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Through teaching and speaking on sexual and gender diversity in psychoanalysis over the years, I have come to observe a feature of how discussions on these topics often unfold. First, the persistence of prejudicial norms against trans and queer people in our profession is recognised. Then a careful case is made for reconceptualising metapsychological precepts that veil these damaging attitudes by codifying them in rarefied abstractions. Of greatest urgency in this regard is, of course, deconstructing the cardinal myth of psychoanalysis, the Oedipus Complex. As a purportedly universal account of kinship, Oedipal theory reduces the polyvocality of gender and sexuality to an ahistorical and acultural binary, thereby simultaneously normalising and transcendentalising their dichotomisation. Once this sort of case has been made, a plea to urgently revise the sorts of harmful, entrenched, therapeutic techniques derivative of such metapsychological precepts is submitted. For example, the Kleinian imperative, advanced amongst others by Hanna Segal, to interpret a patient's homosexuality as an unconscious attack on their parents because non-normative sexualities are inescapably perverse, narcissistic and indicative of developmental arrest (Segal & Abel-Hirsch, 2007, p. 253).
At this point, a participant almost invariably interjects: ‘Hold on everybody. Can we just pause to think for a minute?’ Notable about such interpolations is less their imperious elision of the rich thinking prior to the intervention, although that is, of course, significant. It is, rather, more that their seemingly unimpeachable call to ‘pause for thought’ is, in fact, a forceful demand for the opposite, namely, that thinking stop. Immediately. That thinking has gone dangerously too far already, and it is nigh on time to revert to the comforting certainty and reassuring familiarity, of received opinion and accepted bias.
I mention this because it bears directly upon the story of Saketopolou's and Pellegrin