Toward a Horizon of Potential: Longing, Phobia, and Queerness in Psychoanalysis and Beyond

This paper uses psychoanalytic methodology to interrogate queerphobia. Through the sharing of a brief encounter with a prospective patient who insisted on knowing whether or not the analyst was a “gay man” despite the analyst already having identified himself as a “queer person,” the regulatory anxieties and violence attendant to queerphobia are explored. Clinical and theoretical questions related to identity, both in therapist-patient fit and in the identity paradigm more broadly, are considered through a critical examination of the exchange between analyst and prospective patient. Borrowing from the work of Jill Gentile, the feminine and the vaginal are taken up as organizing/disorganizing paradigms in both methodology and content as the caller’s insistence is explored. The deployment of logics of biology as a rhetorical move is also investigated here, as the caller continues to push the question of whether the analyst is a “biological” gay man. In an attempt to think beyond the analyst’s failures in initiating treatment with the caller, as well as the caller’s queerphobia, the author leans on the notion of queer potentiality as developed by José Esteban Muñoz to dream forward another, more generative version of the interaction.