IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB028662274

Cold War Pavlov: Homosexual Aversion Therapy in the 1960s (2021)

Davison, Kate (Author)

History of the Human Sciences
Volume: 34
Issue: 1
Pages: 89-119
Publication date: 2021
Language: English

DOI: 10.1177/0952695120911593

URI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695120911593

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Medicalization Sexuality Homosexuality 20th century, late Commonwealth countries Czechoslovakia

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.

...More

Included in

Article Kirsten Leng; Katie Sutton (2021) Histories of Sexology Today: Reimagining the Boundaries of Scientia Sexualis. History of the Human Sciences (pp. 3-9). unapi

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB028662274

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Chapter Kateřina Lišková; Alain Giami; Sharman Levinson; (2021)
Sexology’s Unexpected Progressiveness in the Cold War East: Shaping People’s Sexual Selves, Creating Socialist Societies (/p/isis/citation/CBB700487405/)

Article Kateřina Lišková; (2021)
History of Medicine in Eastern Europe: Sexual Medicine and Women’s Reproductive Health in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary (/p/isis/citation/CBB983224356/)

Book Tiemeyer, Philip James; (2013)
Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants (/p/isis/citation/CBB001201064/)

Article Davidson, Roger; (2009)
Psychiatry and Homosexuality in Mid-Twentieth-Century Edinburgh: The View from Jordanburn Nerve Hospital (/p/isis/citation/CBB000932527/)

Article Tsampiras, Carla; (2014)
Two Tales about Illness, Ideologies, and Intimate Identities: Sexuality Politics and AIDS in South Africa, 1980--95 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001422142/)

Article Deborah Weinstein; (2018)
Sexuality, Therapeutic Culture, and Family Ties in the United States After 1973 (/p/isis/citation/CBB686551212/)

Article Jennings, Rebecca; (2008)
“The Most Uninhibited Party They'd Ever Been To”: The Postwar Encounter between Psychiatry and the British Lesbian, 1945--1971 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001030988/)

Chapter Lunbeck, Elizabeth; (2012)
The Narcissistic Homosexual: Genealogy of a Myth (/p/isis/citation/CBB001201489/)

Article Marta V. Vicente; (2021)
The Medicalization of the Transsexual: Patient-Physician Narratives in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (/p/isis/citation/CBB053167422/)

Book Kateřina Lišková; (2018)
Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire, 1945–1989 (/p/isis/citation/CBB942663111/)

Book Meghan Fitzpatrick; (2017)
Invisible Scars: Mental Trauma and the Korean War (/p/isis/citation/CBB810752603/)

Article Naoko Wake; (2018)
Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis Meet at a Mental Hospital: An Early Institutional History (/p/isis/citation/CBB587409183/)

Essay Review McCaughey, Martha; (2000)
Gay science: Reinventing the sexes (/p/isis/citation/CBB000110093/)

Article Beccalossi, Chiara; (2009)
The Origin of Italian Sexological Studies: Female Sexual Inversion, ca. 1870--1900 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001030579/)

Book Katz, Jonathan; (2007)
The Invention of Heterosexuality (/p/isis/citation/CBB000774193/)

Article Hubbard, Thomas K.; (2008-9)
The Paradox of “Natural” Heterosexuality with “Unnatural” Women (/p/isis/citation/CBB001032469/)

Book Forth, Christopher E.; Crozier, Ivan; (2005)
Body Parts: Critical Explorations in Corporeality (/p/isis/citation/CBB000820036/)

Book Williams, Craig A.; (1999)
Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity (/p/isis/citation/CBB000110091/)

Article Beachy, Robert; (2010)
The German Invention of Homosexuality (/p/isis/citation/CBB001035125/)

Book Gabriella Romano; (2019)
Il caso di G. La patologizzazione dell'omosessualità nell'Italia fascista (/p/isis/citation/CBB086820247/)