The idea for this paper arose one morning after seeing two patients consecutively. One was a young man of twenty-four who had had both heterosexual and gay relationships and who was now interested in having an intimate relationship with a man. However, he said, he ‘couldn't cope’ with what identifying as gay might mean culturally. The other was a middle-aged woman who was continuing to feel periodically very troubled about her son identifying as gay and was expressing concern about her homophobia. The idea that a twenty-four year old young man who is generally not at all conventional in his thinking and in his life style is still terrified that at some point he might have to ‘come out’ as gay and become the target of possibly considerable hostility because of loving another man, felt particularly shocking to me on that day: the huge achievements regarding sexual equality simultaneously sharply highlight how far the constraints on taking up these rights are still operative in people's day to day lives.
O'Connor and Ryan in their innovative and highly influential book, Wild Desires and Mistaken Identities, Lesbianism and Psychoanalysis, argue that pathologizing interpretations arise as defences against the anxieties aroused by working with lesbian and gay patients.1 They challenge the notion that there are features which are inherent in lesbian desire. They argue instead for a recognition within psychoanalytic practices of the diversity of lesbian desires, socially, historically, and culturally. They further emphasize that where there is any commonality in lesbians' experiences, this is to be found in lesbians' responses to living in a homophobic culture. Shared structures of oppression may ‘constitute or contribute to the forms of expression of lesbian desire’ (O'Connor and Ryan 1993: 234) and it is in relation to these that lesbian identities become ‘forged’. Lesbian sexualities do not share qualities in any essentialist sense.
My aim in this paper is not to attempt to develop a definitive explanation of homophobia, identifying its ‘causes’ and ‘effects’. To do this would be to risk replicating the approaches of those psychoanalytic theories which pathologize lesbianism and homosexuality, and fail to recognize their diversity. I also do not want to imply that homophobia is one thing or one process with one source; it manifests itself and functions in a multiplicity of ways and is more appropriately referred to in its plural form. Through my account of my work with my patient, Teresa, I critically reflect on a number of possible, not necessarily mutually exclusive, interpretations of what might constitute homophobia, or homophobias, drawing on the theories of Freud, Foucault, Butler and Levinas.
According to Freud, phobias are not ‘independent pathological process[es]’ (1909b: 115); they can appear as an aspect of many different forms of distress ranging across all the neuroses. He delineates three different groups of phobias:
Phobias experienced by so-called ‘normal’ people, such as fear of snakes. Freud claims that fears such as this are a ‘universal human characteristic’ and they are therefore generally not accorded the status of ‘symptoms’ or regarded as particularly troubling or inhibiting (1916-1917: 399).
Phobias of situations which are recognized by most people as entailing some risk, such as train travel, thunderstorms, crowds, enclosed spaces and solitude. Their status as phobias is related to the intensity of anxiety which anticipation of them evokes.
Phobias which are, in Freud's words, ‘beyond our comprehension’, such as animal phobias (1916-1917: 399).
Some phobias, such as agoraphobia and fear of rail travel, are acquired later in life, while others, such as fear of the dark, of animals, and thunderstorms arise early on. However, all of the phobias relating to the second and third groups are, he argues, closely related to anxiety hysteria.
In ‘anxiety hysteria,’ according to Freud, phobias function as ‘defensive structures’ against anxiety, which involve endless ‘precautions, inhibitions,
or prohibitions' (1909b: 117). He initially theorizes anxiety as arising in relation to an ‘internal threat’ to the ego, such as libidinal or destructive impulses, rage, or shame. Freud later revises this to emphasize the significance of an ‘external’ threat (1926d:126) and, in particular the threat of castration. He retracts his previous assumption that anxiety arises from repressed libido and argues that anxiety has its source in the attitude of the ego. It is the anxious ego which initiates repression.
In his analysis of the case of Little Hans's phobia of horses Freud highlights how Hans's phobia is formed through a condensation of unconscious thoughts relating to his Oedipal conflict, namely his sadistic sexual desire towards his mother and his hostile and rivalrous feelings towards his father. As Butler (1997) points out, Freud's theorizing of the Oedipus complex assumes that heterosexuality has already been accomplished. It presupposes that which it claims to explain. Freud strongly asserts in his reflections on Little Hans's development that homosexuality arises from a fixation at the point of transition between auto-eroticism and ‘object-love’. Freud's theorizing of phobias is therefore rooted in an assumption which is, itself, homophobic. To apply Freud's analysis of phobias in groups two and three to homophobia is untenable.
