Significant Others

Lesbianism and Psychoanalytic Theory

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3945973
AutoresDiane Hamer (autor de correspondencia)
Año1990
Volumen34
Número1
Páginas134-151
Fecha de publicación1990-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaFeminist Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0141-7789 • E-ISSN: 1466-4380
EditorialJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/1395313
OpenAlexW4237030238
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas10
Referencias citadas12

Of all the conversations I have had with friends lately, the one which raised the most passionate and the most violent emotions is that which concerns the function of my therapist in my life. Our discussions have all the elements of political debate investment, contestation, fracture, gaping abysses of opinion. Therapy seems to be the new terrain for the working out of a politics of personal life. It even threatens to eclipse the status of lovers as conversation topics. More and more of us are going into therapy and it is almost becoming unfashionable not to be in it. Yet there is still an antipsychoanalysis consensus amongst lesbians, despite the fact that the theoretical bases of many of our therapies will have been informed by psychoanalysis at some point. Perhaps as a result of this consensus of feeling the relationship between psychoanalysis and lesbianism remains largely untheorized. The most recent articulation of a political position on psychoanalysis was in the radical feminist journal Trouble and Strife (Rondot, 1989) in which Freud's case of'Dora' was once more found to embody all that is most oppressive about psychoanalysis to lesbians and to all women. According to that author at least, the implication seemed to be that psychoanalysis has nothing to say to lesbians and vice versa. Many of the criticisms directed at the theory and practice of psychoanalysis are undoubtedly accurate. However, such wholesale dismissal (mainly through silence) does not answer what some lesbians find extremely useful about psychoanalytic theory in accounting for how we make sense of ourselves. In this article I want to attempt to bring the two, lesbianism and psychoanalysis, together in part along the axis of a personal account of therapy to see what it is they might have to say to each other

Feminism · Human sexuality · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Queer theory · Sociology · Anthropology · Cultural Studies · Gender Studies · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Psychology · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications · Reproductive Health and Technologies