Three very senior psychoanalysts from The British Psycho-Analytical Society gave oral evidence, Wilfred Bion, Elliot Jaques and William Gillespie. The prevailing tone of their evidence can be gauged by Bion’s statement that no-one who has a real choice in the matter is likely to choose homosexuality. Throughout they emphasised in various ways the pathologies they considered to underlie what they called homosexual ‘outlets’– these were not, they said, symptoms, but alternatives to psychotic or neurotic formations, means of dealing with deep internal anxieties. They also gave the impression that change of orientation was possible through psychoanalytic treatment. However, when they were pressed by the doctors on The Wolfenden Committee to provide evidence and case histories to support this view, they could not produce them–a familiar clash of empiricism with psychoanalysis. With therapeutic zeal Bion averred, ‘There is no patient I would like to call an ingrained homosexual.’ This seems to be a claim for the supposedly fundamental nature of heterosexuality to which people can be restored. (Wolfenden 1954-57, HO 345: Box 14) The Tavistock Clinic therapists emphatically distinguished between treatable and untreatable, where this seems to have meant change of orientation and were even more gung-ho than those from the British Society: they maintained that of the 20% they thought were treatable, 100% success could be claimed. They also advocated the setting up of specialist clinics.
It is clear that the Wolfenden Committee did not accept much of the psychoanalysts’ evidence. The Committee saw any concurrent psychiatric abnormalities as due to the strain and conflict of the circumstances of homosexual lives, not as causal; whereas the psychoanalysts unequivocally saw homosexuality as an indication of underlying psychological disturbance, and as an unsatisfactory way of dealing with internal anxieties. In this sense, The Report is much more normalising of male homosexuality than the psychoanalytic evidence. The psychoanalysts, like Freud in his often quoted 1930 letter to the mother of a young American man, advocated decriminalisation. This was on the basis that the law increased feelings of persecution and made treatment more difficult, and that decriminalisation would not increase the prevalence of homosexuality–one of The Committee’s preoccupations. As Bion stated, ‘The homosexual is not going to be treated by the law, he has to be treated by medical people.’ (Wolfenden 1954-57 HO 345: Box 14).