Herzog traced the history of the psychoanalytic community’s relationship to homosexuality in chapter two. The psychoanlytic community was particularly threatened by the implications of Kinsey’s research on human sexuality and homosexuality, as it undermined the theories of psychoanalysis. Ultimately, Herzog argues that sex has been so central to pyschoanlysis. Therefore changing conceptions of sexuality has challenged the field. The work of Freud and his emphasis on sex, has both hurt and helped the political realities of psychoanlysis. Here were useful quotes for understanding the text: 56 - “One of the many mysteries surrounding the broad popular success of psychoanalysis in the United States in the first two postwar decades involves the fierce persistence with which analysts insisted on denigrating homosexuality, especially male homosexuality, and the passion they poured into explicating a particular version of femininity – one they insisted must involve sexual responsiveness to men, but on very specifically circumscribed terms. “ 57 - “ To put it another way: psychoanalysis’ own conflicted relationship to sex explains a great deal both about its fortunes and about the ever-evolving contents of its most cherished concepts. “
- “Beginning already in the midst of the battles over the proper relationship between psychoanalysis and religion, an additional subtle paradigm shift in postwar US psychoanalytic thinking about sex evolved in direct reaction to – indeed against – Alfred Kinsey.”
84 - “To state the point another way: each and every notion in the Freudian and post-Freudian edifice (from drive to object, from trauma to transference, from ego to unconscious) can be, and has been, used both for malicious and for generous purposes. Nowhere would this become more clear than when also nonsexual political realities pushed their way back into psychoanalytic discussions.” Questions: Why is sex so central to psychoanlysis, instead of other bodily processes? What does that say about the relationship of the body to understanding the mind? What about non-material things, such as other conceptualizations of consciousness outside the body?