Let’s attempt to examine these reasons one by one, keeping in mind the undeniable fact that psychoanalysts have been and are for the most part publicly homophobic. Thus, during the debates on
PaCS
(Pacte civil de solidarité; Civil solidarity pact), they were the first to oppose the recognition of same-sex couples and gay
parenting
; few among them expressed any wish for a professional prohibition that should have stopped them from intervening in these political issues
as psychoanalysts
.
From History to Theory
The first meetings between nascent psychoanalysis and the loose conglomeration of homosexual practices, fantasies, and urges were bad encounters and would no doubt bias the future of their relationship (or non-relationship) for a long time. First of all, psychoanalysis was born at the conjunction of a dominant, doubly homophobic discourse: the nosographic discourse of German
psychiatry
and the moral discourse of the Viennese and German bourgeoisie. In this sense, it initially only repeats prejudices that come from elsewhere. Secondly, it is inevitably under the sign of suffering or mental disorder that the first forms of homosexual urges present themselves to Freud: healthy, overt homosexuals have no need to submit themselves to his new form of “cure.” From which, by not thinking about it too much, derives the easy identification of homosexuality with unhappiness and illness: it was not Freud who invented the patient Dora’s respiratory troubles and attempted
suicide
, nor “young Viennese homosexual woman’s” provocations, nor Schreber’s transsexual delusion (it would be “lovely” [
recht schön
] “to be a woman succumbing to intercourse”) or his dream of receiving God’s rays in his rear. Thirdly, it does not appear to be Freud who, on his own initiative, tries to “treat” homosexuality, the request seems mostly familial: it is families, and notably the fathers, of Dora, the young homosexual female, or of Little Hans, who ask Freud to “cure” them. At this level, the bias lies with the liberal and commercial nature of psychoanalytical
treatment
: it is difficult for a nascent enterprise to be too choosy on the origins or the request (in the economical sense), even if said request runs against his professional principles (it is the patient’s request that must take precedence)— that is the law of business. During the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) conference, Jones appears to even generalize somewhat on this “economical” principle of the specific familial request in regards to the “general social request” by declaring that in everyone’s eyes, homosexuality is a “repugnant crime: if one of our members committed it, it would discredit us all) (cited by Roudinesco and Plon).
Homophobia inherited from psychiatry the desire for bourgeois credibility and commercial interest, confirmed repeatedly and for very little by the objective suffering of their analysands, it is understood that the essence of the psychoanalytical movement, since Jones and Karl Abraham, actively relayed by Anna Freud, until the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s, has gotten busy not only to forbid homosexuals from becoming psychoanalysts but, even more, to convert them to heterosexuality. Nothing strictly psychoanalytical in that, only the appearance of sinister (unconscious?) calculations in regards to money, parish, and power, making psychoanalysts the new priests of the heterosexual
symbolic order
.
By reasoning thusly, however, they not only betray the patients who had trusted them, but also their own theory. We must recognize that this conversion of psychoanalysts into zealous missionaries of heterosexuality operated at the expense of the otherwise profound ambiguities of Freudian theory, if we strip it of its exogenous, and possibly infantile prejudices, “infantile” in the measure that Freud seems to have evolved with time; what remains is his famous, but late, letter of April 9, 1935 to an American mother who wanted him to treat her son: “Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is not a thing to be ashamed of, no
vice
, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness.… It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and a cruelty too.” And doubtlessly “exogenous” prejudices, for the essence of the first Freudian analyses revolved around two blind spots: Firstly, is it the homosexual urge as such or its repression that is the pathogen? Secondly, what is the definition of “normal” in the “normal” oedipal elimination (which the homosexual cannot achieve, being stuck at the anal or phallic stages of pre-genital sexuality)? A veritable moral law of civilization that would require the repression of all partial urges or a simple statistical and descriptive standard without moral connotation? If we settle these alternatives each time on the first sense, we dive into militant homophobia; if we settle each time on the second sense, then we agree with Wilhelm Reich, and there is no longer any homophobia, but then there is no psychoanalysis either, as its first essential foundation is shattered: castration or the primacy of the phallus.
