It is in this context that we must regard with interest the work of Joseph Nicolosi Jr., American clinical psychologist and founder of the Reintegrative Therapy Association. Son of Joseph Nicolosi Sr., a known figure in the old so-called « reparative » therapies, Nicolosi Jr. has chosen a more cautious, more clinical, and doubtless more acceptable path: he does not present his method as a « machine to make people heterosexual », but as a therapy for trauma, wounded attachment, shame, compulsions and sexually charged memories. According to his presentation, Reintegrative Therapy uses therapeutic tools employed in treating trauma and addictions; when these dynamics resolve, sexuality may sometimes change as a side effect, not as a mechanical injunction.
The nuance is capital. Nicolosi Jr. does not say: « Your orientation is a disease. » He rather says: « Your desires have a history. » And this sentence, in itself, is already a revolution in a world that sacralizes desire as soon as it touches sexuality.
For it is here that the debate becomes fascinating. Our society readily admits that eating desires can be disordered, that desires for domination can be worked on, that sexual addictions can be healed, that pornographic compulsions can distort the imagination, that childhood wounds can shape affective life. But as soon as one touches on homosexual attractions, desire suddenly becomes untouchable, almost sacred, as if it miraculously escaped all personal, family, mimetic, cultural or pornographic history.
Yet Christianity has never reduced the person to his impulses.
This is where we must dare to name what many men keep silent: certain sexual fixations are not born in a pure sky, but in a wounded affective history. A boy may have known paternal rejection, humiliation by other boys, exclusion from a male group, the feeling of being « less of a man », too sensitive, too weak, too different; he may have been mocked in his body, in his voice, in his way of being, or deprived of that simple masculine recognition a child needs to grow peacefully. Others have known early sexual intrusions, pornographic images discovered too soon, immense loneliness, confusion between admiration, lack of love, shame and desire.
In certain cases, what was not received as affection, security or belonging can become charged with eroticism: the admired masculine becomes the desired masculine; the wound of exclusion becomes fascination; shame becomes excitement; lack becomes scenario. This is obviously not a universal mechanism, nor a unique explanation of all homosexual attractions. But it is a clinical hypothesis serious enough not to be prohibited in advance. Yet our society, instead of helping to discern these wounds, tends often to immediately sacralize their sexual translation: it transforms a possible fixation into identity, suffering into a flag, a wound into destiny. It is precisely this shortcut, both psychologically lazy and ideologically convenient, that Nicolosi invites us to contest.
The Church asks that homosexual persons be welcomed with respect, compassion and gentleness, and that all unjust discrimination be avoided; but it also recalls the universal call to chastity, to self-mastery, to interior freedom and to Christian perfection. This position is neither contemptuous nor naive: it rests on an anthropology in which man is not ontologically defined by his sexual desires. He is more than what he experiences. He is a person, an intelligence, a will, a history, a vocation, a soul.
It is precisely this that Nicolosi Jr.'s theory allows us to reopen: the possibility of not confusing respect for the person with canonization of all his attractions. A man can experience a desire without wanting to make it his identity. He can recognize an attraction without wanting to organize it into destiny. He can ask for help to understand why a certain image, a certain lack, a certain wound or a certain humiliation has taken on an erotic charge. He can wish to live chastity, or to free himself from compulsive sexuality, or to recover an interior unity more in keeping with his faith.
One will obviously object that « conversion therapies » have led to abuses. It is true. There were brutal, humiliating, guilt-inducing practices, sometimes sectarian, sometimes inflicted on vulnerable young people under family or religious pressure. No serious Catholic should defend that. The Church does not ask to crush souls in the name of a moral ideal. It asks to lead persons toward truth in charity.
But the existence of abuses should not lead to prohibiting all therapeutic research for those who freely wish to work on their desires. It is here that the French situation becomes troubling.
