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As we round the corner of the millennium, and of this, our psychoanalytic century, there is a powerful imperative to speak to history and to legacy, to define and consider ourpresent circumstances, and to make some claims on the future, however tentative.
The inaugural issue of our journal, Studies in Gender and Sexuality: Psychoanalysis, Cultural Studies, Treatment, Research, with its auspicious publication date of January 2000, positions us at the crest of the wave between the centuries. Our subject, the study of sexuality and gender, has spanned, and through the cultural dispersal of psychoanalysis, preoccupied the century we leave behind. The question going forward is how these foundational categories of dynamic theory, and more broadly of identity and culture, will survive the intensive interrogation and critique to which they have been subjected.
The terms gender and sexuality have had their own distinct historical evolution in the modern period . Sexuality was not articulated as a dimension of personality until late in the 19th century (Katz, 1996), and it was only with Money's work in the 1950s (Money, Hampson, and Hampson, 1955) that gender and sexuality were formally conceived as separate and distinct categories of analysis. Ten years later, Stoller (1964) imported these ideas into psychoanalysis in order to explore the power of gender as an organizer of self, a pivotal move in the development of psychoanalytic gender studies (see Benjamin, 1988; ; Chodorow, 1978; Herdt and Stoller, 1992, for some significant illustrations).
To put it in cultural terms, we could say that 19th-century European notions of sexuality were initially and fatefully undermined by Freud's