A New Therapy in China

Listen, I have a new therapy for smokers. Every time you pick up a cigarette I smack you in the head. After a while you will find a lessened desire for cigarettes. And I can produce the research that shows that after six treatments there is a lesser desire to smoke. Is this a joke? An exaggeration? No, simply a parallel for what passes for therapy these days.

I am reminded of this by an article in the L.A.Times. (“Chinese cures for being gay”. May 22/11 LA Times article) Here is the therapy, and I quote,” They get some beautiful men to walk around naked beside you, or make you watch gay porn.” This from the leading Chinese expert on homosexuality. You know what an expert is? Someone from out of town. This one is from out in space. The article goes on, “The man will naturally get an erection. When his erection reaches a certain level, the instrument emits an electrical discharge, which upsets him. They repeat the process until the man doesn’t get excited anymore.” They claim progress in China since the authorities have removed homosexuality from the list of mental disorders. Another Chinese expert states that gays need to learn to accept themselves. He goes on with more nonsense: “Homosexuality is innate, not something that can be cured.” Why do they come to this conclusion? Because they have no way to delve into the deep unconscious and see what generating sources of deviation lie there. Since they have no way to treat it, it must be untreatable. One of those syllogisms that I love.

So let’s see what this is all about. I have treated many homosexuals over the years. They almost never come to get over their homosexuality. They feel bad and want therapy for their misery, like anyone else. And sometimes they wake up one day and have no desire for sex with the same gender. It was cured by inadvertence. No one tried to do it but after feeling basic need for many months things change. It happens sometimes, not always, and it happens when there is what I call “second-line” homosexuality; that is, severe deprivation of love during childhood. There is a deeper origin, trauma during gestation and birth that also plays into homosexuality: first-line origin. This is very tough to treat because the origin is so remote and early, and because the imprint is so engraved into the entire system. Oh yes, that brings me to another facet; homosexuality isn’t simply a matter of the behavior of sex organs. It is a state being found in the altered immune system, brain circuits and physiologic processes. It does no good to extract the sex organs for study and therapy as if that is the be-all and end-all of the matter; like headaches is only a matter of the head. Yes, it is manifested there, but it is a reflection of the person and her history. If we ignore history we are forced to take the presenting manifestation as THE problem and treat it apart from the whole system. It is a fragmented approach where we treat fragments of the person instead of the person herself. So there is an imprinted memory of trauma, which is ultimately manifested in high blood pressure. We treat the blood pressure but not the origins. It is always palliation.

Why would we focus on homosexual behavior if the behavior is driven by basic unfulfilled need? If, for example, there was a cold, punishing father in the boy’s life or a tyrannical mother he may search out warmth from a man. Is that wrong? Does it need to be treated? Or is that natural, something that all of us need — love? Many of my patients became fixated on animal love because that was all there was in the household. Should we punish it? Drive it away? Smack the person when he sees a dog? Why would we smack someone who gets an erection when he sees a naked man? He is excited by the possibility of male love (mixed with sex).

I offer an example. I treated a gay man who loved sucking penis; and now I shall simplify. His feeling when his partner came was “mother’s milk.” His basic need was for a warm father and for sucking and having the breast, both of which went missing. Now would we want to smash his head when he gets an erection? His need became sexualized but it is still basic need. Do we want to double his neurosis by increasing his load of repression? His sexual response is keeping the need alive. It is a point of access, not for punishment but for accessing the need and his pain. He may be acting-out the need for a loving father or out of fear of angry women (his mother). Do we want to castigate that and make him deny that need? So what are the Chinese doing? Extracting the penis and treating it as the problem. Smacking the erection and warning it not to get hard again when it sees naked men. Like the absence of an erection constitutes treatment of homosexuality.

Here again they focus on the presenting problem because they remain on the surface and are content to stay there. There is no unconscious in their scheme, so they harken back to pre-Freud days; talk about retro. It is much better to feel what you were and are missing than to drive it underground; because that deprived need is what drives all of us all of the time.