Chapter 5 Homosexuality and the Struggle for Coherence

Selfobjects are not experiences. They are not distinct and separate beings. [This idea insists] on the boundary between individuals and [demands] that we maintain what is internal in opposition to what is external. Selfobjects are the others that allow one to achieve and maintain an individual integrity. They are what makes us what we are, our very composition. But the individual is not reduced to these selfobjects, since there is an “owness” inhering in the individual that goes beyond and is logically distinct from these relations. Individual integrity and internal relatedness are not incompatible. They are joined together to form the self. Therefore we never become free of our selfobjects, nor should we, because they are our constituents.

When I was around eight years old, I was spending a few weeks of summer vacation at my grandparents home. There was a girl about my age who lived on the next block. We were best friends. One afternoon I ran over to her house to play. As I walked up the front walk, I saw her father sitting on the porch with several empty beer bottles lying around him. Inside the screen door I saw my friend quietly motioning me to go away. Before I could figure out what was happening, her father got up and yelled, “Get the hell out of here and don't come back! You are nothing but a goddamned sissy!” I turned heel and ran back to my grandmother's. By the time I got there I was crying and confused. I did not know what a sissy was, but the way he said it made it sound terrible. I found my grandmother and in between sobs reported that Mr. Smith had yelled and called me a sissy. “What is a sissy?” I asked. She thought