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Let us, just for a moment, consider the position of a young woman … or in this instance, two young women, whose sexual orientation is lesbian, who also find themselves drawn to psychoanalysis. After all, why not? From a certain perspective it has, this discourse of psychoanalysis, an allure, a veritable charm … indeed it would appear to privilege a quest for truth, set in the context of an insistent challenging of taboos, and so might be thought to allow for the possibility of a challenge to be mounted against prevailing homophobic attitudes that so stalk our culture. Or at the very least provide a venue for a serious interrogation of the issues involved. Surely this is neither a case of a ‘wild desire’ or of ‘mistaken identity’.
Now as some of us are dimly aware this psychoanalysis has come to disappoint; rather than a source of emancipation … and it is not that just such a potential is not still in play … what now goes with the territory is a pernicious resistance to diversity. However a word of warning here … just as the authors of this book so successfully avoid the homogenisation of homosexuality, and persistently underline the plurality of its possibilities, right at this moment am I not in danger of becoming involved in some superimposition of a unifying vision of psychoanalysis? The very notion of the ‘discourse of psychoanalysis’ or of the ‘psychoanalytic community’ runs the risk of a suppression of difference. In other words it would be absurd to assume that all psychoanalysts or psychoanalytic psychotherapists will be tarred with the same brush. Nevertheless what haunts the scene is an insistent conflation of psychic health and heterosexuality.