If the homophobia on which Freud's theorizing is predicated is normalized and not regarded as a symptom, can homophobias be usefully considered as belonging to Freud's first category of phobias, exemplified by the fear of snakes? Fears such as this, however, obviously do arise in some cultures (although not all, as Freud claims), and are regarded as socially acceptable or comprehensible within a particular cultural frame or belief system. They are therefore, similarly to homophobia, not treated as ‘symptoms’.
In an interesting move, Young-Bruehl, in her book Anatomy of Prejudice, offers an analysis of homophobia in which she specifies three different homophobic character types, namely obsessional, hysterical, and narcissistic. Although these categories are derived from psychoanalytic theory, Young-Bruehl stresses that she does not view people who are prejudiced
as any more pathological than any others. Rather, she claims to present descriptions of the different relationships these groups appear to have to homosexuals.
According to Young-Bruehl, the obsessional attitude is characterized by a view of homosexuality as dirty, degenerate, and feminizing. It is associated with financial power and AIDS. The world therefore needs to be cleansed of gay men. Hysterical characters need homosexuals, but ‘keep them in their place’. Homosexuals act out the desires which they prohibit in themselves and they can punish them for it. They can watch gay porn vicariously but return to their heterosexual world ‘“forgetting” that (they) ever left or what (they) did’ (p. 158). A narcissistic relation to homosexuality is revealed in members of same-sex groups which are implicitly, yet strongly defined as non-homosexual, for example, men's teams, clubs, and military units. Young-Bruehl's descriptions are useful as snapshots which succinctly and vividly convey a range of homophobic orientations to the world. She does stress that positions of dominance and alienation for any of these groups are constantly shifting and that social and political conditions and purposes ‘operate as galvanizing ideologies and organizing ideas’ (1996: 342). However, as my account of Teresa's struggles with her homophobia towards her son in analytical psychotherapy highlight, the categories theorized by Young-Bruehl are too sharply delineated and do not sufficiently allow for the shifting complexities of homophobic attitudes.
In my presentation of Teresa's work in psychoanalytic psychotherapy my focus is on those aspects of Teresa's analysis which concern her exploration of conscious and unconscious manifestations of homophobic thoughts and feelings2 Many other themes have emerged over the years which have been as or more significant. I feel privileged to be engaged with her exploration of feelings of which she, at times, feels very ashamed; they are very ‘at odds’ with what she wants to feel towards her son and towards lesbians and gay men in general.
Teresa was already in therapy with me when her son, some years ago, then in his early twenties, ‘came out’ to her as gay. Luigi had decided to ‘come out’ to her because he had begun a relationship with another
young man which was important to him. Teresa felt extremely shocked, even if not surprised, and struggled to extend herself to Luigi through her desire for his happiness and against her terror of the possible significances of this for him and for herself. Horrific and threatening images of gay sex and sexualities, and of bizarre lifestyles, cascaded through her, their strangeness threatening to annihilate her. These unspeakable images were also suffused with loss: loss of the picture to which she had clung of her son as a prospective husband and father who would produce grandchildren within a conventional nuclear family situation. Her narrative was interwoven with a number of themes, most of which were conscious: anxieties relating to what were her own, albeit disowned, fantasies of unbounded sexual expression, her terror of the unknown, and feelings of loss in relation to her imagined future. Sometimes her son became the focus, almost arbitrarily, for any of her angry feelings.
Teresa is a highly intelligent woman from an Italian working class, Catholic background who was born in England. She began therapy because she was suffering from acute anxiety. Teresa's anxiety is constantly shifting its focus and there are times when it is intensely focused particularly on her son's homosexuality. I shall explore here the particular conscious and unconscious associations which have emerged for Teresa in relation to Luigi's sexuality. Through this, I wish to raise the question as to whether this material can augment our understanding of the workings of homophobia in a more general way.
