Ganimedes en el diván: etiología de la homosexualidad masculina desde el psicoanálisis

Abstract

The relationship between psychoanalysis and homosexuality has been troublesome and ambiguous. Psychoanalytic thinking about male homosexuality was probably more culturally biased and in uenced by the personal inclinations of analytical authors than other subjects. This thesis rstly aims to be a history of this con ict and secondly to clarify the reasons of this ambiguity. Freud was ambiguous when, on the one hand, he declared that homosexuals were not sick and even defended their right to become psychoanalysts and, on the other hand, developed the conceptual basis of an etiopathological theory that considered homosexuality a block in the psychosexual development of an individual. A preliminary and fundamental question in writing a history of psychoanalytic theories of homosexuality is the following one: what is the meaning of the word homosexuality in psychoanalysis? Or rather, what are the characteristics of the anthropological type that psychoanalysis calls homosexual? Since the publication of the History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault, there have been numerous studies that help to answer this question. For Freud, the homosexual is the anthropological type described by the medical science in the late nineteenth century. He is the homosexual described by Kra t-Ebing, Schrenck-Notzing and Binet. Foucault explained how the medical imperialism of the late nineteenth century shaped the conception of sexuality and created new anthropological types, including the homosexual. The homosexual is now a species. Studies on the relationships between homosexuality and psychoanalysis are not numerous. Furthermore, very important authors such as Bion, Winnicott and Lacan have touched only tangentially the issue of homosexuality. Even fewer are the critical studies about the history of the psychoanalytic theories of homosexuality. The rst systematic study of the relationship between psychoanalysis and homosexuality is the book written by Kenneth Lewes The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality published in 1988. It may be the best book written on this theme. The author chooses not to analyze the positions of Jung, Fromm, Stekel and generally favors American authors. He does not include, in his discussion, the criticisms that Foucault addressed to the medical psychiatric discourse right in those years, so Lewes does not re ect on the meaning of homosexual as a clinical subject in psychoanalytic thought. Moreover, the history he presents ends with the beginning of what we have called the third phase of the psychoanalytic approach to homosexuality...