But Freud does not fully settle on one or the other. For the first alternative, he effectively says (with regard to Schreber, for example) on the one hand that the “weakness” of homosexuals stems from the fact that they “have never been able to free themselves of this need that the object must have the same genital organs as they do,” thus it is the homosexual urge in itself that is a “fixation” or “regression” in the adult and, on the other hand, that the weakness stems from repression itself, and thus paranoid homosexuals become so by seeking “to
defend themselves
from such a sexualization of their instinctual social investments”; the illness thus stems from a maladjusted defense and not from the urge. And it is the same for the second alternative: on one hand, it is an almost moral abnormality when Freudian analysis transforms itself into a theology of desire: the desire
must
eliminate Oedipus by accepting castration in order to be able to love (it is notably the case in Freud’s
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
and in his analysis of Little Hans), on the other hand, it is an absolute infra-moral abnormality and thus purely statistical, since the homosexual who identifies with his mother will love others as she loved him and thus as well, or as bad, as the others (which is the case, notably, in
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
, and once again in the analysis of Little Hans). So, the essence is that Freud does not settle, and even seems to forbid himself from settling, thus letting castration appear as the common horizon of all sexualities, perversions (of which homosexuality is the archetype), thus no longer appearing in this
entre-deux
as an abnormality, but as the simple “reverse of the neurosis” (the cost of heterosexuality and not of civilization). Neurosis and perversion thus no longer constitute the terms of a judgment that distinguished the normal from the pathological, but the simple terms of a choice, amoral and unconscious: the “choice of object,” the choice of the object of desire. And certainly, we could still refute this whole theory of castration, and therefore psychoanalysis itself (there may even be some good reasons to do so), but this time, in no way in the name of any type of homophobia in its theoretical suspense, Freudian-style psychoanalysis is beyond all homophilia, as all homophobia, and even the notion of “infantile regression” is no longer homophobic because it is, fundamentally, the peculiarity of all pleasure.
Consequently, on this point, we must certainly not “burn” Lacan, but rather honor him for having rehabilitated the reading of Freud, notably against American hyper-normalists, and for having sought to rid Freud himself of his prejudices, which made him almost systematically opt, less at the level of theory than of discourse and practice, for terms that are morally connoted as “weakness,” “powerlessness to,” “resistance to get well,” et cetera. Thus, in regards to the rupture of the analytical relationship with the young Viennese lesbian, Lacan notes: “Regardless of Freud’s opinion, we are far from blaming everything on the deadlock in regards to the patient’s position [in the transfer]. His intervention, his conception, his prejudices on the position, must have something to do with the situation’s breakdown.” What then, according to Lacan, are these prejudices on the young lesbian’s transferential position? Of having mistaken the imaginary position for the symbolic position, the transfer, and thus the analytical relationship, have no impact on the imaginary level but only on the symbolic level. And thus, regardless of who is male or female in reality, all that counts are the symbolic positions occupied in the structure: a transfer, and more generally a relationship, is always possible because the “perversion” is no less a structure than the neurosis. Homosexuality is thus no more, no less “normal” than heterosexuality because neither of them is [normal]; in a sense even, neither of the two exists—there exists only difference, the Other.
From this point of view, those psychoanalysts who want to forbid legalization (same-sex
marriage
) or lineage (gay
parenting
) in the name of the preservation of symbolic order, just as those who stigmatize these forms of normalization in the name of the subversion of this same order, have no idea what they are saying; specifically, if symbolic order can be odiously threatened or supported in a conformist manner by imaginary identifications, it is simply not a symbolic order; as per the Lacanian way of speaking, “it would be known.” To state it more simply,
gender differences
and the primacy of the phallus that symbolically constitutes them, if they are essential, are only essential because they are, in fact, symbolic: anyone can “choose” to identify themselves with any place, the only thing that is important for one’s own health is being able to hold to it. Thus, the gay or lesbian’s ethics would also consist of “not retreating before the legitimacy of one’s desires” by admitting only which place he or she occupies (phallic or spayed, active or passive). It is not very elegant, certainly, but this is not a question of homophobia, but rather misogyny, and then some.
