2 - Psychoanalysis, homosexuality and modernism

Summary

“Was I ill? Have I recovered? Has my doctor been discovered?” Nietzsche / Psychoanalysis has often been seen as complicit in dominant social constructions and constrictions of homosexuality, and there is certainly some evidence for this in the classic psychoanalytic texts, from the early works of Freud onwards. Certain parts of the psychoanalytic institution in some historical periods have been particularly wedded to such social orthodoxies, the post-war American school for instance; and even today, theories and practices of psychoanalysis at large are not entirely free of homophobic positions. As a whole, across its historical and geographical range, psychoanalysis has achieved rather ambivalent forms of recognition for gay and lesbian sexualities. As in its work on gender, in the field of sexuality orthodox psychoanalysis at once affords certain forms of emancipation for alternative models and retains an attachment to the conventions of the patriarchal culture that such models would challenge. From the outset, psychoanalysis dared to speak the name of homosexuality, at a time when it was, often violently, unspeakable. Yet the psychoanalytic modelling of gay sexuality, derived from that which it constructs for gender, imposes discursive constraints of its own. Freudian psychoanalysis makes homosexuality speak its name in ways that are coloured by the suppositions of its broader project and constrained by those of the culture out of which it emerges.