Since the 2022 law, now codified in Article 225-4-13 of the Penal Code, practices, behaviors or repeated statements aimed at modifying or repressing a person's sexual orientation or gender identity, when they impair their physical or mental health, are punished by two years' imprisonment and a fine of 30,000 euros. The stated intention was to protect persons against violent or manipulative practices. But the obvious risk is: to create a climate of fear where a willing adult will no longer be able to honestly state his therapeutic objectives without putting his practitioner in danger.
It is a delicious paradox, if one still has enough humor not to weep. In a country where one never ceases to celebrate « self-determination », it would become suspect to self-determine against the dominant ideology of desire. One can wish to change one's name, social gender, body, affective trajectory, family model; but wishing not to be governed by certain attractions would become almost illegitimate. Freedom, yes, but only in the direction foreseen by the progressive catechism.
The Nicolosi case thus compels us to pose a simple question: why could a free adult not choose his therapeutic goals? Why could a man with unwanted homosexual attractions not say: « I do not want this to define my life; I want to understand what, in my history, nourishes these desires; I want to work on my wounds, my attachments, my compulsions, my relationship to the masculine, to shame, to pornography »?
Pornography, moreover, is the enormous blind spot in this debate. Our era claims that sexual desire would be a pure truth springing from the untouched depths of the self. But it forgets that millions of adolescents are shaped by violent, mimetic, addictive images, increasingly extreme, that do not merely reflect desire: they manufacture it. Human desire is mimetic. It imitates, it absorbs, it repeats, it becomes excited by what is shown to it. Pornography is a clandestine school of sexual imagination. Pretending it could not bend, trouble, amplify or direct certain attractions amounts to willful blindness.
It is not about saying that all homosexuality mechanically comes from pornography, nor that every homosexual person has an identifiable and repairable wound in a few sessions. That would be simplistic. But it is equally simplistic, and far more ideological, to forbid in advance all inquiry into the history of desire. Between absolute biological determinism and magical therapeutic promise, there exists a reasonable space: that of a human freedom capable of rereading its history, of working on its wounds and of ordering its desires toward a higher good.
Opponents of Nicolosi respond that these approaches are not validated by dominant consensus. The great English-speaking psychological organizations remain very hostile to efforts to modify sexual orientation, which they consider unproven and potentially harmful. This reservation must be heard. A therapy must never promise what it cannot guarantee. It must never fabricate shame. It must never transform faith into psychological pressure.
But one may also remark that contemporary « consensus » is not always chemically pure. It is traversed by anthropological, political and activist presuppositions. Once a field of research touches on homosexuality, gender or family, certain questions become nearly forbidden before even being studied. Whoever raises them is no longer merely debated; he is morally suspected. It is a strange science that begins by sanctuarizing conclusions.
The strength of Nicolosi Jr., despite controversies, is therefore to recall an anthropological obviousness: man is not condemned to passively suffer everything that surges within him. He can reread, choose, order, renounce, integrate. This vocabulary is not that of violence; it is that of interior freedom.
For Catholics, the stakes are immense. It is not about resurrecting hard, clumsy or humiliating methods. It is not about promising automatic heterosexuality to those who would follow the right protocol. It is about defending a deeper principle: no one should be locked into a sexual identity against his conscience. Neither by his family. Neither by his religious milieu. But nor by the State, the media, activist associations or professional bodies.
True compassion does not consist in saying to someone: « Your desires are your essence, bow to them. » It sometimes consists in saying to him: « You are greater than your desires, and you have the right to seek peace. » This is what our era can no longer tolerate. It confuses welcome with validation, respect with approval, freedom with submission to desire.
Joseph Nicolosi Jr. has doubtless not solved everything. His theory must be discussed, tested, criticized, clarified. But he poses a question that France would do well not to bury under criminal law: does a free adult still have the right not to want to become what his desires suggest to him?
To this question, a truly free society should answer yes. And a Catholic should even add: fortunately, for all Christian life begins precisely there, in that mysterious space where man discovers that he is not the slave of his passions, but a being called to the freedom of the children of God.
