Critical, Classic Psychoanalysis vs. Affirmative Essentialism
Part II, Chapter 1 of In Defense of Pedagogic Sanity
Critical Psychoanalysis vs. Affirmative Essentialism: Part II of In Defense of Pedagogic Sanity
Many psychoanalysts, along with psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, counselors, and social workers, have permitted the officials governing their professional associations (ASA, the various APAs, etc.) to guide them into adopting an “affirmative” approach to LGBTQA+ lifestyles. These endorsements provide a strong basis for a pedagogy which promotes such lifestyles to schoolchildren: presenting these as optimal life-choices for the children’s future adult life. If these lifestyles are indeed the product of being “born that way”, than the earlier we promote such lifestyles to children, the smoother will be their process, the less traumatic, of helping them accept and become comfortable their essential nature. Children whose essence pushes toward a heterosexual, cis-gendered lifestyle, will not be adversely affected.
If instead, we adopt the Queer Theoretical perspective, than there are no children who are naturally bound toward an exclusively heterosexual, cis-gendered lifestyle. All children are queer, as well as “gender-fluid”. To fail to promote these alternate lifestyles, represents, therefore, a betrayal of children, depriving them of the realization of their full potential.
So it’s a win-win. Where’s the harm?
This relatively new perspective that has taken over almost the entirety of the psychotherapeutic industry runs counter, however, to the classic psychoanalytic critique of homosexuality and trans-gender-tending sexual body dysphoria (to which I will now refer as “H/T”), based upon the basic premises of psychoanalysis: which are just as much opposed to the old Catholic doctrine of original sin.
The basis for these associations’ decisions to discard more than a century’s worth of scientific investigation and theorizing, was not any such further, deeper, or more insightful scientific investigation or theorizing. It was based instead upon political pressure to “normalize” H/T, thus “liberating” these choices from any and all critical, scientific consideration, by the gay rights organizations. These organizations accomplished this dubious agenda via disruptive sit-ins at these associations’ meetings. i This agenda mandated that the very heart of psychoanalysis itself was hollowed out.
There have been two bases for this revisionism. One of them is a smear campaign, so far waged successfully, to confuse people into thinking that the critical psychoanalytic approach is homophobic, and that the reparative therapy based upon it, has been conclusively proven harmful and ineffective. We’ll discuss the falsity of these claims in a later chapter.
The theoretical basis for this rather drastic change in these professionals’ perspective is ontological essentialism, spiritual or biological. In later chapters, I will critique various texts which were obviously written under the influence of this ideology. For right now, let’s discuss its two basic variants:
The “Born that Way” View:
This approach is one in which LGBTQA+ preference is solely determined by one’s particular essence, which is either biological, or spiritual. There has been no convincing evidence offered, however (we will take this up further in the chapter on the scientific evidence about these matters), that such people have a genetic make-up that differs significantly from that of the straight and the cis-gendered. And in fact, most if not all of these associations admit in their statements on the matter that these alternate sexual attractions/body dysphoria must have at least an additional, socio-environmental basis.
Nor, of course, is it even possible to find objective evidence for a determinative role by some spiritual essence. The only basis for such claims, therefore, is sheer impressionism: “I felt gay from when I was very young”. But as we will see from the next chapter, when I present the psychoanalytic critique, this critique can account for this feeling, without resorting to unfounded bio-genetic theories, or the presence of spiritual essences that go bump in the night, and whose capacity, as Hotspur says, to come when we call, is very doubtful.
The other theoretical justification comes out of Queer Theory. This form of essentialism is more, in a way, broad-minded. It presents the idea that we are all essentially Queer. It was presented by Carl Wittman in his 1970 Gay Manifesto:
Nature leaves undefined the object of sexual desire. The gender of that object is imposed socially. Humans originally made homosexuality taboo because they needed every bit of energy to produce and raise children: survival of species was a priority. With overpopulation and technological change, that taboo continued only to exploit us and enslave us.ii
Note what Wittman is saying here. According to him, heteronormativity is purely socially imposed, and oppressive. Still, in past societies, this oppression was necessary, since they were technologically backward and under-populated. Now, however, this norm is purely in the service of those who would “exploit and enslave us”. For the individual, it offers no intrinsic value: such as psychic health, as Erich Fromm asserted in The Art of Loving, through the unique “rebirth” offered only by romantic union between man and woman, that alone transcends our basic, by default, human condition of “separateness”.iii
Maturity? Emotional stability? Deep intimacy, via a unity of the yin and yang, the animus, with the animua? The joys of having and raising children?
