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.
The collection of conceptually diverse and politically progressive essays gathered together in Rethinking Psychoanalysis and the Homosexualities marks an important moment in psychoanalytic history. We can finally sense within our professional boundaries an intensifying interdiction against both formal and casual expressions of homophobia. Concomitant with that interdiction, norms have changed. Within psychoanalysis, we can no longer burden the category “homosexuality” with an assumption of psychopathology.
Rethinking Psychoanalysis and the Homosexualities provides us with an opportunity to consider the determinants of the remarkable transformation in the relations between the two protagonists of its title. We have tended to categorize “homosexuality” either as an exceptional condition warranting an etiological account, or as an explicitly clinical entity. This being so, we have been permitted, even compelled, to ask questions like: “What is it?” “How does it come about?” “What does it imply?” Such questions—and the norms that support them—can no longer be assumed neutral. Regarding “homosexuality,” then, we no longer know the limits and contents of our field of observation and study. In grappling with this question, psychoanalysis reluctantly, but necessarily, grapples with the philosophical problems of postmodernism.
Beginning, perhaps, with Freud's “Three Essays on Sexuality” (1905), the classificatory project of psychoanalysis once came to us as though the product of an incomplete, though nominally disinterested, science. Now, instead of seeing evidence of disinterest in our founding taxonomies, we see signs of special interest—the shaping forces of norm, prejudice, and ideology. Therefore, in rethinking the place of the homosexualities we find ourselves rethinking perforce