In These Pages …

We open the pages of this Journal issue with a remarkable personal odyssey. The classically-trained psychoanalyst Edwin C. Wood charts over forty years of attitudinal shifts toward male homosexuality in himself and in the zeitgeist of our profession. While reminding us more generally of the accepted opinions about the genesis of mental disorder and how treatment was conducted, he describes how homosexuality was viewed within the spectrum of these disorders. Since his psychiatric residency in the 1950s, Wood has necessarily participated in the societal shifts that have led to the formal depathologizing of homosexuality by the American Psychiatric Association and by training and accrediting bodies in psychoanalysis. How might a practicing psychoanalyst deal with these shifts? After all, we are not considering technological advances, but instead shifts that are primarily ideological and political.

How Wood has managed concerns us. Our concern is not solely with the specific subject of his paper: changing attitudes toward homosexuality. Through the vehicle his paper provides, Wood instantiates the wider question of how each of us manages societal value shifts. To what extent are we bound by unseen biases that fetter our comprehension, effectiveness, creativity, and compassion? Where and how do we locate these invisible fetters? What are the discursive practices that fix us in closed value systems?

We turn to Jonathan Goldberg who speaks from within gay (“queer”) literary theory and criticism. While Goldberg nods approvingly at aspects of Woods' endeavor, he finds the shifts that Wood recounts far less substantive than we, or Wood, might suppose. with its turnings and shiftings, Goldberg points to a Foucauldian future in which one of our society's most cherished and fundamental concepts—normalcy—is problematized and challenged.

We then move from the briskness of the Wood/Goldberg engagement, turning to a consideration of the frequently encountered condition, narcissistic pe