This paper addresses questions arising from my PhD project: a transnational history of homosexual aversion therapy, with a special focus on how this history was shaped and determined by Cold War geopolitical factors. Between 1962-1974, the Sydney-based psychiatrist Neil McConaghy built an internationally recognised career as the leading Australian practitioner of homosexual aversion therapy. These years were the heyday of behaviour therapy in Britain, promoted by Hans-Jürgen Eysenck at the Maudsley Hospital.  McConaghy, a Marxist, was heavily influenced by the Russian physician Ivan Pavlov, whose psychophysiological approach to psychological medicine had been official doctrine in the Eastern Bloc since 1949. In McConaghy’s view, Pavlov’s methods had been badly misunderstood by Eysenck, and many of the British experiments failed to meet rigorous scientific standards at the expense of their patients. Instead, he took his inspiration directly from a team of Czechoslovakian psychiatrists led by Dr Kurt Freund, who had conducted a pioneering experiment in homosexual aversion therapy in Prague involving 222 patients between 1950 and 1962, and who agitated successfully for homosexual law reform in 1961. Freund would eventually leave Czechoslovakia for Canada following the Prague Spring of 1968, yet McConaghy and Freund maintained a life-long professional relationship.