Heterophilia — The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Aim: Commentary on Trop and Stolorow's “Defense Analysis in Self Psychology: A Developmental View”*

Trop and stolorow have presented case in which same-sex desire is prominent and treated as pathological. While this pathologizing view of same-sex desire in their paper can be readily illustrated, what seems more important is their apparent decision to maintain their point of view without actually discussing it. In this way, their paper exemplifies two interrelated phenomena seen in psychoanalysis: (1) the unarticulated belief in a particular sexual ideology, which I call “heterophilia,” and (2) the explicit belief that psychoanalysis is, or should be, free of ideology and politics.

In what follows I try to show how heterophilia, the overvaluing of intimate relations between different-sexed partners, manifests itself in Trop and Stolorow's case report and how it tends to immunize their ideological commitments against articulation and scrutiny. Moreover, I will try to show that as an artifact of heterophilia, same-sex desire is necessarily denigrated. These points are in line with the general claim of this paper that the particular sexual ideology of heterophilia and its discursive practices detour psychoanalytic work from its expansive and liberatory aims.