Queering psychoanalysis: power, self and identity in psychoanalytic therapy with sexual minority clients

Abstract

In this article I consider whether psychoanalytic psychotherapy can be gay affirmative and ask to what extent is psychoanalytic practice able to incorporate a queer account of heteronormativity in work with sexual minority patients/clients. I discuss the often pathologising vocabulary of psychoanalysis and go on to consider its theoretical use in providing a complex and practical understanding of the oppression of sexual minority persons, along with a model of therapeutic work and Oedipal relations which may contribute to helping sexual minority patients/clients work through the impact of growing up and making a life in a heteronormative culture. Thus, in this article I seek to address the question of how a queering of the foundations of psychoanalytic therapy may offer a means of effectively challenging heteronormativity both throughout our wider culture and within psychoanalytic theory and practice itself.

Keywords:

• Foucault
• heteronormativity
• lesbian and gay clients
• psychoanalysis
• queer theory
• sexual minority

Notes

1. Such a broad term will always be problematic given the variety of schools and models subsumed within it, in fact the term ‘psychoanalyses’ might be more appropriate. For the purposes of this article I wish to emphasise those readings of psychoanalysis which still adhere to some or other Oedipal theory of sexual and gender development and which, in turn, have at their core some form of heteronormative model of sexual and gender identity. I argue that most readings of psychoanalysis still fall within this category.

2. ‘Gay-affirmative’ theory and practice has been defined as a model ‘for working with clients who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual which does not pathologise or discriminate against such clients … The gay-affirmative therapist affirms a lesbian, gay or bisexual identity as an equally positive human experience and expression to heterosexual identity’ (Davies 1996, pp. 24–25). For criticism of this term from an existential-phenomenological perspective, see du Plock (1997).

3. Here I use the terms patient/client together to include the two most commonly used terms in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalytic counselling. However, I wish to fully acknowledge the different opinions on whether to use the term patient or client or something other, for example analysand. These debates concern the risks of pathologisation and the implication of passivity in using the term patient, while the term client also encompasses problems, for example in relation to the construction of the relative positions of consumer and service provider and the risk of impoverishment of the complexity of the therapeutic relationship. In the first study of its kind, Ritchie, Hayes, and Ames (2000) asked 147 UK adult psychiatric outpatients whether they preferred the term patient or client, 77% preferred the term patient. The authors ask for greater reflection on using the term ‘client’.

4. Though such power and authority is beginning to be analysed and challenged by some practitioners, for example, Stephen Mitchell and the relational school.

5. See, for example, the work of Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby, Lillian Faderman, Gayle Rubin, Biddy Martin and Sandra Lee Bartky who variously mirrored, engaged with and critiqued Foucault's ideas during the 1970s and 1980s.

6. The idea of abjection in this context requires a more complex treatment than I have space for here. Halperin (2007) provides a very compelling account of both the origin of the notion of abjection prior to Kristeva's use of the term (he traces it back to Genet and Sartre) and the ways in which abjection can be turned upon itself to become a site of resistance to the shame, humiliation and exclusion it demands. Such a queering or ‘transvaluation’ of abjection, for Halperin, contributes to the possibility of understanding subjectivity without recourse to psychological and psychoanalytic vocabularies, which, for example, might focus on the notion of masochism and this is an important debate in itself. However, here I wish to emphasise Halperin's notion (following Genet) of abjection as productive of struggle and resistance:

• Genet describes how the experience of abjection confronted him with the existential necessity of taking a bitter pleasure in humiliation, of crazily glorying in it, since only by that means could he resist its soul-destroying effects. (Halperin, 2007, p. 79)

• Thus, abjection must be contextualised in relation to the play of power, struggle and resistance that it may bring forth and this provides another sense in which psychoanalytic explanations may be turned on themselves, queered, redeployed.

7. The Oedipus complex is usefully defined as an ‘organised body of loving and hostile wishes which the child experiences towards its parents’ (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1983, p. 282). In Freud's own words (1900, p. 262),

• … it is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so. King Oedipus, who slew his father Laïus and married his mother Jocasta, merely shows us the fulfillment of our own childhood wishes.

Put another way, the ‘Oedipus complex’ refers to repressed wishes, desires and emotions focused around the child's relationship (usually seen as involving rivalry and castration fears in boys) with its parents.

8. Note that Freud always insisted that the Oedipus complex transcended the individual and historical context: ‘Every new arrival on this planet is faced with the task of mastering the Oedipus complex’ Freud (1905, p. 149).