Homophobia's Durability and the Reinvention of Psychoanalysis

"To put it another way: psychoanalysis's own conflicted relationship to sex explains a great deal both about its fortunes and about the ever-evolving contents of its most cherished concepts. This would become especially evident in the course of the 1970s, as psychoanalysts engaged in an extended debate over whether their patients - or indeed human beings more generally - could best be understood through the framework of Oedipal conflicts or rather were beset by pre-Oedipal problems, including borderline and narcissistic character disorders" (57)"In general, Freud's conviction about the constitutive bisexuality of all human beings meant that homoeroticism was a possibility within everyone. And in Freud's subsequently published correspondence, it was also evident how often Freud struggled with what he in his own words called an "unruly homosexual feeling" in himself, even as the yearning for the men for whom this feeling in him stirred (from Wilhelm Fliess and Sandor Ferenczi to Carl Jung and Ernest Jones) was not so much a frankly physical one as rather an intensive longing for emotional intimacy and, not least, a yearning that they might express obedience to him as the revered patriarch" (59)"In other words, Ferenczi was both attuned to fluidity in desire and in gender identification and, however contradictorily, also sorted individuals into categories and then sought to use the fact of fluidity to encourage those he thought capable of changing their orientation to do so" (60)"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" (63)"Highly ironic, moreover, was the fact that nobody knew better than psychoanalysts themselves just what a wide variety of behaviors and feelings existed among the supposedly so ideal heterosexuals" (67)"Masters and Johnson problematized orgasms themselves - men's and women's. And one innovation Masters and Johnson insisted on was the importance of treating the couple as the patient, not the individual who manifested the symptom" (68)"A second innovation was their insistence on the anatomical, on physiological functioning rather than psychological dynamics" (68)"Masters and Johnson by contrast promoted the idea, incidentally already advanced by Kinsey, but now backed by the "hard science" of their own inside-the-body empirical studies, that all female orgasms were triggered by clitoral excitation, even if some women experienced them as localized in the vagina or in the entire genital area - or all over the body. And they offered behaviorist therapy that emphasized caressing, communication, and relief from performance pressure - especially for men" (68)"The normalization of desire that had been one of the major agendas of the postwar American psychoanalytic community was in trouble. Freud's original conviction that human beings were driven by libidnal urges which were the repressed by society - the idea that, however ambivalently, had been reasserted in the shunting-aside of the neo-Freudians, even as it had been suplemented by additional encomiums to ego strength and the individuals' capacity to master those urges - would inevitably be eroded in the face of a society filled with frank sexual stimuli and incitements" (70)"Spitzer became interested in hearing from experst who could assert that homosexuality should simply be thought of as a "common behavior variant," that homosexuals fell "within the normal range of psychological functioning," that many homosexuals coped just fine in their daily lives and that many were perfectly satisfied with their orientation and not interested in being converted. Studies conducted in the 1950s by psychologist Evelyn Hooker, which had demonstrated psychiatric experts' inability to detect any difference between homosexual and heterosexual men with respect to their "mental adjustment," became newly crucial evidence in this context" (72)"Importantly, the narcissism problem under discussion was not understood in the quotidian sense as meaning self-involvement, vanity, and the advancement of self-interest, but rather, on the contrary, the sign of a profound deficiency in self-love" (74)"the major lighting-rod figure in the conflicts of the 1970s was the Chicago analyst and developer of self psychology Heinz Kohut" (74)"The shift to pre-Oedipal issues needs also to be understood in the context of a reaction both to the declining significance of analysis within American psychiatry and to the feminist and gay challenges. Psychoanalysis had to reinvent itself" (74)"Rather than letting go of homophobia, its contents morphed" (75)"Stoller noted that "there is no such thing as homosexuality" and thus there were in any event no grounds for having a diagnosis for it in the DSM. However, if diagnoses there must be, he said - reminding his listeners that there were after all many "variants of overt