In the early part of her therapy, before her son ‘came out’ to her, Teresa often referred to her fear of God, who was constantly scrutinizing of her ‘bad thoughts’ and punitive. She is also averse to certain images of Christ, recalling a frightened curiosity in her childhood as to what might be underneath his loin-cloth. Teresa does not consciously recall being exposed to explicitly anti-homosexual teachings in the church as a child. However, she does remember her Catholic parents being vehemently anti-gay. Her scrutinizing of her own sexual thoughts and her guilt at these is also very evident.
A strong theme for Teresa is her anxiety that she has ‘caused’ her son's homosexuality. This became focused on her recollection of changing her son's nappy when he was a baby and her disquiet at seeing her son's penis erect; she began to feel that that she must have caused him
to have an erection, although she does not recall touching her son inappropriately. Although realizing intellectually that homosexuality is not ‘caused’ in the way she fantasizes, she would return to this anxiety periodically. This fantasy has generated a number of different meanings, depending on the context.
Sometimes it is associated for Teresa with her own childhood experiences of sexually abusive situations. Male sexuality is for her often (although not always) equated with abuse; sexuality between two men therefore appears doubly abusive and disgusts her. Luigi's identification with being gay, placing sex at the foreground of his identity as a man at times seems to embody this notion of abusive masculinity for her. Luigi's moustache emerged in our discussions as unconsciously symbolizing male sexuality and it becomes the focus of her anxiety and feelings of loss that her small boy is now a sexual man.
A central question is, of course, Teresa's relation to her own sexual desires. She has not had an intimate sexual relationship for over twenty-five years and her son's statement of his sexuality has brought about a crisis of her own. It is unthinkable to Teresa that she may have feelings of attraction towards her son, although she knows that she has never acted upon such a possibility. It is also difficult for her to admit any experiences of same-sex attraction she may have had. In one session when I said to her that her sexuality had been very intertwined with her experience of rejection by her husband she had surprised herself with her tears.
Some weeks later Teresa dreamt that she was enjoying having sex with a person who was half-man and half-woman. This character had male genitals and a very ugly woman's face which was, in the dream, nevertheless erotically attractive to her. I wondered whether the ugly face was an attempt to camouflage the pleasure she was feeling. In a later dream she was making love with her ex-husband. The pleasure was mutual and he was lightly commenting on a physical feature which, actually, is a feature of her own, but which she had attributed to him in the dream. I interpreted to her that perhaps the ex-husband in her dream represented her own sexuality which she was now beginning to claim.
Soon after this, more aspects of her sexuality emerged. She was able to tell me that she had found gay sex on television very erotic until Luigi had come out to her. Teresa also admitted that she felt very uncomfortable
about having been attracted to Luigi's partner. She started to feel that her sexuality was ‘all over the place’.
Teresa has found her son's camp aspects very challenging. When he showed her a photo of himself in drag, she had felt very uneasy: what would it lead to? What if he did it in public? It would be different if he were an actor. I reflected on how frightening the unknown was to her. ‘Or of what I am getting to know: first he says he is gay, then that he has a partner, then that he has a lesbian friend, then that he might give her his sperm…whatever next?’ she replied. I linked this to her childhood memories of always being on the alert and say ‘perhaps Luigi is “whatever next?’” At the end of the session she told me tentatively that, when she is with Luigi, she finds herself making camp gestures. I responded humorously, resonating with the playfulness that I felt she had now begun to allow herself: ‘you are worried about men being gay, yet here you are as a woman playing at being a camp gay man?!’
In a session soon after this Teresa told me that she had dreamt of trying to stop wild animals coming after her. When I reflected on whether these were aspects of herself, her own ‘wildness’, she told me how unbearable it had been to watch a television documentary about a woman scarred by a hysterectomy who had succeeded in becoming a belly-dancer. It felt ‘too much’. I reflected that perhaps the idea of feeling pleasure in, and a connection to, her body and her sexuality felt ‘too much’ for her. Later in the session I suggested that gay men's public identification with their sexualities felt ‘too much’ in a similar way.
