The Portman Clinic

Perversion and how to handle it

The Observer, November 2008

Seventy-five years ago, a middle-aged woman walked into a London clinic to receive help with her violent temper. She’d attacked her employer and was judged to be worthy of psychological examination. There are a few more things known about her case, but the details are less significant than the fact that she was the first recorded appointment at the new clinical wing of the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency.

The Institute had been formed to examine the fringes of society. Founded during the political and social upheaval of the interwar years, it dealt with those thrown up and then tossed aside by a turbulent world, and its mainstay was troubled youth. The clinic attracted the psychoanalytical superstars of the day, along with some literary ones: its vice-presidents included Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Havelock Ellis and HG Wells. The Institute saw cases of habitual criminality, desperate addiction, extreme violence and sexual perversion. Today, 75 years later, under its less revealing but more aesthetically pleasing name of the Portman Clinic, two things have changed. The caseload has increased and there’s a lot more sex.

Many people who visit the Portman Clinic today come out of Swiss Cottage underground station and walk a little way up Fitzjohn’s Avenue. On their right they will pass the Tavistock Clinic, a much larger and better known therapeutic institution that tends to deal with a broader range of patients, patients who may never have been in serious trouble with the law. The Tavistock is based in a bland Sixties utility building, but the Portman can be found at a grander address, an attractive red-brick Edwardian house that in another age would almost certainly have employed waiting staff.

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