In the dark times we live here in Brazil, the issue of the so-called gay cure, rights to treatment for gays or ex-gays and things like that often comes back to public debate.
Initially, it is important to explain what these "therapies" are: in the past, they were intended to be a therapy that would try to change a person's sexual orientation. They were all failed, but not before leading many people to pathological conditions or desperate measures (depression and suicide among others).
Nowadays, as the best strategy that the smart guys developed after the failure of the first one, the new "therapies" propose to suppress the external affective and sexual expression by people of the same sex (as if biological sex, sexual orientation and gender were a thing only) and that the person was able, through strategies developed in "therapy", to maintain conventional heterosexual relationships, even if internally their desires did not change, but were endured in silence.
The theoretical "refinement" of these "therapists" is to state that any sexuality other than the standard would be an incurable disease, but a chronic one and with their help it would be "treatable" (read: strategies for not carrying out any act non-standard sexual behavior or expressing desires socially).
Here it is worth returning to the Freud even before the founding of psychoanalysis: at the beginning of the 1890s, Freud was already beginning to realize that if he wanted to minimally understand and make therapeutic interventions he would first need to listen, making an immense effort to listen with as little pre-ideas as possible. -designed for only then, based on what you heard, to make an intervention. He quickly discovered that moral judgments didn't help at all., on the contrary, they just made the people he served keep quiet. And then he founds what would be one of the fundamental pillars of psychoanalysis: the patient was asked to speak freely, without censorship, that is, the so-called free association. Of course, this required a counterpart on the part of the analyst: there would be no moral judgment on the part of the patient and ethical confidentiality would be maintained.
With this, Freud sought to do two things: one was to understand each patient singularly, going after that person's unique points (specific ideas and emotions, their history). Another was to develop theories that account for how people work, what general principles govern human psychic life. And to do these two things, it was essential that the person felt free to speak freely.
It was precisely by radically supporting free association that he was able to increasingly elaborate psychoanalysis and open up fruitful questions that are still debated and developed today. In other words, it was essential that the psychoanalyst did not try in any way to "fit" the analysand into a pre-conceived mold. Here it is already possible to see the radical difference between a Freudian stance and the stance of these “therapists”.
While Freud asked for the voice of the analysand and sought to bring conflicts so that the person himself could think about them and elaborate, with his analyst or between sessions, answers for his own life, these "therapists" ask for silence, dictate what can and what cannot be, how it has to be and how it is prohibited to be. A curious thing that Freud arrived at in later years: he expressly states that psychoanalysis was not a Weltanschauung, that is, that it was not a knowledge that would dictate a worldview, that It was not up to psychoanalysis to dictate how people should be or behave. Psychoanalysis would be at the service of thinking about how human beings work, their mechanisms, their logic, their constitution, exposing their conflicts, but never legislating how each person should live their life, dictating morals (social or intimate) or making value judgments. . The anguish of not having ready answers to live with allows people to create their own answers: distressing on the one hand, liberating on the other.
On the side of current homophobic "therapists", the question remains: what can such "therapists" learn about human beings by silencing them? At most, they can develop more elaborate techniques on how to "shape" people or silence them even more, whatever the suffering it takes.
Leandro Salebian is a psychologist (CRP 06/99001) graduated from the USP Psychology Institute. He has worked in the area of mental health in an Adult CAPS and is now dedicated exclusively to working in a private practice. He continues his training by studying Psychoanalytic authors and has a critical and attentive look at issues of gender and sexual diversity. In the first week of the month he publishes a column and in the third week an internet user responds. To send a question or suggest topics, write to: leandrosresponde@gmail.com . Also visit their website ( www.leanrosalebian.com.br )
