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Around 1972, during the American Psychiatric Association's debates over whether to delete homosexuality from the DSM list of mental disorders, several analysts argued against deletion by claiming that it would foreclose any future discussion of homosexuality. Such fears have proven to be unfounded. Another fear, unarticulated but perhaps more pervasive and worrisome, was that “depathologizing” homosexuality would prove the first step in undermining the very basis of psychoanalytic theory and in legitimizing the voice of non- or anti-psychoanalytic views within psychoanalytic discourse. As it seems to be turning out, this latter warning has proven to be rather more substantial than the first, though whether the consequences it predicted are a curse or a blessing still remains to be seen.
Wild Desires and Mistaken Identities, a study of the place of lesbianism in psychoanalytic discourse, ranks among the best of recent psychoanalytic work on same-sex object choice. Making no attempt to disguise its belief in “an integrated, non-perverse, mature and manifest homosexuality,” it considers a wide range of theoreticians from Freud, through classical Freudians and revisionists, Kleinians and object-relations theorists, to Lacanians and the