heterosexuality, e.g. compulsive promiscuity, use of pornography, preference for prostitutes, adult masturbation," then indeed "we can all be given a diagnosis"" (78)"Stoller emphasized the key point that what was erotic for one person was utterly nonerotic for another. While Masters and Johnson had researched arousal anatomically, Stoller was interested in how excitement worked emotionally. He was interested in fantasies - both conscious and unconscious - and how in every individual (but always differently from how it worked in everyone else) there was an intricate calibration of safety and riskiness, scripted storylines and fetishistic image scraps (with their convoluted combination of dehumanizing abstraction and rehumanizing concreteness) that maximized sexual excitement for that person" (78-79)"Stoller began to develop a theory that the point of all fantasies was "to undo frustration, trauma, and intra-psychic conflict" - and that there was often a theme (however well hidden) of desire for revenge for past humiliations" (79)"In Stoller's view, painful experiences were at the root of all perversions - but almost everyone was a pervert in some way" (79)"In Stoller's view, painful experiences were at the root of all perversions - but almost everyone was a pervert in some way" (79)"The old Freudian assumption that many problems in life that seemed nonsexual had their (hidden) roots in sexual desire or conflictedness could be turned on its head; the idea now was to take note of how much that was originally nonsexual was being brought into every sexual encounter. This was a major conceptual shift. The idea, in short, was to shift from drive to drama" (80)"In fact, Stoller concluded with a flourish, "How many happy heterosexuals do you know? How many of them are untainted by archaiac and primitive narcissistic cathexes?"" (81)"Another favorite Stoller tactic was the list that delibately mixed the usual with the all-too-common in such a way that non one could avoid feeling called out and put on the spot" (81)"In sum Stoller was positioning himself in resistance to three prior movements. For one thing, he diverged from the rise of the biomedical model of psychicatry promoted by Robert Spizter's DSM-III by maintaining a commitment to psychoanalysis as a practice and emotions as a focus. Second, he resisted the ongoing misogny and homophobia still prealent among his fellow psychoanalysis - and, more generally, he pointed out how many similarities could be founda cross the gay-straight divide. (For instance, Stoller noted how many heterosexual men apparently had had closely binding mothers and distant fathers.) And third, he repudiated the love doctrine originally developed by analysis in reaction against Kinsey" (81-82)"the sociologist and psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow published her influential essay "Heterosexuality as a Compromise Formation." Building on her prior feminist work while also drawing extensively on both Stoller and Lewes, Chodorow brilliantly called for treating heterosexuality as just as problematic as homosexuality had been thought to be, and insisted on the importance of pluralizing homosexualities and heterosexualities alike" (83-84)"Sex, also specifically anonymous sex, he argued, could after all serve as a life-affirming strategy for warding off despair - and, in Lewes' view, it was by no means compatible with social responsibility or sound psychological functioning. The preoccupation with relationships, he maintained, deprives individuals of all sexual orientations and preferences of a deeper and more honest understanding of the ways sexual desire and pleasure - or, as Lewes has put it, "the intensity of our sexual lives and imaginations" - need not only be sutured to the couple form, but can also serve as significant strategies of life-affirming resistance to - again in Lewes' words - "social conformity ... homogenization, and mediocrity"" (85)"But in his 2005 essay Lewes was adamant in his concern that the ascent of the relational schools' insistence on "yearnings for attachment and affiliation" as humans' primary motivation could only be damaging to patients who did not fit the normative mold and that, indeed, it should be seen as part of the much longer analytic tradition of flight from and discomfort with sex" (85)"In Lewes's phrasing: "The discourse on homosexuality from the Second World War until the 1980s was a neurotic symptom that was maintained with an amount of energy entirely disproportionate to its importance, which served to discharge disowned sexual and sadistic impulses. It helped bolster the fragile self-esteem and cultural identity of psychoanalysts; and it was maintained irrationally in the face of experience and obvious historical fact." Moreover, and pointedly: "Psychoanalysis would have plenty to say about such an aberration if it concerned a patient"" (85-86)