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In Straight Male Modern John Brenkman attempts a wide-ranging critique of psychoanalytic theory and practice, with special attention given to the oedipal configuration. He views the concept of oedipal relations as a signifier of historically determined social practices. When we subject it to critical analysis, we arrive not at some putative human nature, but rather at the complex and contingent processes through which normative heterosexuality is established in capitalist societies.
To put it another way, Brenkman is critical of the male dominance, compulsory heterosexuality, and patriarchal nature of our existing sexual arrangements. Psychoanalysis provides an important conceptualization of these arrangements, but uncritically. Starting with Freud, its major theorists have been unconscious of the ways in which their vision of reality is gender specific and class specific. Blind to the social determinants of their worldviews, they reproduce these determinants in and as their view of the world. As Marx (1844/1978) would say, they provide us with an “inverted world consciousness” of an “inverted world” (p. 53). The distortions of the theory mirror the distortions of existing human relationships. Hence the theory does reveal us to ourselves, but only if we decode it, retranscribe it in the register of practices of domination.
I have stated Brenkman's project in these very general terms in order to indicate its long historical lineage. The lineage extends back at least to Marx, who approached both Hegelian philosophy and political economy with the aim of liberating their scientific and interpretive potentialities from their ideological articulations. The theorists of the Frankfurt School (e.g., Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse) applied this same critical method not only to bourgeois ideology, but also to both Marxism and psychoanalysis.