Much of their argument can be read as a claim for territory–that of psychoanalytic treatment–which did not convince The Committee. The final version of the report stated that there was no evidence that change of orientation was possible through treatment.
In the unpublished written evidence of the British Psycho-Analytical Society to the Wolfenden Committee (Memorandum, 1955) there is some discussion of the irrationality and violence of other people’s responses to homosexuality. This is seen as due to the severe repression and denial of a universal latent homosexuality, described in passages that read like transcriptions of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In their oral evidence the analysts comment on what they deem others’ ‘horror’ of sodomy, what Bion describes as, ‘The powerful emotions aroused by disgusting excretions which makes the law lose its aim’. The tone of this is as if they themselves were somehow outside and above any such irrationality in their formulations about homosexuality – an abiding problem with psychoanalysis. The Wolfenden Report reflected some of these ideas about repressed and latent homosexuality in its comments on irrational responses, and also in its position, like that of Freud’s in his Three Essays on Sexuality, that disgust and repulsion, whilst very common in sexual matters, should not serve as a basis for morality or law. In this sense, as in many others, Freud’s position has much in common with classic liberalism. These passages on the irrationality of reactions to homosexuality point to the positive potential (very underdeveloped, in my opinion) of psychoanalysis to address homophobia. The question also arises as to whether this particular Freudian model, of latent and manifest homosexuality on which this irrationality is seen as being based, is a useful one. What it also brings out is how this distinction, latent versus manifest, co-terminous with, but not the same as, private versus public, is used to sustain a psychoanalytic position in which homosexuality is seen simultaneously as both normal and abnormal, with often extremely porous and precarious dividing lines between them.