Elizabeth L Auchincloss & Susan C Vaughan. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Volume 49, Issue 4. August 2001.
In 1991 the American Psychoanalytic Association, after months of debate, adopted by an overwhelming majority an explicit policy of nondiscrimination with regard to sexual orientation in the selection of psychoanalytic candidates. In 1992 this policy was extended to cover the appointment of psychoanalytic faculty and their advancement to training analyst. By 1996, Marvin Margolis, then president of the association, had asserted in both The American Psychoanalyst and the New York Times that any claims made by psychoanalysts about the link between psychopathology and homosexuality were “incorrect” (Roughton and Margolis 1996). In the first half of the 1990s, mainstream American psychoanalysis, having begun the process of disentangling itself from the political consequences of a misused theory of mental life and alive with the feeling of possibility that accompanies such change, ventured with great excitement into what seemed to be new territory. In the second half of the decade, this sense of newness has been everywhere. Indeed the very word new has become closely associated with psychoanalytic thinking about homosexuality, as evinced in the wide array of panels, symposia, conferences, and papers that promise something new, including the discussion group of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Committee on Issues of Homosexuality, called “New Perspectives on Homosexuality across the Lifespan.”
What has been the yield of this search for novelty? We argue here that while taking a new perspective on homosexuality has been helpful, the search for a new theory of homosexuality is misguided. In our opinion, a new psychoanalytic theory of homosexuality is not needed; certainly we should not expect to generate such a theory using psychoanalytic methodology alone. Further, the preoccupation with the search for such a theory leads to an avoidance of the more important questions raised by an examination of the long relationship between psychoanalysis and the phenomenon of predominantly same-gender sexual orientation. Too much of the excited demand during the past decade for a new psychoanalytic theory of homosexuality is in fact for an improved view of the object of scrutiny, which continues to place psychoanalysis outside and above homosexuality. We suggest that instead of searching for a new theory, we consider not what psychoanalysis can help us understand about homosexuality but what our long encounter with homosexuality can help us understand about psychoanalysis—in short, about ourselves.
Over the last half century, American psychoanalysis has been engaged in a process of intense self-examination with regard to its basic identity. In the 1950s, developments in the philosophy of science forced a reexamination of both the methodology and the database of psychoanalysis (Hook 1959). The viewpoint on psychoanalytic theory taken by hermeneutic philosophers during this period also contributed to a demand that we be more precise about the epistemological status of psychoanalytic propositions (Ricoeur 1986). As Freud himself asserted, however, the most profound change results not from philosophical reflection but from encounters with reality or, more to the point, from encounters with failure. Significant failures in the history of psychoanalysis include its theories of severe mental illness, of female psychology, and of homosexuality. These failures are of special importance because of their harmful effects on patients, their damaging effects on our reputation in the medical, mental health, and intellectual communities, and their unsettling effects on our intellectual and moral selfconfidence.
During the 1960s, the revolution in biomedical psychiatry brought with it a new understanding of schizophrenia and major affective illness that challenged the omnipotence of the psychoanalytic concept of motivational determinism and heralded the end of psychoanalytic hegemony in American psychiatry (Willick 1990). Failure to deal with the limitations of the theory and practice of psychoanalysis left us open to charges of malpractice (Klerman 1990). During the 1970s, the women’s movement mounted a successful challenge to the reigning analytic idea that the essence of femininity lies in feelings of disappointment and damage, a challenge that resulted in major theoretical revisions in the analytic understanding of female psychology. With regard to the subject of homosexuality, the overwhelmingly dominant force for reexamination of our theories has been political action (Bayer 1981). Moreover, it is only in the case of homosexuality that we have used theory to justify discriminatory policy within the profession, denying psychoanalytic training to many qualified homosexual individuals who might have been our colleagues.
Careful study of the encounter between psychoanalysis and homosexuality highlights difficulties in psychoanalytic theory that must be examined if we are to restore the process of discovery unique to the psychoanalytic method. In particular, the encounter reveals complexities, ambiguities, and dangers inherent in the psychoanalytic approach to the problems of category and causation, the inescapable questions of what and why. It is ironic that it was in dialogue with the mysterious anomaly of homosexuality (or “inversion”) that Freud arrived at a process of discovery that in large measure operates through the capacity to tolerate a repeated undoing of certainty with regard to the arrangement of categories and causes as they appear in mental life (Freud 1905). Somewhere along the way in our relationship to homosexuality, we lost this capacity to tolerate uncertainty and to challenge established categories and causes. Our theories became dogma to be defended, no longer useful for exploration in the clinical situation. Along the way, our capacity for self-examination was also lost, ultimately forcing us into a political arena where self-reflection could be recaptured only through confrontation with an “other” we had once again marginalized, and forcing us to repeat a painful version of Freud’s original process of discovery.
The Problem of Categories
The first problem in psychoanalytic theory that is thrown into relief by the relationship between theory building and homosexuality is the problem of categories. It is difficult to imagine a new psychoanalytic theory of homosexuality that does not begin with an attempt to establish a category that defines what homosexuality is. We question, however, whether the establishment of such a category is a psychoanalytic task. Grossman and Kaplan (1988), in their landmark paper “Three Commentaries on Gender in Freud’s Thought: A Prologue to the Psychoanalytic Theory of Sexuality,” address the problem of categories in psychoanalysis in their discussion of what they call the “commentary of traits.” By a commentary of traits, Grossman and Kaplan mean any psychoanalytic account of what a certain type of person is like. In such accounts, the types must be defined and their associated traits delineated. The authors examine in particular the commentary of traits that attempts to answer the question “What are women like?” Grossman and Kaplan argue that propositions that attempt to answer such questions as these are not psychoanalytic in form; rather, the constellation of traits describing women that is found in Freud’s work (and by implication the work of others) derives not from psychoanalytic methodology but from nineteenth-century sexology, social convention, infantile fantasy, and personal opinion. Grossman and Kaplan remind us that psychoanalysts should not confuse their role with that of sociologists or social psychologists, but should examine traits for the part they play in individual motive and purpose, as well as in the psychoanalytic dialogue. They argue that constellations of traits cannot be derived from psychoanalytic methodology but should be subject to it. We see Grossman and Kaplan’s discussion of the commentary of traits in the psychology of women as a response to the fact that in psychoanalytic theory the delineation of categories is inherently problematic.
