Homosexuality and Hope: A Psychologist Talks about Treatment and Change by Gerard van den Aardweg (Servant Books, 1985, 134 pp.)
by Dr. Ralph Blair
The author is a Dutch psychologist and his publisher is an American Charismatic Christian house. Even so, no particularly Christian terms or concepts are employed in this book. Moreover, van den Aardweg is skeptical of homosexual “cures” through the so-called Christian “ex-gay” approach, saying that he has found that many such persons simply “played the role of the ‘changed homosexual’, clinging so much to their newfound religion that it seemed that their neurosis had simply shifted from one type of obsession to another”.
In his Introduction, American psychologist Paul Vitz, himself a rather new Christian who has been co-opted by the Charismatic Right, ludicrously lumps all homosexuals with people suffering from anorexia, bulimia, and high blood pressure and says that homosexuals, too, can understand their pathology “and recover from it”. According to Vitz, homosexuality is “a condition from which one can recover”. But to say it doesn’t make it so. He says that he knows of “a group of homosexuals” called Courage, “working hard at living … a sexually chaste life”. But where is their recovery, their heterosexuality, in chastity? He doesn’t say. What else he doesn’t say is that this Roman Catholic group has only some ten wavering members, some of whom have AIDS. Vitz promises that van den Aardweg “places homosexuality in a new context – namely, the context of hope for change”. But there’s nothing new here. The book is a rehash of the discredited 1950s ideas of Edmund Bergler.
Based on his study and treatment of homosexuals for more than twenty years, van den Aardweg calls homosexuality “a form of self-pitying neurosis”. It is his contention that all homosexual feelings stem from “poor me” complaining arising out of poor parenting. His assumption that homosexuality is a mental disorder is at odds with the classification of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Contrary to van den Aardweg’s accusation that the APA dropped homosexuality as a mental disorder only after “intensive lobbying of militant homophile pressure groups”, it must be clarified yet again that the 1973 Nomenclature Committee of the APA concluded that a mental disorder exists only if, in its full-blown manifestation, the psychological condition causes great subjective distress and significantly interferes with social functioning. This was APA’s diagnostic standard across the board – not just on homosexuality. It was on this basis that homosexuality was excluded from the DSM.
In van den Aardweg’s view, there are no homosexuals: “ ‘Homosexuals’ do not exist”. So-called “homosexuals” are heterosexuals with an “inferiority complex”. He asserts that in everyone with “homosexual feelings …one always finds traces of a normal, deeply hidden heterosexual disposition”. Even “the so-called exclusive homosexuals”, he says, have “sporadic” heterosexual impulses. One must thus ask with whom van den Aardweg has had his experience and to what the first word of his title refers.
Insisting at one point that the incidence4 of people with homosexual feelings is from under 1 percent to 3 percent of the population, he later says that even these figures should be almost halved. It is his opinion that any claim for a greater percentage is “pure progaganda … not supported by research”. However, if there is anything not supported by research it is the reactionary approach of van den Aardweg who offers no scientific evidence to counter higher incidence figures of the Institute for Sex Research. If only half of one percent of the population has homosexual feelings, why all the fuss?
Obscenely, van den Aardweg asserts that the love between two gay people is “self-deception … [and has] hardly anything to do with real love. [It is] self-centered love”. Has he met those many gay men who are nursing their mates through the most harrowing and depressing experiences of terminal illness? Many single gay men are volunteering their time, efforts and money to care for one person with AIDS after another. Yet van den Aardweg maintains that no homosexual has “genuine interest in and love for others”.
Since it is his notion that all persons with homosexual feelings “suffer from compulsive self-pity”, his treatment is what he calls “anticomplaining therapy”. People with “the homosexual neurosis” should be trained to laugh at their “infantile complaining”.
The largest word on the cover of this book is “Hope”. Linked with the rest of the title, it will have more impact on Christians who see it in bookstores and in ads than will the contents. But what is the promised “Hope”? Van den Aardweg says: “We should not worry too much about how far we eventually might come”. “We”? The “long work” and “stress” to “combat … restrain [and] struggle” against homosexual feelings with “willpower and patience” is not van den Aardweg’s job. His is merely to load onto others this dreary assignment. He says: “ Certainly, it is not realistic to see marriage as an ultimate goal for everyone”. What is the “change”? “Changes in sexual feelings … will certainly appear when – and to the degree that – the client’s ‘complaining child’ has been starved”. The permanent hopelessness of the love-starved client is betrayed when van den Aardweg cautions: “It is not advisable, therefore, for the therapist of the client to be too sexually-oriented in their attention and discussions. … There may be moments – or even longer periods – of loss of hope”. But the marketing department would never stand for the book being re-titled, Homosexuality and Loss of Hope.
“My overall reactions to this book are negative.” (D. K. Pace) This is the conclusion of another evangelical reviewer – and he’s even in agreement with van den Aardweg’s notion that homosexuality is pathological and needs to be treated. But he calls the book “simplistic” and says he was “disappointed at [van den Aardweg’s] lack of depth”. Pace concluded: “This is not a book that I can strongly recommend”. It isn’t a book that any informed and loving person would recommend.