Speculating on sexual subjectivity: on the application and misapplication of postmodern discourse on the psychology of sexuality

Abstract

Postmodernism, particularly within the social sciences, has served a useful purpose in subverting notions of truth, and because of this, models of positivistic linear psychological development alongside concepts of identity within psychotherapy have come under great scrutiny and deconstruction. Importantly, postmodernism interrogates the dynamics of power, calling into question the relationship between therapist and client by challenging the notion of therapist authority in relation to their clients. With regard to queer theory in particular, previous notions of gender and sexual categories have been deemed thoroughly unhinged from essentialist modes in exchange for wholly socially constructed ones; identities based on gender and sexuality are thereby seen as specifying and limiting. Many queer theorists encourage a postmodern perspective within psychotherapy where identities are subverted and undermined in the name of freeing individuals and society at large – ‘fluidity’ is seen as the developmentally desired position. Psychotherapists, however, must ask whether the paradigm of fluidity and the deconstruction of identities are simply replacing one powerful discourse with another. Furthermore, should a discourse that comes from a philosophical/political background (one that is a-clinical) inform therapeutic practice? How psychotherapeutic practice and theory can take on the insights of queer theory while at the same time honour the phenomenological experience of clients, which frequently adheres to strong notions of gender and sexual identity, will be of great importance. Queer insights cannot be applied to psychotherapy in toto. A relational approach to rework postmodern theory in relation to the practice of psychotherapy is needed: one that reassesses the relationship of post-Foucaultian gender theorising in relation to an understanding that gender and sexual identities in addition to being specifying can also be personally and politically liberating.

Keywords:

• relational psychoanalysis
• queer theory
• postmodernism
• psychotherapy
• fluidity
• gender theory
• sexuality
• identity
• Foucault

Notes

1. Foucault (1978) famously dates the birth of the homosexual subject to Karl Westphal's 1870 essay ‘Contrary Sexual Sensation’. Elsewhere, I (Balick, 2006) have disputed this; it is also heartily and comprehensively disputed by Norton (1997).

2. Hamilton's use of the word ‘sexuality’ here (and Weeks’ use of it to follow) is overdetermined and inclusive seeming to include sex, gender, sexual identity and so on. This is representative of the difficulty in theorising the subject: sexual desire itself (and its relation to sexual subjectivity) is often referred to obliquely, or is absent all together.

3. Pinker (1997) notes that the dichotomy between what can broadly be understood as the ‘nature/nurture’ debate ‘shows a poverty of the imagination, because it omits a third alternative: that some categories are products of a complex mind designed to mesh with what is in nature’ (p. 57). This third alternative, also demonstrated by the biopsychosocial approach supported by Denman (2004), broadly underlines my approach.

4. For more on the intersection between existential/phenomenological perspectives and relational theory, see Balick (2009).

5. This is further supported by Salih's (2002) reading of Butler in which she states, ‘ … Butler is less interested in “the individual” and “individual experience” (if there is any such thing), than in analyzing the process by which the individual comes to assume his or her position as a subject’ (p. 10). The simplicity of the bracketed statement in which Salih disposes of ‘individual experience’ is representative of such thinking.

6. Although Wikipedia may not be the best source from which to access thoroughly reviewed and worked-through academic concepts, it can be relied upon to give a condensed and conventionally understood appraisal of a subject. Wikipedia (2010, 16 April) describes Queer Theory's main project as ‘ … contesting of the categorization of gender and sexuality. Theorists claim that identities are not fixed – they cannot be categorized and labeled – because identities consist of many varied components and that to categorize by one characteristic is wrong’. Although I would not disagree that basing an identity on ‘one characteristic’ is not wise (though I would not say ‘wrong’) I believe that this particular perspective has made the notion of identities of any kind suspect in many a queer theorist's eye.

7. Even those individuals who experience themselves as queer or fluid in their gender or sexual identities tend to gravitate towards an identity that indicates this fluidity.

8. I would widen this to explicitly include everyone in between as well (i.e. inclusive of transgender and intersex experience).

9. See Lewis (1995) for a survey of how such ‘colonialism’ was used by psychoanalysis to pathologise homosexuality for so many years.

10. The use of the word ‘approach’ here is intentional because relational theory is self-consciously not a particular school of thought, but rather a broad way of conceiving of therapeutic process and sees itself as influenced multiply by ‘self psychology, particularly intersubjective theory; social constructivism in its various forms; certain currents within contemporary psychoanalytic hermeneutics; more recent developments in gender theorizing … the centrality of transference-countertransference interaction … [and the rediscovery of Sandor Ferenczi's work]’ (Mitchell & Aron, 1999, pp. xi–xii).

11. The quote by Layton, above, is a good example of this as it was found in a paper on relational practice!

12. One could extrapolate this notion of appropriation as a process that occurs in all relationships to a greater or lesser degree: the strongest appropriations being activated in relationships with primary caregivers through to important personal relationships, social groups and wider social networks. The power of such appropriation in the therapeutic encounter in relation to these earlier relationships is anyone's guess.

13. See Butler (2002) for an excellent and comprehensive perspective on gendered ego formation.

14. My own professional designation as a psychotherapist is ‘integrative’ – this is due to the defining and schoolist practices of registration in the field. Relational theory is applicable across all modes of insight-oriented psychotherapies – each therapeutic perspective will integrate relational (and postmodern) thought in its own way. What makes the practice relational are the main tenets discussed in this article, namely acknowledgement of the interactional nature of the work and the way in which both therapist and client co-create and enact throughout the therapeutic process.

15. For a clinical example of the therapeutic use of an enactment with regard to sexual identity, please see Balick (2009).