What Is a Homosexual?
The delineation of categories has been an important problem in psychoanalytic theory as it relates to homosexuality. Indeed, it is common to find in mainstream psychoanalytic literature assertions such as the following: a twenty-seven-year-old female patient with a history of a “lesbian” affair, as well as of sexual/romantic relationships with men, should not be understood to be bisexual because “as we further explored her sexual aims, it seems that genital sexual urges were directed to men [whereas] … many pregenital sensual urges were felt toward women [such as] … hugging, stroking, and kissing” (Tyson 1994, p. 454). This assertion is fundamentally about categories with criteria for inclusion that are evident though not explicit and whose basis is entirely unexamined. Other psychoanalytic thinkers have developed more explicit and perhaps more politically correct but no less problematic categories. For example, Isay (1989) has asserted that he can determine, based on predominant patterns of erotic fantasy, whether a patient belongs to the category of homosexual or heterosexual.
Yet, even as we have attempted to delineate various categories or types of sexuality, psychoanalysis has produced such categorydefying concepts as “latent homosexuality,” “pseudohomosexuality” and “universal bisexuality.” Indeed, contemporary gay-affirmative critics have criticized psychoanalysis for using its theory of unconscious meaning to destroy the category of homosexuality altogether by attributing all homosexual thoughts and feelings to defensive avoidance of heterosexuality through cross-gender identification rather than viewing them as primary or essential (Dominici 1995; 0’Connor and Ryan 1995). The problem of delineating categories has been examined also by Morgenthaler (1984), who asserts that psychoanalysts must remember that “there is, in fact, no such thing as hetero-, homo-, or bisexuality. There is only sexuality, which … ultimately finds a specific form of expression for each individual” (pp. 103-104). Finally, more radical critics of the psychoanalytic theory of sexuality, such as Butler (1990), follow Foucault’s extreme antiessentialist position in questioning whether the three categories of sexual orientation (homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual) represent anything fundamental, stable, or ineluctable even in individual cases. These authors criticize “gay affirmative” writers such as Isay (1989) and Lewes (1995) for falsely normalizing “same-sex desire or any other psychoerotic system by declaring it a naturally stable form, [or] a sexual ‘identity’” (Schwartz 1995, p. 121).
The challenge presented by the mesmerizing ambiguities of sexuality highlights the difficulty faced by psychoanalytic theorists in charting a course between an extreme antiessentialism that imagines an endlessly pluripotential psyche, unconstrained by any categorical givens, and an excessive certainty that we know what is what. In response to this problem of delineating categories, Robert May (1995) has written an elegant essay, “Re-reading Freud on Homosexuality,” in which he elucidates through a close reading of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality “one of the fascinating tensions in Freud’s writing”; this “involves on the one hand a host of implicit and taken-for-granted categories, deployed with a tone of certainty and knowing, but on the other hand the repeated invention of concepts which turn out to be deeply subversive of those very same categories” (p. 158). May argues that more important for psychoanalytic thinking than “any particular content or set of categories” is to observe Freud “modeling a method for us when his urge to label is repeatedly undone by a subversive curiosity and a wish to violate common understanding by turning things on their head” (p. 164). He concludes by arguing for “the endless undoing of certainty” as the most powerful heuristic emerging from the psychoanalytic viewpoint: “The psychoanalytic method constructs a space characterized by the posing and then merging of opposites, by the endless undoing of certainty. It is psychoanalysis’s commitment to self-dissolving categories that saves it from the constant temptation simply to replace one set of inevitably moralistic labels with another, and that makes it a theory that can enliven the study of all sexualities” (p. 164).
