Elizabeth Moberly

Elizabeth Moberly, Ph.D. is a British Research Psychologist and a Theologian whose Christian ideas inform her views on homosexuality. During the early 1980s Moberly coined the term "reparative therapy".

Ideas
In her book, Homosexuality: A New Christian Ethic, Moberly suggests several ideas for causes of male homosexuality. She believes that environmental factors and a temperamental predisposition contribute, but believes that a primary reason is a subject's failure to bond with his father. Moberly places this idea in opposition to the "domineering mother" idea in Freudian psychoanalysis.

Moberly believes that homosexuality is caused by incompetence by the same-gender parent. Moberly determined that the homosexual men in the studies were suffering from what she termed 'defensive detachment' and 'same-sex ambivalence.' She presumes that a young boy, for any of several reasons, did not bond with his father in a meaningful way."

Moberly believes that homosexuality is a reparative drive. She promotes the idea that heterosexual "male bonding" is similar to homosexual desire but lacks a sexual element. Building on this idea, proponents of modern reparative therapy work to build male-to-male bonds without an element of sexuality. Proponents also propose that homosexual men feel a need to outsource the masculine role to other men, due to a feeling that they are insufficiently masculine. Proponents attempt to increase a subject's feeling of masculinity, with the belief that doing so will lessen homosexual desire.