It is striking that Teresa's homophobic feelings have been particularly intensified at a time when she has also been struggling with her feelings of being very neglected by her mother (who also had not been able to protect her from her abusive experiences of men). One evening, sitting in her armchair with angry thoughts towards her son, followed by thoughts about whether she had touched him inappropriately, and then a feeling of completely shutting off from him, she said to herself, ‘so, this is what my mother feels towards me’. In a dream which marked the end of her preoccupation with whether she had abused her son, she ‘saved the baby’ (her words). Taking hold of a baby which was dangling upside down with wires coming from it, connected to nothing and no-one, she had turned it upright and felt a huge relief.
Teresa's anger towards her son is often a displacement of anger towards other close friends or relatives. We have both wondered if Luigi appears to be a safer target for her feelings because of her assumption, as her son, he will always be there for her. Furthermore, Luigi's sexuality is culturally sanctioned as a scapegoat and her rage, through its displacement, feels justified.
In her exploration of themes associated with her homophobia or homophobias Teresa's experience of me in the transference shifts between various positions. She relies on me as the mother who, she hopes, can save her from being consumed by her panics and her anger in relation to her son. She has never asked me about my sexuality. This is something Teresa doesn't seem to want to know about and I think that my openness to the ambiguity of sexuality (of which I think she is aware) is crucial to her.
Can any of these reflections from Teresa's sessions contribute to an understanding of the unconscious sources or workings of homophobias? My answer to this is both yes and no. There are significant dangers in making generalizations on the basis of one individual or a small number of individuals' experiences. Quantification is not a solution to complexity. As O'Connor and Ryan point out, this tendency on the part of psychoanalysts to theorize lesbian sexuality on the basis of a small number of cases has been extremely limiting. I am neither offering a definitive explanation of homophobia nor claiming that there are inherent acultural features to homophobia, as has been claimed in classical psychoanalytic theorizing with regard to homosexuality. The value of case examples is that, like reading fiction, they can extend possibilities of thinking and raising questions about individuals' experiences and alert us to their complexities: they do not and should not claim to offer definitive and universal explanations of certain experiences.
In my presentation I have addressed a number of dominant themes: the role of religious opinion which is likely to have been absorbed by her parents and herself, the question of her ‘causing’ her son's homosexuality with the implicit assumption that his gay orientation is negative, her own, often abusive, experiences of masculine sexuality, her anxieties in the face of the ‘unknown’, the ‘whatever next?’, her fears of the possible fluidity of her own sexuality, of pleasure in, and enjoyment of it. Enfolded in her phobia or ‘condensed’ within it, to draw on Freud's
concept, are Teresa's personal experiences in relation to sexualities but these are not acultural or ahistorical. The experiences she describes are specific to her lived relationships in her class and religious background and her gender.
A neo-Foucauldian analysis allows for interpretations which do not presupppose a split between the psychic and the socio-historical and cultural. It addresses how her narrative and identity have been shaped by a number of discourses: religious (Catholic), psychoanalytic (the notion of her son's homosexuality as being ‘caused’ by his relationship with her), and those relating to gender in which masculinity is characterized as dominant, women's sexuality is deemed threatening (particularly at the time at which Teresa was growing up), and which designate heterosexual desire as natural. Foucault (1976) traces how, historically, same-sex sexuality has been deemed unnatural, sinful, and pathological. He argues that there is no body prior to history or to discourse; it is ‘produced’ by and saturated with historical forces. Power is transmitted through discourses and practices relating to sexuality, producing culturally specific identities including, for example, lesbian and gay identities whose power arises as forms of resistance to a dominant discourse. Designations of the body and of sexuality as, for example, ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’ are therefore not factual, biological distinctions; they are interpretations which arise from the dominant discourses of subjectivity of the time, whether religious, medical, pedagogic, psychoanalytic etc.
Teresa's homophobia might be conceptualized as a ‘condensation’ (to use Freud's term) of these discourses. But this is not to assume that this condensation is static or to deny the individuality of her experience. Is a neo-Foucauldian analysis sufficient for addressing Teresa's experiences in the analytical relationship or for an analysis of the operations of homophobia in more general terms?
