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This chapter discusses the case of Watt, who was in doubt as to whether he was gay or straight and hoped that psychoanalysis would provide the answer. He thought at first that I would see through to the truth of his inner nature much as a radiologist sees through the body to bone. Of course, I had no idea whether Watt was gay or straight—how could I know?—and I wondered why he thought I should, and why he didn't know himself.
In a recent paper Arnold Goldberg (2001) takes up a question that seemed at least partly to animate Watt's anxiety, and that was the question of whether or not homosexuality is a pathology. Goldberg argues that as psychoanalysts we can't possibly offer a simple answer because for some of our analysands homosexuality may be expressive of pathological self-structure; for others, it may be the expression of a healthy and vigorous self, and for still others, it may be first one and then the other. Richard Isay (1989) believes that homosexuality is genetic and either neurotic, if the father responds with hostility to his small son's erotized love, or normative, if the father's response is warmly loving. For Kohut (1971), homosexuality represents the sexualization