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Can psychoanalysis be misogynistic, LGBTQIAphobic, colonial and racist? … More locally, to which extent does part of French psychoanalysis lay itself open to such criticism? The question may sound quite preposterous, since psychoanalysis is not supposed to confine itself to collective prejudiced representations nor take up the master signifiers and Imaginary forms of an epoch. And yet, during decades, in the name of psychoanalysis, numerous authors in France have approached gay and lesbian sexualities, transidentities, non-heterocentric sexualities and sexuations, or family rearrangements, through pathologizing nosographic and etiological perspectives. The examples are sadly numerous, as shown by the public positions taken by psychoanalysts in France in the last three decades in the debates around Civil Union (called “PaCS”), same-sex marriage (“Mariage pour tous”) or gay and lesbian parenthood. These discourses, dwelling on irreducible gender identity and sex difference, denounce social transformations as attacks of the Symbolic Law. In a mixture of dogma and psittacism, they tend to reproduce the most trite and threadbare clichés dressed in eternal metapsychology.
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One could argue that some psychoanalysts’ self-satisfied swaggering, blustering and gloating in the media is but their own problem, yet these edifying discourses prove dangerous when they are imposed as scientific or academic knowledge. Perpetuating staggering gender violence against subjects who already socially pay the price of their non-conformity, they promote a wondrous course of psychological development – Oedipus, castration, sex difference, blissful household, and happy reproductive family. As a result, same-gender, sadomasochist, multiple-partner or non-genital sexualities are often deemed perverse, for their denial of the other’s sexual identity (Pirlot & Pedinelli, 2009), their “ferocious offensive and defensive denial of the female sex” (Bergeret, 1996, p. 37), their repudiation of castr