Sexualities

Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives

Alessandra Lemma, Paul E. Lynch, Alessandra Lemma, Paul Lynch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317501497
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Sexualities: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives presents a broad selection of contemporary psychoanalytic thinking on sexuality from a wide range of psychoanalytic traditions. Sexuality remains at the heart of much psychoanalytic theory and practice but it is a complex and controversial subject. Edited by Alessandra Lemma and Paul E. Lynch, this volume includes a range of international contributions that examine contemporary issues and trace common themes needed to understand any sexuality, including the basics of sexuality, and the myriad ways in which sexuality is lived.

The clinical examples provided here demonstrate contemporary psychoanalytic techniques that uncover meanings that are both fresh and enlightening, and address heterosexuality, homosexuality, gender, and perversion from a psychoanalytic perspective. Divided into four parts, the book includes the following:

Historical context

Foundational concepts: Contemporary elaborations

Homosexuality

Perversion revisited

Throughout Sexualities: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives the reader will find psychoanalytic wisdom that is transferrable to work with patients of all sexualities, and will see that the essentials of sexuality may be more similar than they are different for homo- and hetero-sexuality. Psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists, as well as academics interested in the subjects of psychoanalysis, gender, sexuality, or homosexuality will find this book an invaluable resource.

Alessandra Lemma, PhD is Director of the Psychological Therapies Development Unit at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. She is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society and Visiting Professor in the Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London. She is a Consultant Adult Psychotherapist at the Portman Clinic where she specializes in working with transsexuals. She has published extensively on psychoanalysis, the body and trauma.

Paul E. Lynch, MD is on the faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, and the China American Psychoanalytic Alliance. He teaches about psychoanalysis, gender, and sexuality, and has been a popular speaker on issues of homosexuality and psychoanalysis. He is also a Clinical Instructor of Psychiatry at the Tufts University School of Medicine.

Part IHistorical context

1 What happened to psychoanalysis in the wake of the sexual revolution? A story about the durability of homophobia and the dream of love, 1950s–2010s

Dagmar Herzog

DOI: 10.4324/9781315714608-1

For me, the offense that we who engage in public talk regarding sexuality commit is to hold up images of the self and of the ‘normal’ that alienate people from their experience of themselves. For example, there is the prevalent view that mature and healthy, in addition to heterosexual, sex must be deeply imbued with sentiments of love. That may sound very attractive, but I don’t think that describes very many people’s experience.

(Sociologist and Sexual Conduct co-author William Simon in a 1999 interview)

This is a story about the intertwined histories of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, sexology, and cultural change. It is a story about the perplexingly stubborn hold of homophobia on the profession of psychoanalysis in the post-World War II era. It is also a story about the more subtly egregious and harder to see mis-uses of the dream of love. For the relationships between sex and love – their connections and disconnections – are not obvious, and never have been. People on both sides of the couch know this in their hearts. But as it happens, psychoanalytic literature was rather more frank about the complexities of desire in the first decades of the movement than it would be in the conditions of diaspora after Freud’s death. And the disavowal of desire’s complexities was even more powerful in the postwar U.S. than it would be in postwar Europe – precisely in the two decades when the prestige of psychoanalysis in American medicine and culture made its dramatic ascent.

Inventing the love doctrine, 1948–1968

The first major paradigm shift in postwar U.S. psychoanalytic thinking about sex would emerge in direct reaction to – indeed against – Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, published in 1948 and 1953, were widely read and discussed in the U.S. media. Instantly, they were understood full well, by the public and journalists alike, as an endorsement, in the guise of scientific empiricism, of a greater ‘democratic pluralism of sexuality’ – as the psychoanalytically inclined literary critic Lionel Trilling put it at the time, evincing considerable distaste and discomfort at the idea (Trilling, 1948: 475). Through their statistics alone, the Reports constituted a frontal attack on the idea of constricting sex to monogamous heterosexual marriage. But they did more than that. They took ordinary people’s experiences seriously. As the reviewer in The Nation noted, until the first Report, ‘only two organized groups have been entitled to talk about sex – the churches and the psychoanalysts.’ Alfred Kinsey made it possible for everyone to talk. No wonder, then, that ‘clergymen and psychoanalysts are among the most militant enemies of the report’ (Gumpert, 1948: 471). Among other things, Kinsey asserted that there was no difference between men and women in their capacity for orgasm, or for marital infidelity, or for sexual interest in general. And he actively advanced the view that homosexuality was a natural variant of human sexuality – and indeed a remarkably prevalent one.