Homosexuality, Normality, and the “Psychopathology of Conformity”
Another category that has given psychoanalysis difficulty with regard to homosexuality is the category of normality. In much of the psychoanalytic literature, homosexuality has with a disastrous ease been linked with psychopathology, the equation between the two falsely presented as deriving from psychoanalytic methodology. A highly problematic commentary of traits runs throughout the psychoanalytic literature on homosexuality in the form of an attempt to answer the question “What are normal people like?” accompanied by the answer “Normal people are heterosexual.” Even when reluctant to assert that homosexuality is itself pathological, many analysts have confused their task with that of epidemiologists or sociologists by asserting, based on clinical experience alone, that homosexuality is associated with psychopathology. Michels (1984) has argued that the question “What is normal?” is not a psychoanalytic question. From this point of view, “new” theories offered by gay-affirmative analysts that include assertions about homosexuality based on psychoanalytic methodology alone, such as those made by Isay and others, are equally non-psychoanalytic. In the same vein, Roughton and Margolis’s assertion, cited above, that the link between homosexuality and psychopathology is “incorrect,” must be understood to be supported by epidemiological rather than psychoanalytic data. Grossman and Kaplan argue that when either analyst or patient presents gender stereotypes or, by extension of their argument, any other example of trait commentary as an adequate explanation for a behavior or an attitude (for example, the statement “This is the way women—or men, or homosexuals, or normal people—are!”), this event should provoke a psychoanalytic investigation of a “psychopathology of conformity” (p. 353). In other words, we must wonder why the patient or the analyst, or the theorist, for that matter, accepts a conventional psychology of traits and categories as an adequate and final description of the “world as it is.” Paradoxically, as noted above, Freud (1905) was in this very frame of mind when he began his revolutionary inquiry, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, by focusing on the phenomenon of “inversion” as an example of the unstable relationship between sexual drive and object. Freud’s 1905 text of this essay offers just such a “psychopathology of conformity” in his exposition of the arbitrary, culturally determined nature of what is considered “perverse.” Later developments in Freud’s views of homosexuality, fueled by his excitement over what he felt his new theories could explain, served to hide much of this original and more radical commentary and led directly to later problems. While Freud himself did not consider homosexuality to be an illness, homosexuality and psychopathology became tightly linked in the psychoanalytic literature for the better part of this century, separating us from the possibility of a “psychopathology of conformity” envisioned by Grossman and Kaplan and implicit in Freud’s first encounter with “inversion.” In recent years, success in disentangling ourselves from the association between homosexuality and psychopathology has had important consequences for psychoanalytic work with all patients. For example, we have been able to consider the possibility that exploration of “homophobia” can be an important part of all analyses (Moss 1997) and to consider analyzing what Ferenczi (1914) was the first to describe as “compulsive heterosexuality.”
Categories and the Psychopathology of Conformity in Clinical Work
The subject matter of homosexuality often presents itself in the clinical situation in ways that make it difficult for the analyst to maintain a psychoanalytic stance toward the problem of categories. Consider the case of a Ms. A., a thirty-five-year-old advertising executive who sought treatment with the explicit wish to learn the nature of her “true” sexual identity. Ms. A. could not decide whether to marry B., a male family friend she had been dating for years, or to deepen her exploration of a lifelong attraction to women. Ms. A. reported that while her sexual fantasies were often about penetration, “with a penis, I guess,” she had never felt sexually or emotionally attracted to “real- life men themselves.” She claimed that she sought marriage with B. only because it was the “conventional” choice and she considered herself a “conventional person.” By contrast, with women Ms. A. had felt romantic attraction, longings for intimacy, and sexual arousal for as long as she could remember. She had many lesbian friends and had had a two-year secret sexual relationship with one of them that had faded into friendship in the face of Ms. A.’s inability to deepen the relationship. She was terrified of the thought of acknowledging an attraction to women to her parents, their friends, or her co-workers. Above all, Ms. A. feared that her “style-conscious suburban mother” would never accept her if she were gay. She also feared, however, that if she chose heterosexual marriage she would be abandoning her “truest” self. One option she considered was a “split life” combining heterosexual marriage with a homosexual lover. Ms. A. felt paralyzed. She felt that if she could learn where her “real sexual and romantic interests lie,” it would help her make a decision. She wondered if her interest in women might not be the result of fears of being close to a man, as she had heard that homosexuality could be caused by such fears. At the same time, she felt that she had no real psychological problems. She insisted that were it not for the opprobrium of society, nothing would prevent her from seeking a long-term sexual and loving relationship with a woman.
The first question I (ELA) asked myself was “What was Ms. A.’s ‘true’ sexual orientation? Was she heterosexual or homosexual?” This was followed by a flurry of hypotheses and explanations placing Ms. A. in one category or the other. As I analyzed my speculations, I realized that I was responding to Ms. A.’s expectation that it was my job to inform her of her correct sexual orientation; she made insistent demands that I do so. It was in the face of considerable temptation to find a way to identify Ms. A.’s true sexuality that I forced myself to pose some psychoanalytic questions: Why did Ms. A. not “know” the nature of her own sexuality, and why did she come asking that I provide this “knowledge” for her? What prevented her from attempting to answer her own question, and what was the relation between her “not knowing” and her feeling of paralysis? Was she unable to choose because she did not know, or did she not “know” because the choices that might follow frightened her?
Ms. A. described herself as having difficulty making choices in all areas of her life and as strongly influenced by the opinion of others. Her ambivalent attachment to external norms was connected to her difficulties becoming more deeply involved in aspects of her life unrelated to sexuality. Despite what appeared to be a passionate temperament, Ms. A. was only superficially interested in her chosen career and was unable to commit herself deeply to any project lest she feel trapped and controlled. Indeed, she made it clear that it would be impossible for her to come to treatment more than once a week because she lacked both the money and the time. In this instance, constraints experienced by her as imposed by the external world had the direct effect of limiting her capacity for involvement and self-knowledge. Ultimately, in this case, maintenance of a psychoanalytic position of curiosity and of “not knowing” with regard to the questions of categories allowed the exploration of Ms. A.’s “psychopathology of conformity.”
