The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists

6 Homosexualities from Freud to Lacan

111 6 Homosexualities from Freud to Lacan Robert Samuels A s many commentators have recently pointed out, Freud’s usage of the concept of homosexuality is so widespread and diverse that it threatens to overwhelm his entire theoretical system (Abelove, 1993; Dollimore, 1991). From the beginning of his work, homosexuality is used to explain such diverse phenomena as the causality of psychosis (Freud, 1911/1963), neurosis (Freud, 1905/ 1962,1909/1963), and perversion (Freud, 1905/1962), as well as the development of civilization (Freud, 1913/1963,1930/1985), and the limits of analysis itself. Through this heterogenous usage of homosexuality it is clear that Freud does not equate it with a particular stage of sexual development or a specific pathology. In fact, Freud’s work lays the groundwork for Lacan’s radical rejection of the notion of a normal form of sexuality. 32582 Chap 6 4/18/00, 9:27 AM 111 112 Robert Samuels Following Freud, Lacan argues that the normal is only the norm-of-the-male. In other words, psychoanalysis has no true, universal concept of the normal. This refusal to promulgate a normalized form of sexuality has been implicit in psychoanalysis ever since Freud (1905/1962) called heterosexuality a problem that has to be worked on: Thus from the point of view of psychoanalysis the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact based upon an attraction that is ultimately chemical in nature. (p. 2, note 1) In other terms, to paraphrase Lacan, there is no natural sexual relation. Heterosexuality as well as homosexuality is something that has to be created and constructed. It is this lack of a natural relation between the sexes that in part determines the essence of the unconscious and what Freud calls the bisexual nature of infantile sexuality. A logic of homosexuality can be constructed with concepts that Lacan introduced to psychoanalysis. In particular, the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic enable us to distinguish between what may be called psychotic, neurotic, and perverse homosexual desire (Samuels, 1993). From a Lacanian perspective, we can posit that psychotic subjects are dominated by the consequences of a foreclosure of the symbolic order of social signification and regulation (Lacan, 1966/1977, pp. 179–225). The unavailability of the cultural Other and the reality principle results in a return of the foreclosed signifiers (the symbolic order) in the Real. Neurotic subjects, on the other hand, avoid the Real by organizing sensations and thoughts into an Imaginary world (narcissism and idealization) as a defense against castration (the Symbolic). In perverse sexuality, the Imaginary echoes the Symbolic structures and scenarios of neurosis without the concomitant sacrifices that castration entails. (In establishing this logic of Freud’s and Lacan’s theories of sexual desire, we must keep in mind that most of Freud’s investigations of homosexuality deal exclusively with masculine sexuality and that all subjects are fundamentally bisexual from a Freudian perspective.) The Logic of (Homo)-Sexuality In the beginning of his ground-breaking Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud (1905/1962) employs the term “inversion” in 32582 Chap 6 4/18/00, 9:27 AM 112 Homosexualities from Freud to Lacan 113 order to upset the “normal” conception of sexual development and to introduce his notion of universal sexual “aberrations.” Inversion is first used to designate a reversal in object choice: “There are men whose sexual object is a man and not a woman, and women whose sexual object is a woman and not a man” (p. 2). Inversion also implies a reversal of sexual identification, when Freud refers to the argument that a homosexual male “feels he is a woman in search of a man” (p. 10). These two ideas, reversal of the object and reversal of gender identification, are often confused in Freud’s own work and in later theories of homosexuality. It is essential to distinguish clearly between a change in object-choice and a change in gender identification, for it is clear that some men believe themselves to be a man in search of another male (change in object), while other men identify themselves as being a woman in search of the opposite sex (change in gender identification). Freud also argues that some subjects are attracted to objects that combine attributes of both sexes, “There is...