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Mark Blechner is Editor of a leading American psychoanalytic journal, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and a psychoanalyst who has published important papers on a range of subjects from neuro-psychoanalysis, through panic attacks and depression, to dream interpretation and working with projective identification.1 He is also an openly gay analyst who has made a significant difference to the way the profession in the USA deals with the issue of homosexuality. His work in this area is chronicled in his recent book Sex changes (Blechner, 2009), which opens with a quote from John Cage: ‘I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of old ones’. The interview took the form of a series of email exchanges between Dr Blechner and Jeremy Clarke.*
JC: I want to start with a phrase used by Muriel Dimen in a remarkable paper that you have just published (Dimen, 2010) about sexual violation in an analytic treatment. She writes: ‘I was 26 and it was 1968, an era of political, personal, cultural and intellectual change, but in which women's sexual subjectivity was still officially less than their own’ (p. 35). Can we explore this idea that sexual subjectivity can be something ‘officially’ less than one's own because it is something you have also written about in your book, Sex changes (Blechner, 2009). What I am interested in is this idea of an ‘official’ space within which sexuality functions and that this, in some important way, is part of what determines who we are allowed to be in society both at the level of personal sexual and mental wellbeing and in relation to what we might call a collective unconscious.
MJB: The ‘official’ space of sexuality is, I presume, in the public world at large. Virtually all societies prescribe and proscribe certain forms of sexuality. Individuals may subjectively experience their sexuality in one way, but learn to keep that sexuality more or less hidden to evade social judgement or pu