Introduction

The issue of same gender sexual identity has posed a challenge for our understanding of psychological development and psychological intervention. Understanding the dynamics of desire remains an enigma. As Chodorow (1992) observed, we still do not understand the foundations of heterosexuality let alone the factors leading to same gender sexual orientation. This problem has been rendered more complex because of social stigma which may interfere in the satisfaction of same gender desire. Nungesser (1983) observed that the possibility of men sharing a sexual relationship and intimacy arouses a particularly intense response among other men professing not to share these feelings.

Efforts to understand same gender desire and its consequences for morale and personal vitality across the course of childhood and adulthood have been rendered additionally complex as a result of the writing and teaching of a group of analysts in the postwar period who found it difficult to distinguish between their own values and beliefs and the process of clinical psychoanalysis as one of empathic understanding in which the analyst's own prejudices have no place. Recently analysts sharing this prejudice have joined with the Religious Right in the effort to portray same gender desire as both evidence of psychopathology and a moral evil. The psychoanalytic process is founded on a unique relationship in which the analyst monitors the analysand's material in order to maintain an atmosphere in which the analysand is able to sort out his or her own wishes and desires in the absence of anxiety on the part of the analyst which could disrupt this effort (Racker, 1968).

It is well known that Freud himself never adopted a moral stance regarding the expression of same gender desire or sexual orientation, sometimes portrayed as homosexuality. Responding to an American mother who had written Freud regarding the possibility that psychoanalysis could “cure” her son of his homosexuality, Freud (1935) demurred, and