplayed, results from the extensive ‘Prague experiments’, which were distinctly cautious about the use and effectiveness of using aversion therapy to treat homosexuality. For example, ‘an entire body of clinical research conducted in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s went mostly unacknowledged in the West and, when cited, was artfully cherry-picked for the most favourable gloss’ (ibid.…”

“…Bayer, 1987 ; Herman, 1995 ); aversion therapy (e.g. Davison, 2020a ; Dickinson, 2015 ), and lesbians' experience of psychiatry (e.g. Jennings, 2008 ; Oram and Turnbull, 2001 ), this article focuses specifically on the practice of aversion therapy to reorientate women's sexuality.…”

Gay Behaviors and Persistent Problems: Looked Globally Through the Lens of an Overview and a Single Case Report

“…Treatment strategies for homosexual or gay people/LGBTQ are diverse, compatible with prevailing old and new theories, concepts and etiologies; psychotherapies especially cognitive behavior therapy [30] and mindfulness behavior therapy and its various variations and techniques [30,31], homosexual aversive therapy [32] and various medications are used in the management of persons with gay behavior and its variants, especially those having psychiatric and physical problems including suicide, substance abuse and HIV [12,33,34].…”