Through her marriage of Freud's and Foucault's work Judith Butler argues for an integration of the concept (not used by Foucault) of the ‘psychic’ with his analysis of discursive practices and the operations of power. Her project concerns the question of how to theorize the subject's incorporation of social norms without assuming a pre-existent
split between internal and external realities. Butler proposes that the foreclosure of homosexual desire is foundational to heterosexuality from the beginning of life. Since the loss of a person of a similar gender whom one has loved cannot be acknowledged, it cannot be mourned, ‘“I have never loved” someone of a similar gender and “I have never lost” any such person’ (Butler 1997: 23). As Freud describes it, the inability to mourn results in melancholia. Since the foreclosure of homosexual love is ‘the condition of possibility for social existence’ (Butler 1997: p.24) heterosexuality is, Butler argues, permeated with melancholy: it is predicated on an unmourned loss. This is not the loss of an attachment that has been made and then disavowed. The form of the attachment has itself been structured through foreclosure, a ‘mourning for unlived possibilities’ (Butler 1997:139). The girl acquires her gender through the repudiation of her desire for her mother and the positioning of her as a prohibited object in a melancholic identification. The boy's gender identity heterosexually is achieved by his repudiation of the feminine: his desire for the feminine is scarred by this such that he ‘wants the woman he would never be’ (Butler 1997: 137). The more virulently he defends his ‘masculinity’ the more accentuated is his melancholy in relation to the loss of the possibility of homosexual desire. This, she argues, is inevitable where there is no public recognition of the loss which might allow it to be fully grieved. Butler does not assume that melancholia in relation to gender and sexual identifications is limited to heterosexuals; where these are rigidly established for lesbians and gay men there is also the loss of heterosexual possibilities.
Butler presents a developmental account of heterosexual subjectivity but she does not make claims for its universality. Through Foucault, her theorizing challenges reliance on ahistorical notions of drives and repression, arguing instead that sexualities are ‘produced’. However, diverging from Foucault and reinstalling the notion of the psychic, Butler attempts to explore the meaning for the subject of the prohibition against homosexuality, through Freud's theorizing of melancholia. She emphasizes that the repudiation she describes is not necessary to psychic survival and argues instead for the mobility and fluidity of identifications.
In the light of Butler's work, it is interesting that Teresa's homophobic feelings towards her son have been accentuated at a time when she
is experiencing intense feelings of neglect by her mother and fury towards her. Butler's emphasis on the melancholia derived from the inability to mourn the lost object of homosexual love might be relevant here. The homosexuality of her son might, unconsciously, remind Teresa of the homosexual love that was prohibited for her, in her early attachment to her mother. Through her fantasy of sexually touching her son she finds herself in a melancholic identification with her mother as neglectful and abusive enabling Teresa to disavow the loss. She berates herself for her son's homosexuality instead of berating her mother for the unlived possibility of her homosexual attachment to her.
In Foucauldian terms the prohibition against homosexual attachments in Teresa's case is partly constituted by her parents' Catholic discourses of homosexuality as sinful (albeit not made explicit to Teresa). In her account of the subject's subjection to the heterosexual norm Butler does not specify different forms of prohibition, such as those theorized by Foucault. However she does explicitly challenge those notions of ‘the symbolic’ (I think that she is alluding to Lacan here3) which fail to take into account the multiplicity of ways in which power operates, namely through the reiteration of norms, through demands, and as ‘formative, productive, malleable, multiple, proliferative, and conflictual’ (Butler 1997: 99).
I think that Teresa is at some level grieving the possibility or acknowledgement of lesbian attachments. She has been in a very strong and intimate, non-sexual relationship with a woman for many years and she has always preferred friendships with women to those with men. However, I think that there is a further feature of her homophobia which is crucial, namely her terror of the ‘unknown’, the chasm opened up for her by differences. This is crystallized in her terrified exclamation, ‘Whatever next?’ at seeing the photograph of her son dressed in drag. This has been a somewhat recurrent, albeit not explicit position, which permeates her narrative. In Butler's terms the ‘unknown’ for Teresa might represent a disavowal of what she wished she could have known, namely homosexual love. However, I think this interpretation does not go far enough.