The Problem of Causation
The second major theoretical problem highlighted by the relationship between psychoanalysis and homosexuality is that of causation. Presumably a new psychoanalytic theory of homosexuality would attempt to answer the question of what causes some persons to have a predominantly same-gender sexual orientation. The problem of causation as an aspect of explanation in psychoanalytic theory is immensely complex, and a thorough explication of the subject goes beyond the scope of this paper. In short, causal theory in Freudian and postFreudian psychoanalytic discourse appears in many contexts, including discussions of (1) individual psychodynamics in the here and now; (2) individual development; (3) general human development; (4) the developmental history of the species (Freud’s phylogenetic theory); (5) the role of organismic factors (roughly equated with the biological) as they pertain to all of the above; (6) the role of social, cultural, and experiential (what Freud called accidental) factors as they pertain to all of the above; and (7) the adaptive functions of behavior and other phenomena as they pertain to the survival of the species. Schafer (1995) has laid the blame for the normative view taken by psychoanalysis toward heterosexuality on this last aspect of causal theory, which he calls Freud’s “Darwinian evolutionary ethic,” according to which it seemed to Freud “to follow that psychosexual development should culminate in genital, heterosexual, reproductive orientation” (p.193). Although we agree with Schafer that Darwinian ideology underlies much of the normalizing trend found in psychoanalytic writing about sexuality, we feel that the more profound problem confounding psychoanalytic writing about homosexuality is a persistent overconfidence in, and conceptual confusion surrounding, psychoanalytic developmental theory.
Developmental Theory and the Concept of Normality
In their critique of psychoanalytic theory, Grossman and Kaplan address what they call “the narratives of development” in Freud’s work. Although they argue that these narratives are more truly psychoanalytic than are commentaries of trait, the former can easily deteriorate into the latter when they attempt to describe fixed programs. This deterioration occurs when narratives of development assume that “a discovery of significant nodal points in development is a discovery also of how they are inevitably traversed” (p. 343). Innumerable authors have attempted to justify assertions that predominant homosexual orientation is a nonnormal variant of the human psyche by drawing on developmental theory, building their arguments on beliefs for which they mistakenly claim psychoanalytic authority, that heterosexual orientation is not only the more common but also the normal outcome of psychosexual development. For example, in “A Conceptual Model of Male Perversion,” Kernberg (1986) attempts to build a classification of the perversions that goes beyond the content of sexual behavior to consider the dominant organization of object relations. However, Kernberg is unable to take full advantage of this strategy to discover a broader range of nonperverse homoerotic attachments because, at the heart of his argument, he has falsely defined the essence of psychoanalytic theory. Kernberg makes an equation between the “psychoanalytic frame of reference” and a viewpoint that includes the normative developmental program in which successful overcoming of the oedipal constellation means that “a man must be able to identify with the sexual … functions of the father,” specifically “with the father in a full sexual relationship with an adult woman” (p. 173).
Similarly, Tyson and Tyson (1990), in the comprehensive Psychoanalytic Theories of Development: An Integration, suggest that heterosexual outcome is normal in the sense of developmentally “mature”: “Oedipal progression for the girl,” they write, “implies that more and more she takes her father as her love object … In doing so, the little girl takes her first major step toward an eventual heterosexual orientation” (p. 267). According to these authors, heterosexual object choice in women is consolidated in adolescence as part of the integration of “a mature ego ideal based on identification with a revised view of mother combined with identification with other admired female figures … The girl is now free to make a heterosexual object choice” (p. 275). In the boy, Tyson and Tyson see homosexual orientation as deriving from the negative oedipal complex, which is “commonly understood to result from his castration anxiety” (p. 287). Adolescence also presents opportunities for defensive “fixation” in a homosexual position (p. 291). Heterosexuality is again taken to be the outcome of conflict resolution representing the consolidation of a “mature masculine ego ideal” (p. 291).
It is possible to hang onto the importance of the triangular oedipal conflict as a “nodal point of development” without postulating that the crisis presented by triangulation must be heterosexual in either essence or outcome. Important developmental narratives for homosexual men have been generated by Isay (1989) and Goldsmith (1995) by positing a structured triangular conflict in which homosexual orientation is not viewed as a defense. Morgenthaler (1984) has presented an interesting developmental narrative wherein hetero- and homosexual orientations are seen as equally normal responses to inevitable narcissistic crises
of early childhood. In contrast to Kernberg (1986), who even under the most “normal” circumstances sees obligatory homosexuality as “defensive structuralization” of the negative oedipal complex (p. 164), Morgenthaler suggests that defensive retreat to a “negative oedipal complex” (by which he means retreat from the primary object of desire) should be seen as neurotic in either group.
The Limitations of Psychoanalytic Developmental Theory
Grossman and Kaplan’s critique of psychoanalytic developmental narratives focuses primarily on the argument that psychoanalytic methodology does not allow us to determine either what is normal or what is universal. We agree with them that the essence of the psychoanalytic frame of reference should not be sought in any particular normative program for development. However, in our opinion Grossman and Kaplan, while pointing the way, do not go far enough in their critique of psychoanalytic narratives of development, in that they fail to address fully the larger problems in psychoanalytic theories of causation for any phenomenon, whether “normal” or not. Despite the extensive critique of the many theoretical problems connected to the “old” psychoanalytic theories of homosexuality, the belief that psychoanalysis itself can generate a valid causal theory of development (normative or not) is still widespread and highly problematic. This belief sometimes reaches the point of absurdity. For example, in the semiofficial psychoanalytic viewpoint on sexual orientation presented in The Glossary of Psychoanalytic Terms (Moore and Fine 1990), published by the American Psychoanalytic Association, homosexuality is described as a “choice”—i.e., as primarily determined or caused during the process of development by psychological factors. Arguments about the role of biology and hormones are judged to be “unconvincing” (pp. 85-89). Heterosexuality, by contrast, is presented as innate or primary, determined by biological givens (pp. 84-85). These propositions, grounded in developmental theory, are presented with no trace of skepticism, the authors evincing no awareness that their statements represent opinions about complex data, most of which are not generated by psychoanalytic methodology. An added paradox is that Freud’s famous developmental theory of female heterosexuality, in which he argued that normal female children make a change in sexual object from mother to father that is determined by the psychodynamics of the experience of anatomical distinction is quietly jettisoned here without so much as a footnote (Freud 1925).
