It is of course easy to say that opponents of psychoanalysis
are frightened of it for what it might reveal. Easy to say because it’s usually
true. I have just discovered that one of its influential early opponents was
Lord Alfred Douglas. Yes, that’s right: in earlier life the companion and
enthusiastic bugger-er (is that the word?) of the worst kind of back-street
rent boys, and the unspeakably creepy little catamite of Oscar Wilde. By 1920
he was a ‘reformed character’ and, I kid you not, head of the Catholic Purity
League, from which eminence he campaigned fiercely against the growing
psychoanalytic movement.
Lord Alfred was also known — well, by now largely forgotten
— as a very bad poet; the sort whose stuff was probably only published because
he was a Lord. The present Lord, Sir Gawain Douglas, happens to live near me
when I’m in England; I’ve met him and have a signed copy of his own slim volume
of verses; I’m afraid his stuff is even worse that his great-grandfather’s. In
time I think the two Lords’ offences against poetry will probably be considered
worse that anything else they may have done.
Here’s Lord Alfred with his lover Oscar Wilde:
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