Building Lesbian Sandcastles on the Shore of Relational Psychoanalysis

ABSTRACT

Stephen Mitchell, one of the founders of relational psy-choanalysis, wrote two early (1978, 1981) articles challenging the then widely held view in psychoanalysis that love between same-sex persons was inextricably pathological. His writings gave me hope that, as a les-bianidentified therapist, I could actively participate in a psychoanalytic community of ideas and practice. However, in the 1980s, when I entered psychoanalytic training, the sandcastle of hope I had built from Mitchell papers was destroyed with the incoming tide. I describe here a personal journey related to lesbian identity in various contexts from 1978 and 1981 when Mitchell spoke so authoritatively about psychoanalytic attitudes to-wards homosexuality to 1996 when he described the plight of the per-plexed clinician with regard to gender and sexual orientation in the age of postmodernism.

Key Words:

• Stephen Mitchell
• relational psychoanalysis
• queer theory
• lesbian identity
• homophobia