Of concern to us in this critique is that new psychoanalytic theories on homosexuality often still consist of efforts to present psychoanalytic developmental theory as though it can account for the origins of homosexuality. For example, Schuker (1996), in “Toward Further Analytic Understanding of Lesbian Patients,” agrees that we need “flexibility in our understanding and classification of individuals in their erotic lives” and that “dynamics in lesbian patients should not be confused with pathology” (p. 485). Schuker goes on to propose that “our understanding of female homosexualities has been excessively welded to unitary theories” (p. 485). However, in her theoretical discussion as well as in her three case presentations, she challenges this unitary theory by using psychoanalytic data alone to suggest “multiple developmental paths, nodal points, and conflicts resulting in homoerotic feelings, behavioral object choice, or a sense of ‘gay identity’” (p. 485; emphasis added). Schuker does not challenge the notion that object choice is the result of conflict; more important, she does not examine her belief that psychoanalytic data alone are sufficient to build causal developmental theory.
When homosexuality is discussed and new causal developmental theory is not forthcoming, it is often demanded. For example, in a report in The American Psychoanalyst of a recent symposium in Cleveland on homosexuality (Janicki 1998), we are told, in a section subtitled “New Concepts, Old Dualism,” that Ralph Roughton began his presentation by contrasting “the older (mis)understanding with newer ways of conceptualizing homosexuality” (p. 38). According to TAP, “Schiff challenged Roughton for saying so little about etiology and for not elaborating on what can be understood from these new perspectives” (p. 38) At the same time, concurrent with the demand for new psychoanalytic theories about the development of homosexuality, there is an opposite trend in some gay affirmative psychoanalytic writing, in which a critique of “old” psychoanalytic causal theories of development has led to the suggestion that we rid psychoanalysis of “determinism” altogether (Dimen 1995). It has even been proposed that we not ask the question of where sexual orientation comes from at all; such a question, it is said, “problematizes” the phenomenon of homosexuality.
We note here with great interest that the discourse on the problem of causation resembles that on the problem of categories; there too we found a wide spectrum of arguments, ranging from those in support of establishing new “normal” categories to those in support of abolishing categories altogether. With regard to the problem of causation, the spectrum of arguments ranges from a demand for a new developmental theory that can explain the origins of homosexuality to a demand that we do away with causal theory altogether. In our opinion, to remove determinism from psychoanalysis is to obliterate the field, beginning with the central concept of the dynamic unconscious. To attempt resolution of the complex problems surrounding causal theory by proscribing the question of origins is patently absurd. For us to move forward, however, we must be aware of the serious limitations in the ability of psychoanalytic methodology to generate developmental theory with robust claims to validity for either individuals or groups. Our past failure to understand these limitations lies behind all three of the abovementioned failures in psychoanalytic theory (Willick 2001). Continued preoccupation with a search for causal developmental theory for homosexuality from within psychoanalysis threatens not only to perpetuate bad psychoanalytic theory, but to interfere with clinical work. The latter, as demonstrated with the problem of categories, requires greater tolerance of what we do not know.
Conceptual Problems Related to Psychoanalytic Developmental Theory
The conceptual problems surrounding psychoanalytic developmental theory have their origins in the work of Freud. Although Freud did not himself delineate the “genetic point of view,” as it came to be called, such a perspective is implied in much, if not all, of what he wrote. In some instances he went so far as to equate psychoanalysis itself with a study of origins: “Not every analysis of psychological phenomena deserves the name of psychoanalysis. The latter implies more than a mere analysis of composite phenomena into simpler ones. It consists in tracing back one psychical structure to another which preceded it in time and out of which it developed … Thus from the very first psychoanalysis was directed toward tracing developmental processes. It … was led … to construct a genetic psychology” (Freud 1913, p. 165).
Kernberg’s equation between the “psychoanalytic frame of reference” and developmental narrative can be traced directly to Freud, as can much of the conceptual confusion repeatedly found in psychoanalytic writing claiming to be about development. Specifically, Freud failed repeatedly to distinguish in his writing between develop- mental/genetic propositions (which attempt to explain how psychological events came to be over time) and psychodynamic propositions (which attempt to explain the nature of psychological events in the here and now). At the same time, while he made references to the differences between psychoanalytic reconstruction and direct child observation, Freud mingled the two in his developmental theory, thus failing to note the distinction between what we would now call the genetic and the developmental points of view. These two failures have never been fully corrected and continue to lead to problems in psychoanalytic theory building and clinical writing.
Psychoanalytic Developmental Theory and Psychodynamics
First of all, as noted above, there is widespread and long-standing confusion in psychoanalytic theory between propositions about etiology and/or development and propositions about psychodynamics. Although we have made considerable progress in distinguishing the psychoanalytic concept of psychodynamics from the non-psychoanalytic concept of psychopathology, we have made less progress in distinguishing psychoanalytically informed propositions about development or etiology from psychoanalytic propositions about here-and- now dynamic interactions among thoughts, feelings, fantasies, affects, and motivational states as observed in the analytic situation. Hartmann and Kris (1945) began their essay “The Genetic Approach in Psychoanalysis” by making a clear distinction between two sets of hypotheses derived from psychoanalysis: the dynamic and the genetic. The first they define as those describing “the interaction and the conflict of forces within the individual … at any given time or during brief time spans”; the second they define as those describing “how any condition under observation has grown out of the individual’s past and extended throughout his total life span” (p. 11). Asserting that dynamic propositions are far more widely accepted than are genetic ones,
Hartmann and Kris offered statements that today sound startlingly cheerful regarding the wealth of data from academic psychology that support psychoanalytic dynamic hypotheses. Hartmann and Kris were arguing here that psychoanalysis, to support its genetic hypotheses, was in need of similar data that could be derived from a collaboration with developmental psychology (hence the establishment of a new journal, The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, for which their paper was the first article of the inaugural volume).
