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The idea behind this book—to commission and reprint a set of essays devoted to Freud's comparatively neglected study “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman”—was an excellent one. The result—a rich blend of contemporary U.S. feminism, self-identified postmodernism, queer theory, and predominantly relational psychoanalysis, all hastily printed and bound by Routledge—is as much a product of its historical moment as was Freud's wildly incoherent 1920 case. While the book thoroughly illuminates social, psychical, and cultural forces informing Freud's haute-bourgeois Viennese milieu, it also sheds a revealing light on the psychoanalytic world of 1990s New York.
That Obscure Subject of Desire is structured dialogically as a series of responses to Freud's case, which the editors sensibly include at the start of the book. After “Psychogenesis” come five essays by academics, most notably Teresa de Lauretis, followed by seven pieces by New York clinicians, with a substantial afterword by supervising analyst Muriel Dimen. Dimen accomplishes some of the work that the book's introduction might have performed by sketching an overview of relational psychoanalysis—a “polyglot” theoretical orientation that combines object-relations psychoanalysis (especially Winnicott) with the self-psychology of Kohut and the interpersonal tradition of Harry Stack Sullivan—which academic readers largely unfamiliar with this contemporary clinical development will find helpful. Dimen's essay is couched as a response to the contributors' responses to Freud, and is preceded by editor Erica Schoenberg's chapter, the book's penultimate piece, which also responds to many of the collection's arguments and insights.
Divided between academics and clinicians, the book seems to want to stage a dialogue between disciplines, but I am not sure that it succeeds. The selection of contributors is weighted toward clinicians; when you include Freud, the ratio of analysts to academics is 2:1. All the cli