Education
He holds a Doctor of Philosophy from the California School of Professional Psychology.
He holds a Doctor of Philosophy from the California School of Professional Psychology.
Nicolosi has advocated and practiced reparative therapy, a practice that he claims can help people overcome or mitigate their homosexual desires and replace them with heterosexual ones. Nicolosi has described his theories in Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality: A New Clinical Approach and three other books Nicolosi proposes that homosexuality is often the product of a condition he describes as gender-identity deficit caused by an alienation from, and perceived rejection by, individuals of the subject"s gender.
NARTH is a professional association that promotes the acceptance of conversion therapy, whose adherents purport successfully changing homosexuals into heterosexuals.
He is an advisor to, and officer of, NARTH. In 2012, California passed a law that banned the provision of conversion therapy to minors, including some of Nicolosi"s existing patients. Nicolosi was named as a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the law on constitutional groups but the law, effectively barring Nicolosi"s clinic from taking on patients under the age of 18, was subsequently upheld.
In 2015, a New Jersey judge barred Nicolosi from appearing as an expert witness in a lawsuit filed against another provider of conversion therapy, Jews Offering New Alternative for Healing (JONAH). The court excluded all of JONAH"s experts, including Nicolosi, because each expert "proffer the opinion that homosexuality either is a disorder or is not a normal variation of human sexuality," which contradicted "generally accepted scientific theory.".
Nicolosi is a founding member of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) and was its president for some time.