Sandler and Sandler (1983), in a series of papers distinguishing between the “past and the present unconscious,” made repeated efforts to clarify the important difference between developmental theory and psychodynamics. They suggested that the term reconstruction be used for propositions about the past unconscious and construction for propositions about the present unconscious (Freud, they noted, did not distinguish between the two terms). They argued that analysis of transference and resistance for the purpose of constructing the present unconscious should be the primary focus of clinical work. We agree that construction of the present unconscious through the analysis of here- and-now data, including transference, should indeed be the primary focus of clinical work; however, we argue that construction of the psychodynamics of the present unconscious in more general theoretical terms is also the form of psychoanalytic theory building most closely connected to what is observable. Psychoanalytic models of development, for individuals or for groups, while of enormous importance in our work and of great interest to general psychology, are vastly more distant from psychoanalytic data and are therefore more speculative.
Schuker’s 1996 paper provides many examples of the confusion between propositions concerning here-and-now psychodynamics and propositions concerning development. From the outset, Schuker fails to distinguish these two types of psychoanalytic speculation, as when she “poses questions about the etiology and dynamics of female homosexualities” (p. 485). We are told, for example, that for Ms. K. “homosexual relations seemed to repair early narcissistic losses. They served avoidance of positive oedipal competition and fantasied male aggression and maternal retaliation” (p. 491). In this same paragraph, Schuker makes it clear that she understands these statements to be not only about how the patient’s homosexuality participates in the psychodynamics of problem solving but also to be part of an etiological and developmental explanation of Ms. K.’s object “choice.” The data, however, consist entirely of observations of here-and-now psychodynamics. In any case, from the theoretical point of view, psychodynamics and developmental/etiological causal theory are here dangerously conflated.
It is essential when the analyst makes an interpretation about here- and-now psychodynamics that this interpretation be confused by neither patient nor analyst with the idea that a causal developmental link has been elucidated. For example, in the case of Ms. A. the analyst made the interpretation that Ms. A.’s fear that her mother could not tolerate her independence might be causally related to her difficulty knowing the nature of her own sexuality. This interpretation, however, was not intended to imply that her fear was caused by her mother’s refusal to allow separation during childhood, or, even more to the point, that a refusal to allow separation might be the cause of Ms. A.’s homoerotic feelings. It is inevitable that Ms. A. will have her own causal theories about the origins of her homosexual feelings, and, as will be discussed below, elucidation and exploration of such theories may be an important part of her analysis.
The Genetic vs. the Developmental Point of View
Second, there is widespread confusion in the psychoanalytic literature between the genetic point of view, which might be said to be properly psychoanalytic, and the developmental point of view, which is not. Hartmann (1950) was quite precise about the distinction between psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. The first he defined as a theory of personality and development based on reconstructive techniques and data derived chiefly from therapeutic work; the second he defined as a body of theory and an approach to the study of personality and development based on direct observation of children, particularly of normal children. Hartmann presented a thoughtful discussion of the limitations of the psychoanalytic, or genetic, point of view, pointing out that conclusions about childhood reached on the basis of analysis with adults have the disadvantage that “we gain them only through a complicated system of reconstructions and through many detours of thought” (p. 7). For psychoanalysis to be a general psychology, he suggested, it must involve the mutual checking of data revealed by its own method against those revealed by another (the direct observation of children). The longitudinal observations made from the point of view of developmental psychology help fill in gaps and allow psychoanalysis “to discard hypotheses which are not consistent with behavioral data” (p. 10). Unfortunately, psychoanalytic theorists did not always attend to the distinction between the genetic/psychoanalytic and the developmental points of view as delineated by Hartmann. Notably, Rapaport and Gill (1959), who gave official status to the genetic point of view in their landmark paper, “The Points of View and Assumptions of Metapsychology,” failed to make a clear distinction between the genetic and the developmental: “the genetic point of view,” they wrote, “demands that the psychoanalytic explanation of any psychic phenomenon include propositions concerning its psychological origins and development” (p. 804).
Our focus on the importance of distinguishing the two points of view is an attempt not to diminish the potential contribution of psychoanalysis to a general theory of human development but rather to be clear about its limitations. Both Hartmann and Rapaport point out that the perspective of hindsight, in combination with the close attention to subjectivity that characterizes the genetic point of view, allows for the discovery of interconnections between experiences that may elude observers with a less intimate point of view. The genetic point of view, for example, allows us to see that psychic phenomena that appear similar may in fact be different in terms of their role in problem solving; conversely, phenomena that appear different may be similar in terms of their representing responses to similar intrapsychic problems. Most important, as stated elegantly by Rapaport (1960), the significance of the genetic approach for developmental psychology is that it “traces the development of a complex unit, namely ‘behavior as a problem solution’” (p. 824).
However, although both Rapaport and Hartmann delineate potential advantages of the psychoanalytic/genetic retrospective point of view, both leave unsolved a crucial problem that has dogged us in the course of using psychoanalytic methodology to construct developmental theory about homosexuality. Nowhere do these authors acknowledge that the investigator, when using the genetic point of view, must make determinations about which phenomena fall into the category of problem-solving behavior and which do not. While we are comfortable asserting that all phenomena participate in motivated psychological problem solving, we are on far shakier ground when we assert that any given phenomenon is caused by motivated problem solving alone. Hartmann and Rapaport also leave us uncertain as to how psychoanalytic investigators can know when they have arrived at factors that should be considered innate, autonomous, constitutional, or immutable. This is the theoretical problem of locating or defining “bedrock.” In light of the irresolvable limitations of the genetic point of view, we can see how homosexuality was conceptualized, by psychoanalysts observing from the genetic point of view, as on some occasions the result of problem solving and on others as innate. Freud himself held both points of view at various times.
