Letter: Freud was not anti-gay

IT IS A pity that your newspaper has joined in the fashionable sport of Freud-bashing. Paula Webb is wrong in asserting that anti-gay prejudice began with Freud ('Bias on the therapist's couch', 21 August).

In 1935 Freud wrote: 'Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of the sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo de Vinci, etc). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime - and a cruelty, too.' (Letters of Sigmund Freud 1873-1939, Hogarth Press, 1970.)

Mary Lynne Ellis is wrong in saying that the 'notion of homosexuality as a perversion has its roots' in psychoanalytical theory. It is rooted in the Bible.

Peter Lambda

Tibberton, Gloucester