On this count, we can no longer speak of homophobia, neither with regard to gays nor lesbians, because the reign of the significant symbolic King, the Phallus, only assigns the places, as the God of St
Paul
, that is to say “without distinction of persons” nor anatomies. In this sense, the aging (and often very obscure) Lacan uses droll phrases, like a match to the Deleuzian joke (they are obviously laughing at the same thing), to explain that the symbolic Phallus, which he calls
touthomme
[allman] or the
touthommic
“race,” expresses its truth in the sexual act that it institutes and not in the relationship of the same name that does not exist:
Would we presume that of
allman,
if there remains a bi[o]logical trace, it is but of a race to Thomosize ourselves, and nothing else at all…. It is constituted from the way the order of discourse transmits symbolic places, those by which are perpetuated the race of masters and no less the slaves, of the pretentious as well, to which must be added in response that of fags, of the boring, and I would add that they not go without the bored.
To see in this the slightest indication of homophobia would not only be to lack humor, but to think the moon is made of green cheese, given that, to the contrary, the homophobic argument is pinned down (and certainly as is any univocally homophile discourse): one only sees “dirty fags” when one takes oneself for a little master, and one only believes oneself capable of judging the Other when one’s own knowledge judges oneself, and does so harshly; in Lacanian terms, psychoanalysts are also assholes.
What is a Pervert?
Is that to say that, thanks to Lacan, psychoanalysis could finally in truth be washed of all suspicion of homophobia, and that all there remains is to scorn, in the name of their “stupidity,” those who still believe they can find in it the foundations of a
real
(thus political and legal) heterosexual Order and not a symbolic one (thus falling under a completely different law)? Not quite, and that, at least in France, is because of Lacan himself, who was not outdone on the question of the “discourse of the master.” And the fact that he knew it and added to it, no doubt in order to not overly enjoy it, does not totally exonerate him. More precisely, if Lacan succeeded in illegitimizing all homophobic discourse and claims by subscribing gender differences to symbolic order, just as with the un-analyzable mix of seriousness and humor he used to speak of it, if he thus succeeded in saving psychoanalysis (unwillingly: obviously, he could not have cared less) of the accusation of being homophobic by sacrificing past and future psychoanalysts, he nonetheless permitted some of them to find themselves, for better or for worse, on a relatively homophobic basis. And that, for three reasons.
First of all, he himself transgressed the limits he imposed on his own discourse, that is, to be but the “frenzy of science” and thus to be able to intervene only on
an individual basis
with
each
of those who are in search and having difficulty before the truth or their truth—scientists, neurotics, perverts, the insane—but never in a discourse for everyone, never for all. As far as we are concerned here, if the symbolic structure is truly independent of reality because it founds it as real, that implies that there may be a truth to certain particular homosexual and heterosexual histories, but that there is no sense in conceiving of a generic homosexual relationship, and even less of a general relation between homosexuality and heterosexuality. But, he could not help himself: he gained a following, he spoke to everyone of the Pervert and the Master, in Vincennes University, before the ORTF (French bureau of television and radio broadcasting), everywhere. Doing this, he reopened Pandora’s Box: psychoanalysts had to speak up, to intervene politically, they were the specialists of the Thing. So, what would require a prioritized intervention today if not the stakes in gender differences and, more precisely, gay and lesbian claims or demands? All of Lacanism should learn to keep quiet on these stakes: it is none of its business. But Lacan transgressed, and it is necessary to resemble the master: today’s psychoanalytical homophobia is no longer an interest, as mercantile and sordid as it may be, it is a symptom, and, in many ways, that is even less forgivable.