The Problem of “Bedrock”
The concept of bedrock as it appears in the psychoanalytic literature has many meanings, all of which have been challenged by the phenomenon of homosexuality. Introduced by Freud (1937) in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” the concept has a clinical meaning in the sense of immutable through further analysis. Of note, Freud’s bedrock in this paper consists of the “repudiation of femininity” that in both sexes is a “remarkable feature in the psychical life of human beings” (p. 250). At a more conceptual level, the term bedrock is used, both here by Freud and later by others, to refer to those aspects of psychic life that are thought to be “innate” or “constitutional,” as opposed to being derived from conflict. For example, in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” Freud concludes that “the repudiation of femininity can be nothing else than a biological fact” (pp. 252-253) The term has also been used to refer to those aspects of psychic life that have achieved “secondary autonomy,” as in Friedman’s views of homosexual orientation (1988), which he suggests may develop in response to disturbances in core gender identity (CGI) in childhood but which, along with CGI, become part of the new “bedrock of the self” (p. 282). Finally, in psychoanalytic developmental theory, the term has been used to mean not only innate and/or autonomous, but also “primary,” in the sense of developing first, as opposed to “secondary,” which comes later, often in response to what is primary.
Psychoanalytic explorations of homosexuality lead us to question the power of psychoanalytic methodology to delineate a category of bedrock defined in any of these ways. In “Comments on ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable,’” Cooper (1987) explores Freud’s concept of bedrock as an attempt to “set the boundaries to psychoanalysis by declaring that whatever was beyond castration anxiety was pure biology” (p. 141). He links this setting of boundaries to the expression of some of Freud’s “most conservative points of view concerning psychoanalysis” and in particular to a “tenacity in maintaining his metapsychology” against competing ideas (p. 128). Cooper also considers the possibility that the introduction of the concept of bedrock reflects Freud’s “hesitation to perturb or interfere with the assumption of unquestioned male authority” (p. 142). The important point to consider here is the idea that claims on the part of psychoanalysts to have discovered bedrock must always be suspect as being motivated as much by ideological as by psychoanalytic concerns.
What Do We Need That is New?
A Renewed Capacity for Analytic Listening
We began by observing that, in the wake of changes in psychoanalytic perspectives on homosexuality and in policies with regard to training homosexual analysts, the search for a new theory has become widespread. We have questioned the wisdom of this search and in the process have examined the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and homosexuality, in an attempt to demonstrate how the problem of delineating categories and the problem of explaining causation have often derailed psychoanalytic theory. We have also attempted to demonstrate how these two problems taken together culminate in the problem of determining bedrock. We are concerned that continuing failure to understand the limitations of psychoanalytic theory may lead us to deploy our desire for something new in the service of perpetuating old mistakes. Psychoanalytic methodology alone does not allow us to construct a new theory of homosexuality. Nor do psychoanalytic clinicians necessarily need a new theory. What we do need is something new when it comes our work with homosexual patients: a new, or renewed, capacity for analytic listening.
This renewed capacity requires first that we be less preoccupied with questions of etiology. While we have largely abandoned our attempts to find out what went wrong developmentally with an aim to “correct” it, analysts frequently remain more preoccupied with questions of causation than are their patients. While it is common for homosexual patients to have their own theories about the etiology of their homosexuality, it is important that analysts stay attuned to the psychological uses to which these theories are put as they unfold within the evolving transference-countertransference. In Freud’s well-known analysis of Leonardo da Vinci’s memory from childhood (1910), he found hidden in Leonardo’s parapraxis the statement, “It was through this erotic relationship with my mother that I became a homosexual” (p. 106). Imagine how different the history of psychoanalysis and homosexuality might have been had Freud understood this constructed fantasy in terms of here-and-now psychodynamics expressing themselves as a theory of causation rather than literally as a developmental explanation of Leonardo’s homosexuality.
Second, this renewed capacity for analytic listening would include the possibility (but never the certainty) that homosexuality might be primary rather than something inherently conflictual and secondary.
While this possibility is but one of many perspectives one might have on the patient’s homosexuality over the course of an analysis, the ability to at least consider that it might be psychological “bedrock” will help us correct the common bias in analytic listening that leads us to expect to hear heterosexually oriented explanations for events and experiences. Even if we cannot determine what is primary or bedrock, we can generate interesting and plausible hypotheses by imagining that homosexuality might be. Just as Stoller’s concept of primary femininity (1977) helped free us from a view of femininity rooted in damage, so the notion of primary homosexuality might free us from seeing homosexual patients as damaged also.
Finally, renewed analytic listening would allow us to hear more from our patients about what it is like to grow up homosexual. The series of developmental narratives that homosexuals often tell includes such experiences as (1) early feelings of difference and a sense that this difference is bad and should remain hidden (Vaughan 1999; Corbett 1996); (2) experiences of gender atypicality (Corbett 1998; Iasenza 1995); (3) the experience of self-recognition regarding the nature of the early sense of difference and of its roots in one’s sexuality (Magee and Miller 1997); (4) the conscious construction of a facade designed to protect against unwitting disclosure of homosexual feelings (Vaughan 1999; O’Connor and Ryan 1993); (5) repetitive instances of inadvertent sexual overstimulation by parents and peers because of false assumptions about one’s sexual orientation—e.g., exposure to nudity in same-sex parents, exposure to friends in locker rooms and sleepover situations (Phillips 2001); (6) painful experiences of selfhatred related to internalized homophobia (Friedman and Downey 1995; Sophie 1987; Moss 1997); and (7) the process of self-disclosure and coming out followed by consolidation of a positive gay identity (Isay 1996). Listening for and hearing these common narratives of growing up homosexual will make us better analysts in that the more stories we know, the greater will be our understanding of our patients.
