There was a panel discussion today at the psychoanalytic convention I was attending about gender and sexuality. I arrived late from another session and missed the bulk of the formal presentation, which, I gathered from context, was a historical review by the people who had lived it, of the shift in US psychoanalysis from a repressive attitude towards gays and lesbians to a current position that ranges from embracing gays and lesbians, to tolerance, including by "allowing" openly gay and lesbian individuals to become analysts and training analysts (analysts who are cleared to train other analysts), to discomfort, but with much more openness towards the psychological health of individuals with disparate object attractions than has traditionally been the case.
I have blogged elsewhere about sex and sexuality. What stuck me today was a question that a woman asked who had been in a previous session with me. That previous session had focused on research in psychoanalysis and she had talked about her own research work. She was pleasant, clear and articulate and my "gay-dar" had not registered anything at all. Frankly, despite her being an attractive enough person her "sexualness", meaning her being a sexual being (God, that sounds stilted) didn't register. What had registered was that this was a comfortably professional and competent woman.
In the Q and A with the panel in the GLBT session, she described her experience as a group therapist in a clinic. In a therapy group one day, an offensive joke about lesbians was told. The group was appalled at the joke and appropriately confronted the joke teller. What was pivotal for her (and for me) was a comment by one of the members. "Well, thank goodness there are no lesbians in the group," the member said.
An interesting thing happened at that moment. Perhaps partly because it still hadn't registered for me that this woman was a lesbian, I thought, "Well of course there are. All the woman in the group (I do not know the gender composition of the group, so this may have meant that just the therapist or the therapist and all of the other women) are lesbians - and straight." But the actual identificatory track, if I am honest, was more personal. I immediately switched the genders and thought, "If an offensive joke about a gay man were told, my gay self would be offended. And so would the gay selves of all the other men in the group (it happened that she had stated that her co-therapist is an openly gay man)."
By the way, I don't mean to be telling my reluctant wife news. And this will not come to her as news. There are men to whom I am attracted, just as there are women (it was kind of odd that I wasn't attracted to this woman telling the story - maybe it was that there were no flickers of attraction that were coming from her? Or maybe she was more practiced than most in desexualizing relationships? Or maybe most of my day to day interactions are much less sexually charged than my bold assertions above be attracted to anything that moves would suggest?). The question that the woman posed to the group was, "should I have come out in that moment?" And this turns out to be a complicated question, especially in a group that is talking about how important it has been for analysts to come out over the course of the last 50 years.
In that moment, when the group member stated that they were thankful there were no lesbians in the group, the storyteller was passing as a heterosexual, something it became apparent many psychoanalysts had been doing during the early years of the AIDS crisis - they came out when they died. It turns out that this therapist's motivation to come out to the group was not based, to the best that she could tell, in her desire to move the group process along. It was based primarily in a wish on her part to be known as a lesbian by the group. She fought her desire to come out - she bore the burden of being unknown to the group through the end of that session and then she and her co- therapist discussed whether disclosing her sexuality would be in the best interests of the group at that moment.
I don't know what they decided, and it doesn't really matter. The point, she and I agreed in a brief conversation after the session, is that what matters is what is in the best interests of the group or, in psychoanalysis proper, the individual we are treating. As psychoanalysts, we need to bear our patients' misperception of us, at least at times. We need to pass. We need to allow the transference to develop. Sometimes my patients perceive me as Jewish. At some point they will discover that I am not, and I need to make my best guess effort to try to understand why they need to see me as Jewish at this particular moment before too quickly disabusing them of a useful fiction. Are they Jewish themselves and need me to be safe? Are they anti semitic and need to hate me? I can't, of course know this for certain, but I can be curious about it. And we can discover that together. The dilemma, though, is that passing violates a basic principle of psychotherapy - good psychotherapy requires that the therapist be genuine - deceit is a corrosive element in any relationship. So how can my lesbian peer avoid deceit while she bears being perceived as straight? How can I avoid deceit while bearing being perceived as Jewish?
First of all, I should not pretend to be gay if I am straight or Jewish if I was raised Protestant. I cannot be something that I am not, and I shouldn't try. That said, and this should cause you to question my integrity, I think we should consider our ability to channel, not simply to bear, being the person we are perceived to be. This should not be a deception. In so far as I am able to be in touch with my gay self; to be offended as a gay man by a slur against gays, in so far as I am able to be my Jewish self; to be safe or to be despised in whatever way I am; in so far as I can, I should identify with the projections of my patients, to try them on for size - never losing track of the fact that I am, at least also, straight; that I am, in very essential ways, in addition to being Jewish in whatever ways that I am, Protestant and a member of the dominant culture, so that my passing, my channeling, is just that; passing, and I pass as a means towards more fully engaging with my patients, with their experience of my essential otherness or similarity or whatever it is they may be exploring.
If this is the analytic ideal, and I believe it is, this may help us better understand the homophobia that has been such a central element in American psychoanalysis. But American psychoanalysis is not just homophobic, it has been a bastion of narrowly and conservatively defined normalcy and mental health. Psychoanalysis begs us to get in touch with all of our contradictory selves, especially those that are most threatening to us. And it demands of analysts that they do the same thing, and this is, indeed, very demanding. We must bear not just the projection, but the realization that, in some derivative way, it is accurate because we are human and we lust, we hate, we love, and we do everything else that makes living so delicious and so complicated. But I think we also want to deny that reality, so we created the myth of the well- analysed person - someone who had somehow weirdly transcended being human. We thought that we, and our patients, could achieve this state, and may therefore have engaged in denial of aspects of ourselves, and of them, that were ironically essential to their achieving true psychological health. (For another perspective on why psychoanalysts have been late to the gender and sexuality conversation please see a more recent post here).
I am aware as I say this that my perception of psychoanalysis as homophobic - or as being closed to childhood sexual abuse as a contributor to psychopathology - is based largely on my experience from outside the profession: from what I have read about it, or heard about it before becoming more closely involved. Charles Soccarides wrote powerful tracts denouncing homosexuality as essentially pathological. Indeed, version of the Diagnostic Manual (DSM-III) that was in place when I started to practice characterized homosexuality as a diagnosable disorder. But my experience of practitioners of psychoanalysis is that they are, by and large, an open group - curious about the human condition and engaged in trying to understand that as best they are able. And I have experienced the shock of practitioners at the characterization of the analytic position being that childhood sexual abuse didn't exist because they have been hearing about it and treating the effects of it for decades. We need to be careful about characterizing psychoanalysts as a group as we do about characterizing any other group, I suppose.
After the conference, I had a little time to kill before boarding my plane. I didn't have enough time to go to a museum, so I decided to go to the New York Public Library, to the reading rooms, to soak in a bit of the atmosphere. I was carrying my briefcase and my overnight bag and I went through an inspection line on the way out the door (I have no idea why the NY Public Library doesn't have a mechanical theft detection mechanism). I had a number of my own books in my briefcase, but I saw the guard size me up and decide I wasn't a likely thief - he let me leave without even a cursory inspection. And he was right. I didn't have any stolen books in my bag. This doesn't mean I don't want to (in the probably all too mortal words of Abby Hoffman), "Steal this book." I have stolen. I still feel the urge. Perhaps more than most, I am conscious of it. I feel needy and entitled. I am, at heart, a thief. But it is currently unlikely that I will act on that - and maybe the guard could see in the cut of my coat that the risk of being caught, and my moral repugnance at my desire to steal, and whatever other factors conspire to keep my inner thief in jail were at work and my bag was clean.
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