Teresa's mother's anxiety and self-absorbed preoccupation with numerous phobias has been a source of terrifying insecurity for her. As a child she was also, always, on the alert for the possible death of her father owing to a chronic illness that he had. Teresa feels that neither parent (although she particularly blames her mother) was ever able to protect her from abusive, or potentially abusive, experiences with men when she was young, or support her when she was terrified. That which is ‘unknown’, unexpected, or ambiguous gives rise to intense anxiety. In her curiosity about what was underneath Christ's loin cloth she both feared and desired knowledge. It was fearful, not only because of her (religious) guilt at being interested in Christ's genitalia, but because whatever she might come to know is never complete and might be even more terrifying. The radical otherness of the Other constantly threatens her.
Levinas, a Jewish post-phenomenologist who was born in 1906 in Lithuania and lived and worked in Paris until his death in 1995, is centrally concerned in his theorizing with our relation to the Other. It is for this reason that his work has been of interest to those in cultural studies, gender studies, and lesbian and gay studies. His work constitutes a major challenge to the prioritizing of the Same over the Other which permeates Western thought.
According to Levinas, The Other is what I am not. The Other is this, not because of the Other's character, or physiognomy, or psychology, but because of the Other's very alterity' (Levinas 1947: 83). The ‘Other’ is not another ‘myself’ but is alterity itself. The Other is encountered in the irreducibility of the ‘face-to-face’ relationship. In his account of the face-to-face encounter, Levinas emphasizes that, ‘[The] face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse’ (Levinas 1961: 66). This speech is unpredictable and touches us from beyond ourselves. The Other can never be possessed or completely understood; it escapes my power. Furthermore, subjectivity does not pre-exist the relation with others, it is constituted through its openness to the Other. Our awareness of the mortality of the face of the Other demands of us a responsibility to them which does not rely on reciprocity, it is an openness to beyond being. This is an ethical position which does not rely on universal
principles; justice for Levinas is rooted in proximity, in responsibility towards one another.
For Levinas, what is intrinsic to sexual intimacy is the search for the mysterious. The caress ‘does not know what it seeks’ (Levinas 1947: 89). He challenges the idea that the relationship with the other is of fusion. Nor is it one of knowing and possessing. Intimacy is a relation to the unknown of the future.
Luigi's homosexuality, for Teresa, symbolizes the Other and it also, as a phobic object, stands in the place of the unknownness of the other. The unconscious references to her fears of the unknown are an important feature of her homophobia. It is not only that she recognizes some of ‘herself’, her prohibited homosexual desire, as an interpretation based on Butler's theorizing might conclude. What is absolutely intolerable to her also is the radical otherness of Luigi, as a man and as gay. Luigi is also now middle-class (Teresa is working-class) but this difference is not so threatening: his achievements in his studies and work are culturally sanctioned and symbolize her success as a mother. She feels a part of his achievement. His homosexuality, however, symbolizes for her his absolute alterity. Into the absence of what she can know and possess she pours her fantasies. They frighten her, they seem to distance her from him, but they simultaneously bind her son to her. His uniqueness and his alterity, however, resist her power to possess him and to absorb him into the Same and she has murderous thoughts. As Levinas says, ‘I can only wish to kill an existent which is absolutely independent, which exceeds my powers infinitely, and therefore does not oppose them but paralyses the very power of power’ (Levinas 1961:198).
The theorizing of Foucault, Butler, and Levinas all offer an important contribution to a consideration of what might constitute homophobia or homophobias. As my presentation of Teresa's work in psychotherapy highlights, her conscious and unconscious experiences of homophobia or homophobias are shaped by a number of interweaving discourses through which she has ‘lived’ her sexuality from childhood on. Teresa's associations to Luigi's homosexuality shift in relation to other unconscious concerns which emerge for her at different moments.
Enfolded into Teresa's homophobia is also a profound fear of the Other as Levinas conceptualizes it. The forms of Teresa's homophobia are unique to her but my reflections on how they are embedded within her particular socio-historical context might indicate possible directions for interpretations of what is inscribed in the various collective manifestations of homophobia.
O'Connor and Ryan both went on to become founder members of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis.
Those details of her life which might identify Teresa have been disguised in order to protect the confidential nature of the work.
See, for example, Lacan's claim that It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the function of the law' (Lacan, 1966: 67).