New Listening in Action: The Case of Mr. C.
Mr. C., a thirty-four-year-old homosexual professional, sought psychotherapy and later psychoanalysis, complaining about difficulty in intimate relationships. His history was remarkable for his having been sent by his parents, between the ages of ten and seventeen, for two separate analyses in Europe. His parents sent him there with the goal, as he put it, of “making me less sissy so I didn’t turn out gay.” His mother, an academic with a lifelong interest in psychoanalysis, voiced her personal theory about the etiology of her son’s homosexuality, a view buttressed by her psychoanalytic reading. She believed that his feminine identifications and preference for men were, in Mr. C.’s words, “the best adaptation I could arrive at, with the alternative being that I would be psychotic.” While Mr. C. had found his first analyst helpful, she left in the middle of the treatment after focusing on his homosexuality “as a defense against fears of the female genitals or as an immature and narcissistic developmental arrest.” Although Mr. C. began to date girls during this analysis, he found this activity unfulfilling and began to drink, use drugs, and engage in anonymous sexual encounters with men. He sought treatment after becoming sober in AA and testing HIV positive.
Early in treatment, it became clear that Mr. C. experienced interpretations from me (SCV) as if he were being clubbed over the head as punishment for perceived sins or wrongdoings. However, at the same time, he persisted in an idealizing transference of me as “a sage lesbian savior” who would rescue him from the ravages of psychoanalytic theory. A split-off negative image of his mother developed simultaneously, as Mr. C. became preoccupied with the idea that it was her intrusiveness and “the way she came between me and my father” that had produced his homosexuality. Before a visit home, he sent his mother a copy of Richard Isay’s book, Being Homosexual, believing— after seeing it on my bookshelf but not having read it himself— that it would show her a new and nonpathologizing view of homosexuality. In short, at this point in the analysis, Mr. C.’s personal theory of the origins of his homosexuality closely resembled that of Bieber (1988), whose paradigm of a pathogenic family constellation consisting of a close-binding mother and a distant father was turned on its ear by Isay in the very book Mr. C. gave his mother without having read. Clearly, Mr. C. wished to blame his mother for his difficulties in intimate relationships with men, his HIV status, his substance abuse, and his general unhappiness as a gay man. As we explored the multiple meanings of his sending her the book, an image emerged of me and Mr. C. allied against his mother, clobbering and indicting her with psychoanalytic theories that implicated her as the cause of his homosexuality. The patient fantasized coming out to everyone in the phone book in his hometown so as to panic, humiliate, and indict his mother for her failures. When I repeatedly interpreted how his attack on his mother, supported by me as his ally, served to keep his rage and feelings of damage safely out of the analysis, his desire to punish me for the sins of analysts past, as well as for my own homosexuality, began to emerge. He began to tell me of a secret store of criticisms he had collected over time. These centered around two themes: (1) I was a damaged lesbian who was too mannish and whose defective femininity was the cause of my homosexuality. He complained, for example, that he found me “heavy-footed” and “butch” when I went to get him in the waiting room. (2) I was an analyst who secretly wished to cure him (and myself) of homosexuality. He cited my “bias” against anonymous and unsafe sex as evidence of my own hatred of homosexuality. As issues of internalized homophobia and rage were addressed and the role of projection in shaping his views of me as a lesbian and an analyst became more clear to him, Mr. C.’s theories about his sexuality shifted accordingly.
Approximately three years after he had given his mother Isay’s book, he purchased it and read it for himself. Isay’s formulations allowed Mr. C. to begin a new exploration of early memories of attraction to his father and of pain at his father’s interest in his brother’s athletic activities. He began to consider the possibility that his homosexuality might be more constitutionally than conflictually based. His desire to see it as primary or inborn was accompanied by increased self-reflection as to why he had previously thought of his homosexuality in terms of fault and blame. He also began to develop a more balanced positive view of me as someone who could be both a lesbian and a mature, caring person. Around this same time his mother remarked on a positive shift in their relationship and stated that his analysis must be helping. Mr. C. confronted her about a prior remark in which she had suggested that I, as a lesbian, would be unable to help him with sexual issues. In contrast to their previous fights about the origins of his homosexuality, this confrontation led to a productive conversation in which Mr. C. was able to convey his feelings of hurt. By the end of his analysis, Mr. C. felt that he did not know why he was gay and would probably never know. Moreover, while curious, he felt that he did not need to know. Through the work of analysis, he understood how his evolving theories of causation served to support a variety of psychological needs. Mr. C.’s new feelings of acceptance, both of himself and of his parents, went hand in hand with this greater tolerance of not knowing the true cause of his homosexuality.
At the many conferences and symposia one of us (SCV) has attended, the presentation of clinical material such as this is often met with the disappointed comment, “But this is just analysis!” Although the stories of homosexual lives may sound unfamiliar, even queer, to our analytic ears, they do little or nothing to explain what Freud called the mystery of homosexuality. Yet this disappointed comment that analyzing homosexuals is just business as usual is perhaps the most important new perspective of all.