Building Lesbian Sandcastles on the Shore of Relational Psychoanalysis

Bibliographic Data

ID12459404
AuthorsBeverly Decker (Identity, corresponding author)
Year2004
Volume8
Issue1-2
Pages79-93
Publication date2004-04-27
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Lesbian Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1089-4160 • E-ISSN: 1540-3548
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1300/j155v08n01_05
PMID24820878
OpenAlexW1967827402
LanguageEN
References cited21

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

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Homosexuality · Human sexuality · Identity (music · Lesbian · Postmodernism · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Psychosexual development · Sexual identity · Sexual orientation · Sociology · Gender Studies · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Philosophy · Psychology · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications · Transactional Analysis in Psychotherapy

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