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To the oft-repeated question, ‘one psychoanalysis or many?’, this panel gave a clear answer: many, and quite divergent. At times, this aroused a sense of frustration, as the differences of viewpoint appeared so great as to make a dialogue difficult. At other moments, the feeling was that the honest expression of the different positions was in itself valuable, even if a fruitful dialogue would require more time, more patience and more intimacy than could be achieved within the boundaries of a congress panel.
The moderator, Aiban Hagelin, opened with a question: ‘What is homosexuality? Is it an impulse neurosis? Is it a personality disorder? Is it a neurosis? Perhaps a psychosis, or a “transitional neurosis?”’ Hagelin quoted Socarides: ‘Of all the symptoms of emotional origin that serve simultaneously as defences, homosexuality is unique in its capacity to use profound psychic conflicts and struggles to attain, for limited intervals, a pseudo-adequate equilibrium and pleasure reward (orgasm), often permitting the individual to function, however marginally and erratically’. He suggested that these and many other issues could be addressed by the panel.
The first panellist, Lenise Lisboa Azoubel, presented a clinical case of male homosexuality. In her theoretical introduction she drew upon Chasseguet-Smirgel's emphasis on the regression to pregenitality motivated by castration anxiety, on the disavowal of the differences between genders and generations, and on the idealisation of anality. She also relied on Lander's differentiation between stable homosexual structures (not necessarily perverse) and perverse homosexual symptomatic acts (in acting out), and mentioned Amati-Mehler's questions as to the difference between symptoms, perverse defences, perverse thought and perverse transferences.
The patient, a man who started analysis at 27, described his father as violent and his mother as passive and submissive; he became homosexual in adolescence. Azoubel outlined