“The most uninhibited party they’d ever been to”: The Postwar Encounter between Psychiatry and the British Lesbian, 1945–1971

Abstract

Rebecca Jennings L esbian and gay activists and historians of sexuality have long debated the relationship between psychiatry and homosexuality in Britain. The Counter-Psychiatry Group, founded in London in 1971 by the psychiatric social worker Elizabeth Wilson and her partner at the time, the sociologist Mary McIntosh, was one of the first groups to be formed within the emerging Gay Liberation Front (GLF) there. Influenced by the broader antipsychiatry movement that had developed in Britain and elsewhere in the 1960s, the group challenged the authority of the psychiatric profession to define or treat homosexuality, rejecting the concept of homosexuality as mental illness and arguing that, instead, it was social attitudes toward homosexuality that should be regarded as irrational and "sick." Turning to political techniques, the London GLF Counter-Psychiatry Group demonstrated on Harley Street and outside London hospitals such as the Maudsley and the Tavistock Clinic to protest against the use of such forms of psychiatric treatment of homosexuality as aversion therapy, brain surgery, and chemical castration. 1 In her oral history of the organization, Lisa Power, a GLF activist at the time, contends that "the gay rejection of the popular, psychiatric diagnosis of homosexuals as sick rather than criminal marked a break with the homophile movement, many of whose adherents had been happy to accept a medical pronouncement that they were unable to help themselves and therefore

A history of lesbian politics and the psy professions

“…Whilst these kinds of studies may be considered unethical or degrading by today’s standards, they were not only used to challenge pathologisation, they were also subverted, at least to some degree. For example, Chapman suggested that opportunities to engage in these studies offered a rare chance for lesbians to get together and were experienced like an “uninhibited party” ( 1985 ; see also Jennings, 2008 ). Moreover, activists were not completely naïve or uncritical about engaging with psy-centred research studies.…”

“…Moreover, activists were not completely naïve or uncritical about engaging with psy-centred research studies. They adopted “a stance of critical distance” and were generally “ambivalent” towards medico scientific research, seeing it very much as a “means to an end” ( Jennings, 2008 , pp. 901–902).…”

“…By the early 1970s, the rise of counter-cultural social movements of the 1960s and 1970s helped foster a more radical and oppositional lesbian and gay politics in the UK. Activists turned away from psychological and psychiatric theories to try and understand themselves and challenged the idea that psy professionals had any specialised knowledge they could use to help them “put their case to a wider society” ( Jennings, 2008 , p. 904). Instead they turned to the collective action of lesbian and gay people themselves ( Ettorre, 1985 ; Power, 1995 ).…”

“…The Gay Liberation Front (GLF) represented a “shift away from an earlier rapprochement” ( Jennings, 2008 , p. 904) to a more confrontational stance towards the psy professions, especially psychiatry. The 1971 GLF Manifesto explicitly named psychiatry as a source of oppression and the “Counter Psychiatry Group” (CPG) was one of their first action groups.…”

Queer signs: The women of the British projective test movement

“…It was also a core theoretical framework for projective techniques. Interest in homosexuality continued in Psychology and Psychiatry but with a rather more homophobic and pathologizing tone from the middle of the twentieth century (Jennings, ). Psychological understandings of homosexuality therefore continued to be especially focused around gender roles and theoretical “inversions” like those first proposed by Ellis (see Minton, , ).…”