Response

Dear Sir,

In his letter regarding my psychoanalytic perspective on Neil Jordan's The Crying Game, Dr. Schrut appears to conflate the ‘hardwired’ phenomena of gender identity disorder and certain varieties of homosexuality and heterosexuality with the kind of fluidity one observes in the analytic setting. For both analyst and analysand there is an ongoing dialectical tension between one's nominal gender or one's nominal sexual orientation and the transference/countertransference identifications experienced in the crucible of analytic work. My own clinical experience as an analyst and a supervisor of other analysts is quite different from that described by Dr. Schrut.

Psychoanalytic data are unique to that setting and do not always corroborate observations of children where inferences are made from external behaviors. Nonetheless, even non-analytic data support my contention that in many cases sexual desire may be fluid. Margaret Mead's anthropological research led her to conclude that when nominally heterosexual individuals are confined to a situation where only same-sex partners are available, sexual desire for and sexual activity with persons of the same gender are common.

Finally, it is unclear to me how Dr. Schrut's relationship with the late Robert Stoller is relevant to his argument. For what it is worth, Stoller was also a mentor of mine, and much of what I have learned about gender, sexual orientation, and the ‘sexualities’ came from conversations with him and from his writings in those areas.

Glen O. Gabbard, MD
The Menninger Clinic
PO Box 829
Topeka
KS 66601-0829
March 1998