What had changed in the half-century since Sigmund Freud had first weighed in on the topics of sexual desire, aims, and objects? Freud’s work was full of contradictory impulses and recurrent self-revisions, but he was unquestionably more open and curious about the intricacies of desire than many of the psychoanalysts who followed in his wake. On the one hand, there were in Freud’s published work the normative assumptions that what he called ‘a normal sexual life’ required: making an object choice external to the self; connecting the drive for pleasure to reproductive aims; fusing component instincts and putting any remaining partial (polymorphous, oral, anal) drives into the service of genital primacy (S. Freud, 1962: 73). On the other hand, there were also repeated declarations that: homosexuals were not necessarily any more mentally unstable than heterosexuals; homosexuals could in fact serve as analysts themselves; and there was as little prospect of converting homosexuals to heterosexuality as the reverse. Moreover, and emphatically, Freud declared (in a 1915 footnote added to his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality): ‘Psycho-analytic research is most decidedly opposed to any attempt at separating off homosexuals from the rest of mankind as a group of a special character’ (S. Freud, 1962: 11). ¹

In the decades between Freud and Kinsey, however, the psychoanalytic community tended increasingly towards more negative assessments of homosexuality – even as, in the early movement, there was still a lively mix of opinions and theories (in the midst, significantly, of an ongoing effort to profile psychoanalysis in relationship to other then-emerging sexological propositions). The Hungarian analyst Sándor Ferenczi, for instance, a close collaborator of Freud’s, veered between: earnest confession of ‘the homosexual impulses’ in himself (Ferenczi, 1914: 39) as well as ‘the homosexual component that is hidden in everyone’ (Ferenczi, 1952: 43); amused, cheeky descriptions of how well a particular man he knew was managing his own homosexuality – despite being married to a woman (Ferenczi, 1926: 250); and a smorgasbord of side remarks in case studies of patients, ranging from one homosexual patient’s ‘indissoluble fixation on his mother’ (Ferenczi, 1934: 5) to another patient’s ‘far-going homosexual bondages’ (Ferenczi, 1949: 233). Most consequential for the future, however, was Ferenczi’s attempt to distinguish conceptually between different types of male homosexual interest. Reacting, in a talk given in 1911 and published in 1914, to the well-known German homosexual rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld’s theories of a ‘third’ or ‘intermediate sex,’ Ferenczi advanced the notion that one should distinguish between what he called ‘subject-homo-erotism’ (evinced by a more feminine man, i.e. by someone inverted in his own gender role and thus an exemplar of Hirschfeld’s ‘intermediate sex’ – these types Ferenczi thought were not convertible to heterosexuality) and ‘object-homo-erotism’ (as exemplified by more masculine-appearing men who nonetheless desired other men – these types Ferenczi deemed to be suffering from ‘obsessional neurosis,’ and he asserted that they could in fact be converted and could learn to desire women (Ferenczi, 1952: 300, 303)).

Along related lines, in the early work of Helene Deutsch, there was a stark vacillation between, on the one hand, a genuine, at times intrusive-voyeuristic and at other times almost envious, concern with investigating the sexual practices of lesbians and, on the other, the eager attempt to develop further Freud’s reflections on lesbian object-choice – above all by shifting theoretical interest to the pre-Oedipal stage of the mother–child relationship (Deutsch, 1932). In Karen Horney’s often impressive feminist critiques of Freud’s theories of sexuality, as well as in her eventual skepticism of the validity of libido theory in general, there was at least ambivalence about the status of same-sex desire (Horney, 1924: 60–61; Horney, 1939: 80–81). Strikingly, Horney’s occasional negative comments about homosexual men were accompanied by negative assertions about most heterosexual men as well (Horney, 1932: 352). But already in Melanie Klein’s drive-centered, pre- (or early) Oedipally- focused work with children, and in Marie Bonaparte’s studies of incest and of children’s sexual play with each other, there were inserted strongly negative assertions about the pathology of homosexuality (Klein, 1932: 46, 78; Bonaparte, 1953: 130–131). So too, in Ronald Fairbairn’s writings, and in the midst of his innovative larger project of deeroticizing the concept of libido and promoting the importance of object relations, there was explicit annoyance at so many male homosexuals’ refusal to see themselves as disturbed and disinterest in changing their orientation; in a 1946 essay Fairbairn described homosexuality with clear distaste as ‘the natural sexual expression of a personality which has become perverse in its essential structure’ (Fairbairn, 1952: 291–293; Royston, 2001: 43). In the more ego- and defense-oriented work of Sigmund Freud’s daughter Anna, there was the proud pronouncement, as of 1949, that while her father had not believed in the possibility of conversion of orientation, she, Anna, could report excellent success in this area with a number of male homosexuals. Basing herself expressly on Ferenczi’s distinctions between ‘subject-’ and ‘object-homo-erotism,’ Anna Freud insisted that the most important things to look at in the attempt to arrive at accurate diagnoses and treatment approaches were not men’s behaviors but rather their fantasies (especially with regard to their identifications as either passive or active – or, in alternation, both – in the midst of the sexual act). Therapeutic success in ‘divert[ing] their libido from one sex to the other’ would emerge from the analyst’s interpretations of these oscillating identifications (A. Freud, 1949: 195; Waldhorn, 1951: 337).

