Publication du livret "Homosexualités et bisexualités: mythes et réalités"

L'association Helem a l'honneur de vous inviter à la publication et signature du livret "Homosexualités et bisexualités: mythes et réalités" rédigé par Maha Rabbath - Psychologue Clinicienne et Psychothérapeute Analytique.

Lieu: Hotel Crown Plaza, Rue Hamra
Date: Jeudi 29 octobre 2009, de 11h a 13h

Ex-Gay Movement: What is it?

Imagine this scenario: Some seventeen year old boys are handcuffed by their own parents and dragged to a camp where they are promised to be cured from their “mental disease;” their homosexual orientation. The “curative techniques” consist of being electrocuted, drugged, and having the “gay beaten out of them.” After a month of this “reparative therapy”, the once homosexual boys are thought to be ex-gays; meaning, they are no longer homosexual but have once again become heterosexual. This, in a nutshell, is the basic premise of the ex-gay movement.

Almost all of the studies promoting treatment for homosexuality talk about treating people who are distressed by being homosexuals. These studies are backed up by religious and similar groups.

The president and the vice-president of the National Association for Research and Therapy for Homosexuality (NARTH) wrote in 1994:

Freud
Freud is considered by many people as the founder of modern psychiatry or at least psychoanalysis. He thought that homosexuality is just a normal variation in human sexuality and he did not think that it is a pathology. (1,2)

Other Psychoanalysts:.
Other psychoanalysts had differing views from Freud. Some of their theories stated that homosexuality was a "phobic" reaction to the other sex or a psychopathology related to the Oedipal complex. (1)

It might be illogical to mention "psychiatry" and "psychology" when talking about "homosexuality". Psychiatry is one of the medical fields that deal with health and disease whereas homosexuality is a social, political and historical issue that has nothing to do with "health". The fact remains that across the years, there has been a lot of confusion about the above relationship and for that reason only it is worth talking about this issue.