Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis [Paperback]

Tim Dean (Editor), Christopher Lane (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0226139379 | ISBN-13: 978-0226139371 | Publication Date: June 1, 2001 | Edition: 1

Why has homosexuality always fascinated and vexed psychoanalysis? This groundbreaking collection of original essays reconsiders the troubled relationship between same-sex desire and psychoanalysis, assessing homosexuality's status in psychoanalytic theory and practice, as well as the value of psychoanalytic ideas for queer theory. The contributors, each distinguished clinicians and specialists, reexamine works by Freud, Klein, Reich, Lacan, Laplanche, and their feminist and queer revisionists. Sharing a commitment to conscious and unconscious forms of homosexual desire, they offer new perspectives on pleasure, perversion, fetishism, disgust, psychosis, homophobia, AIDS, otherness, and love. Including two previously untranslated essays by Michel Foucault, Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis will interest cultural theorists, psychoanalysts, and anyone concerned with the fate of sexuality in our time.

Contributors:
Lauren Berlant
Leo Bersani
Daniel L. Buccino
Arnold I. Davidson
Tim Dean
Jonathan Dollimore
Brad Epps
Michel Foucault
Lynda Hart
Jason B. Jones
Christopher Lane
H. N. Lukes
Catherine Millot
Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Ellie Ragland
Paul Robinson
Judith Roof
Joanna Ryan
Ramón E. Soto-Crespo
Suzanne Yang

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"This important collection of essays will dispel forever the illusion that psychoanalysis has nothing to teach us about lesbian and gay sexuality. It gives a powerful demonstration of the apparently limitless capacity of this discourse to say something new about the issues that matter to most of us. And, given that homosexuality plays a part in the organization of even the most normative psyche, there is none which should matter more."--Kaja Silverman, author of Male Subjectivity at the Margins

"A wide-ranging collection of essays on a topic whose time has come at last, Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis contains some surprising new takes on ethics and Foucault, attempts to draw Lacan to the side of queer, and revisits 'classic' texts of gay and lesbian theory, reviving old debates with fresh ambition."--Teresa de Lauretis, author of The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From the Inside Flap

Why has homosexuality always fascinated and vexed psychoanalysis? This groundbreaking collection of original essays reconsiders the troubled relationship between same-sex desire and psychoanalysis, assessing homosexuality's status in psychoanalytic theory and practice, as well as the value of psychoanalytic ideas for queer theory. The contributors, each distinguished clinicians and specialists, reexamine works by Freud, Klein, Reich, Lacan, Laplanche, and their feminist and queer revisionists. Sharing a commitment to conscious and unconscious forms of homosexual desire, they offer new perspectives on pleasure, perversion, fetishism, disgust, psychosis, homophobia, AIDS, otherness, and love. Including two previously untranslated essays by Michel Foucault, Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis will interest cultural theorists, psychoanalysts, and anyone concerned with the fate of sexuality in our time.

Contributors:
Lauren Berlant
Leo Bersani
Daniel L. Buccino
Arnold I. Davidson
Tim Dean
Jonathan Dollimore
Brad Epps
Michel Foucault
Lynda Hart
Jason B. Jones
Christopher Lane
H. N. Lukes
Catherine Millot
Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Ellie Ragland
Paul Robinson
Judith Roof
Joanna Ryan
Ramón E. Soto-Crespo
Suzanne Yang

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 472 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (June 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226139379
• ISBN-13: 978-0226139371
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #633,384 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Christopher Lane teaches literature at Northwestern University and is a recent Guggenheim fellow. A London-born literary critic and intellectual historian, his work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Slate, Chronicle Review, and many other newspapers and periodicals. He is the author of, most recently, The Age of Doubt: Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty (Yale, 2011). His other books include Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (Yale, 2007), winner of the Prescrire Prize for Medical Writing (France) and highly commended by the British Medical Association, translated into French, Spanish, Danish, Japanese, and Korean.

He writes a popular blog for Psychology Today called "Side Effects" (recent posts appear to the right). He also writes regularly for the Huffington Post.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Courageous, fascinating, and overdue, November 13, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (Paperback)

Many of us have heard the story of Freud writing the mother and telling her, in essence, that there was nothing wrong with her son being homosexual. The story is so unambiguous that we also have wondered what went wrong--with psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis--that resulted in homosexuality being directly and indirectly stigmatized for so long by professionals whose fields supposedly were largely influenced by Freud, other schools of psychological theory and thought notwithstanding. At the same time, many of us have concluded that perhaps that question didn't matter so much after the APA removed homosexuality from its list of illnesses nearly 30 years ago and the professional practice of psychoanalysis continued its long-term decline both in absolute terms and relative to other theories and methods.

Now Tim Dean, Christopher Lane and their book's contributors--with findings and interpretations drawn from diverse quarters--bring together gay/lesbian studies and queer theory with psychoanalysis, seriously engaging Foucault; making Lacan, Laplanche and others previously omitted from these interchanges relevant to the issue of psychoanalysis; emphasizing the need to integrate lesbians into debates that were for a long-time primarily about (and often by) gay men; and keeping it all timely and relevant in light of queer theory, AIDS, and other recent developments.

Students of gay/lesbian studies (including GLBT history), queer theory, and/or psychoanalysis obviously will profit greatly from this book. Those with a working knowledge of psychoanalysis will find this book easiest to digest while continuously stimulating; those without that working knowledge will find some parts tougher sledding than others but surely worth the effort. There's something truly thought-provoking just about every time you turn the page. It's surprising that no one had written and/or edited a book like this one before and I'd bet that Dean and Lane put years of thought and planning into this one. We should all be glad they did.