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Dear Sirs,
I am surprised with the stance R. Roughton takes to develop a criticism of my article published in the International Journal. Indeed, in this article—as in all my works, and being convinced like Freud of the scientific status of psychoanalysis—I simply express hypotheses and offer to discuss their validity (or not) in a most open dialogue with my colleagues. I never intervene to defend a position that could involve moral judgements of a choice of life! Or even passions.
I simply offer to try to reconsider, in unison with others, the usual conception that psychoanalysts, as well as the public, have of what we call (singularly) ‘homosexuality’. In order to reach this aim, I intend to start from positions taken by Freud as well as by Ferenczi and by other later psychoanalysts, whether they belong to the old continent or to the ‘new world’ …
I do not intend to express a moral judgement on object choices made by anyone, whether by persons I meet in life or by the ones who come and consult me. For thirty years I have sought to practise the prudence with which psychoanalysts must consider the notion of ‘normality’, paying attention to its nuances.
I have tried to offer a differential decomposition of the excessively heterogeneous group of very different situations considered as ‘homosexual’. I attempted this by showing the diversity of the affective and relational processes abusively
assembled under this name, without attributing a pejorative connotation to any of these forms.
In the clinical part of my article, I, of course, confined myself to evoking cases of persons who consulted me because they showed a state of suffering that made the intervention of a psychoanalyst necessary in their own view. But I have not, at any moment, considered that all ‘homophiles’ were sick.
It is not up to me, in a scientific review article, to determine whether a homophile subject is a priori able or not to work in a specific occupation, or to run his or her relational life under le