Introduction

This symposium reconsiders sexuality from a relational perspective. It follows up on the Psychoanalytic Dialogues “Symposium on Gender” (Vol. 1, #3, 1991), which crystalized a fresh, deconstructive mode for thinking about gender that had emerged from nearly two decades of relational and feminist theorizing. This compilation initiates a new discussion. It is prompted by the critical, postclassical paradigm shift in which sexuality, once read as the driving force of desire, development, and pathology, has become that which is organized. To put it colloquially, if, with Freud, we thought that your sex is what makes you who you are, now we think that who you are shapes what sex you are and what sex you like. Not sexual drive and its conflicts, but the relational meaning of sexual desire, informs character and pathology, transference and countertransference. Clinical attention is less often on how the anatomical distinction between the sexes influences the psyche and more commonly on sexuality's relational complexity (see, e.g., Goldner, 1989; Mitchell, 1988), on how the psychological and cultural meaning of biology inscribes desire. Postclassical psychoanalysis thus implicitly destabilizes the nature and specificity of desire, treating them as emergents, not determinants.

This shift is manifest in the psychoanalytic reversal on sex and gender: in the classical version, sexuality organized gender; postclassical thinking, however, has it the other way around—gender organizes sexuality (Person, 1980). Although, then, the theory of psychosexuality preceded gender theory, the enormous recent interest in gender, gender identity, and gender development has obscured sexuality per se.