PUTNEY — As of July 1, Vermont law will bar mental-health providers from trying to change a minor's sexual orientation or gender identity. Vermont has become the fifth state to place limits on what's called “gay conversion therapy.” The District of Columbia and the city of Cincinnati also prohibit its use on minors.
Two linked stories - one of the hysteria epidemic in Europe in the late 1800s and the other of one of the first conversion-therapy cases - underscore the folly of gay conversion therapy and the wisdom of the new state law.
The hysteria epidemic that swept Europe in the late 19th century afflicted mostly women and girls. Symptoms could include twitching, fainting, hearing voices, talking in tongues, and paralysis.
Lesbianism and female masturbation were also considered symptomatic of hysteria. To provide relief from such, some doctors prescribed opiates. Some gave pelvic massages administered with vibrating devices. And, not uncommonly, surgeons performed ovariectomies or clitorodectomies.
During that epidemic, the young neurologist Sigmund Freud offered no medical or surgical treatments. Instead (and rather heroically) he talked to his hysterical patients and made no judgments. And when he talked to them he kept an open mind.
Well, he started out with an attitude free of prejudice about lesbianism and masturbation. But the next few decades unfortunately included a few of Freud's least-enlightened pronouncements:
• Men acquire morality through the castration complex. Any disobedient boy worries that his father may punish him by chopping off his penis. Fear of castration is what helps a boy form moral virtue. A penis is so precious and the fear of its loss so complete that, once a boy acquires morality, he does not misplace it.
• Having no penis, a girl has no morality - until she acquires babies, which are penis substitutes, and accepts direction from her children's father.
• Lesbianism and sexual satisfaction through masturbation are gateways to mental illness because they remove a woman from the chain of life and from daily guidance from a man.
• Lesbianism is always the fault of a woman's father. He either parented too distantly, giving a girl no one upon whom to Oedipally attach, or too closely, scaring the dickens out of her.
• Lesbianism - indeed, all homosexuality - is curable by psychoanalysis.
* * *
Fast forward another few decades for the second of the two linked stories. Now it is 1918. At age 23, Sigmund Freud's daughter, Anna, is already considered a bit of an old maid. And she is enjoying an intensely romantic friendship with a young woman.
Ask yourself: What would you do if you were Sigmund?
What he did was take Anna into psychoanalysis. By my count, they met for at least 1,000 clinical hours.
They discussed mostly her masturbation fantasies. In them, a young man who has made a mistake about a matter over which he has no real control is imprisoned and beaten by a knight. The beating helps bring Anna to orgasm.
The young man of her fantasies, Anna knew, represented her. And the knight, I hope she knew, might have represented her father, who seems to have been figuratively beating her every session for the mistake of her sexual orientation, an “error” over which she had no real control.
You can't make this stuff up. Anna became a psychoanalyst. Both she and Sigmund wrote about these analytic sessions and these fantasies.
* * *
And then what happened? Did analysis by the founding father of analysis turn Anna straight?
Anna's attachment to her young friend did not survive the thousand clinical hours with her father. But shortly after analysis ended, she met Dorothy Burlingham, heir to the Tiffany fortune. Both women followed in Sigmund's footsteps, becoming analysts - though, unlike him, they specialized in the care of children.
Anna and Dorothy enjoyed an exclusive relationship for 54 years. They even raised a family together.
After the Nazis occupied Vienna, the Freud family and Dorothy fled Austria for England, where Anna and Dorothy set up a group home for war orphans and for children separated from their parents by the Blitz of London.
The couple rescued more than 100 babies and children from ruin. After the war they took in child survivors of the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
The insights that Anna and Dorothy brought to the field of child analysis humanized the burgeoning fields of child psychology and early childhood education and took much of the brutality out of institutional life in orphanages. Quite literally, because of Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham, the western world became a better, safer place for children.
* * *
The two women never did come out of the closet. But in an interview with Freudian analyst Isaac Tylim for a 2011 article in the Buenos Aires Herald, their grandson Michael confided that they were not just good friends but sexual partners and, indeed, spouses in every sense of the word.
Sigmund never renounced the idea of ridding homosexuals of their neurosis. He did seem to relax his misconceptions about lesbianism, if only a bit, as Anna and Dorothy progressed through life together.
I like to imagine that, were Sigmund alive today, he would side with the Vermont Legislature in its push against gay conversion therapy. For, surely, as he watched his daughter and the woman she loved rescue child after child after child, he would have seen that his fears about lesbianism making women immoral and crazy were unfounded.
And after Dorothy died in 1979, he couldn't have helped but notice that his darling Anna had emerged from 54 years of a “Boston marriage” as ethically centered and sane as she'd always been - and every bit as gay.