You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Roughton has presented us with both paradox and challenge. The paradox is how to explain changes in the clinical theory of psychoanalysis, while the challenge posed for clinical psychoanalysis requires reconsideration of received wisdom regarding the analysis of persons with alternative sexual lifestyles such as gay women and men (Herdt, 1997; Hostetler and Herdt, 1998). Much of what we presume to be the received view regarding homosexuality as evidence of either oedipal or deficit psychopathology in personality development is founded on a theory of development as adaptation which was initially posed by Rado (1945-1955, 1949) at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center in the postwar period (Isay and Friedman, 1986). As Lewes (1988) has shown, Freud never maintained this view of homosexuality as the psychopathology which has so often been attributed to him. Although there is yet little information regarding the adjustment of gay men and women followed from early adulthood into oldest age, virtually all cross-sectional study of gay and lesbian lives in adulthood, more than a thousand such reports to date, has shown absolutely no relationship between personal distress and sexual orientation except as the consequence of a lifetime of experience of stigma and antigay prejudice on the part of the larger society (Meyer, 1995).
Roughton challenges us to reconsider not only our presuppositions regarding this relationship between psychopathology and sexual lifeways, but also to reconsider presuppositions regarding both our understanding of the course of gay and lesbian lives, as well as the dynamics of change in psychoanalytic work with gay men and women. His sensitive, honest, case presentation raises particular questions regarding the nature of the transference, focusing on the analysand's search for mirroring and twinship (Tolpin, this volume).
Roughton also challenges us to reconsider our views regarding the meaning of wish and action among those men and women identifying with a