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The symposium ‘Psychoanalysis and Lesbian Sexuality’ held at the International Psychoanalytic University in Berlin (IPU) in January 2020 was a tempestuous affair. Speakers included practising analysts and psychologists, doctors, social workers and academics - many from the IPU, as well as quite a few graduate students - and the event was also open to the public, drawing many from Berlin's LGBTQ+ scenes. The essays in this volume reveal the sharp tensions that soon arose between participants, and especially between analysts and academics on the one side and ‘lay’ queer observers on the other, with the latter taking issue with what they considered a persistent pathologizing or desexualizing framing of lesbian sexuality. Conference organizers and editors Victoria Preis, Aaron Lahl and Patrick Henze-Lindhorst use this collection to explore and negotiate these tensions - ultimately with mixed results.
Spurring the fraught atmosphere from the outset was Manuela Torelli's keynote, ‘Psychodyamics of Lesbian Sexuality - Reloaded’. Torelli diagnoses a combination of harmony, boredom and a search for safety in lesbian relationships, arguing that the emphasis on pre-genital sexuality and pre-Oedipal maternal relations cannot form the basis of passionate adult relationships. Most controversially, Torelli uses her doctoral study of 24 lesbians with ‘sexual disturbances’ to argue that not only are such problems caused by sexual abuse, but that experiences of sexual violence are fundamental to the psychodynamics of the post-war women's movement in general. In this reading, traumatic shared experiences such as mass wartime rapes have been passed on from mothers to a generation of daughters, constituting that movement's ‘chosen trauma’ (Vamik Volkan's term) and the basis of feminist solidarity.
Linking sexual problems to abusive experiences is hardly new to psychoanalytic history - one need only think of Freud's ‘seduction’ thesis in his earliest writings on child sexuality, which he l