By the post-World War II era, the dramatically rapid spread of psychoanalytic ideas into the American mainstream via the mass media and popular advice books was marked by an ever more firmly consolidated consensus among analysts that homosexuality was by definition abnormal. From Chicago to New York and from Boston to Topeka and back to Baltimore, and despite ongoing vigorous conflicts in views with regard to psychoanalytic theory and technique more generally, there was remarkable agreement that homosexuals were disturbed and needed to be cured – i.e. that they were, in fact, the separate category of person that Sigmund Freud had insisted they were not. Whether in the ‘neo-Freudian’ trend first inspired by the writings of Franz Alexander and then developed further by both Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan (the latter of whom, although homosexual himself, publicly made homophobic pronouncements) or among the ‘ego psychologists’ around Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, and Grete and Edward Bibring (all of whom worked closely together with Anna Freud), whether in the group around Sándor Radó (whose antihomosexual ideas were built on his vehement objections to Sigmund Freud’s foundational concept of bisexuality) or in the work of the eminent non-émigré psychoanalyst and explicitly Christian ‘dean’ of American psychiatry Karl Menninger – not to mention in the subsequent psychoanalytic projects of Robert Bak and Phyllis Greenacre on perversions and fetishes – the psychoanalytic community in the U.S. generated a welter of uninterrogated assumptions and declarative assertions that would shape the conversation about same-sex desire for decades to come. ²

The incoherence of the claims about the patheticness and/or pathology of homosexuality was as palpable as was the imposing confidence with which those assertions were delivered. Male homosexuality was seen as a way of attempting to avoid castration by the father – or as a way to unite with the father. It signaled an overidentification with a seductive or domineering mother – or it was a sign of a profound fear of the female genitals. It functioned as a hapless way to repair one’s sense of inadequacy as a male – or it was a powerful sexual compulsion that required better control. The prolific, popular New York-based analyst Edmund Bergler wrote with authority: ‘Homosexuals are essentially disagreeable people . . . [displaying] a mixture of superciliousness, fake aggression, and whimpering . . . subservient when confronted with a stronger person, merciless when in power . . . You seldom find an intact ego . . . among them’ (Bergler, 1956: 28–29). Psychoanalysts were not quite as obsessed with lesbianism, but comparably confused things would be said about it as well. Was the same-sex-desiring woman identifying with an emotionally withholding Oedipal father or defending herself against her (frustrated) desire for that father? Were lesbians stuck in a still all-too-masculine ‘clitoridal’ phase – or did they have castrating impulses toward their own sons? Or were they above all striving for a return to the undifferentiated mother–child fusion of infancy?

It is difficult in hindsight to assess how much the hostility to homosexuality was driven by the lasting sense, inherited from Freud, that homosexual impulses, however well hidden, existed in every individual, including within the analysts themselves, and how much the animus was driven by the effort to make psychoanalysis acceptable to mainstream, Main Street America. This was, it bears remembering, a culture which was by no means free of anti-Semitism. And although there were certainly also gentile, native-born analysts, it was not irrelevant that this was a culture still strongly skeptical of the European-accented, often left-leaning and oddb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: let’s talk about sex or … maybe not …
• PART I Historical context
• PART II Foundational concepts: contemporary elaborations
• PART III Homosexuality
• PART IV Perversion revisited
• Index