Bah, Humbug! We had best just get rid of it. Scrap it all for an “anything goes” attitude. It is purely a relic of the feudal past, like any other piece “of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism” (Marx and Engels, the Manifesto). Instead of ennobling us, it cripples us.
Who is it that is conducting this alleged “exploitation and enslavement”? What is the source of this sexual oppression, this “dead hand of the past” upon the genitals and erogenous zones of the living? Wittman’s answer is as follows: “the exploitation of minorities by capitalism, [and] the arrogant smugness of straight white male middle-class Amerika”.
Wittman disguises his real, divisive view behind pseudo-Marxist rhetoric. His “arrogant” discourse is inimical to the genuine Marxist call for unity and equality in fighting the common class enemy. Marxists distinguish between the exploitative class interest of the capitalist class, and the false consciousness of intermediate, majority layers of the lower classes, and aims, with a respectful approach, to win them over, out of their support for the ruling class.
By contrast, Wittman’s actual view, like so much of Queer Theory, is divisive, and profoundly disrespectful. In his discourse, the consciousness of the “Straight (also white, English, male”, is identical, to that of the “capitalist”. In none of their thinking is there “room for equality.” The “cause” and “reflection” of this “verbal hierarchy” is the “social institutions” of “Amerika” As opposed to the Marxist view, in Wittman’s thoroughly idealist conception, he never offers a theoretical, materialist social ontology which places the capitalist class in control of these institutions, primarily because of their ownership of the means of production, and thus their control of the means of communication, and cultural hegemony. Thus, for Wittman, the Straights, whites, English, and males, are all just as culpable for homophobia as the capitalists.
Wittman’s view is much more Weberian than Marxist: a neo-Hobbesian view of a war of all against all. But instead of the Hobbesian emphasis on a pre-social “state of war” mostly between individuals, for Weberians like Wittman, groups, in the modern, materialist era of society, struggle against each other to monopolize wealth, status, and power, legitimating this monopoly by manipulating culture to place themselves in the center, and demean and marginalize other groups. With this conception, it becomes very difficult to understand how these “arrogant, straight white middle class males” can ever become Wittman’s allies, in the struggle against homophobia. And so he might as well indulge his ressentiment against us, by shaming, insulting, and guilt-tripping us instead!
Gays traditionally have been, in the Weberian Frank Parkin’s term, socially excluded, culturally marginalized as deviant or inferior. A genuine Marxist would call for tolerance and equality for those who choose alternate lifestyles, from those traditionally considered normal, while leaving the latter with even a shred of their former self-respect to enjoy their straight lifestyle choice in peace. Instead, Wittman proposes to turn the tables on what he considers to be his oppressors: “straight white male[s]” (and also, by the way, come to think of it, “capitalists”!). These, regarded as normal, and, on that basis, regarded themselves, in their “arrogant smugness”, as superior, shall now be considered abnormal, inferior, and the other adjective thought by Wittman, but left unspoken: “stupid”. Homophobes presume to tell Wittman his sex life is not only improper, but shouldn’t be tolerated. Instead of simply telling them to mind their own business, he presumes to tell all straights the same thing!
For all his bluster about how hierarchical thinking is deep fried into the cultural DNA of straights, whites, English, males, and...yes, also capitalists, Wittman does not seem particularly immune from such thinking himself. His only problem with it is who gets to be on top, and who, on the bottom. In his own ideal version of this social totem pole: it is gays whom Wittman wants society to consider, not as equals, but as superior, because they are courageous: enough to defy homophobic repression, and embrace the purportedly universal human polymorphous perversity. Instead of considering themselves normal, it is the straights who should be ashamed of the ‘narrow’ range of their sexual preference. They should grovel in the dust before gay men, because they are cowards. They were the ones who were sick, all along. Thus, in Wittman’s own words,
Exclusive heterosexuality is fucked up. It reflects a fear of people of the same sex [?!], it's anti-homosexual [?!!], and it is fraught with frustration [?!!!]. Heterosexual sex is fucked up too; ask women's liberation about what straight guys are like in bed [?!!!! Which “liberated women” is he asking about this? Did he conduct a random sample in his survey—or did he just ask the lesbian separatists?]. Sex is aggression for the male chauvinist; sex is obligation for the traditional woman. And among the young, the modern, the hip, it's only a subtle version of the same. For us to become heterosexual in the sense that our straight brothers and sisters are is not a cure, it is a disease.iv
Need it be said that very little sagacity can emerge from such a vengeful motivational foundation?
Speaking of foundations, in a later chapter, we will discuss radical feminist Heather Brunskell-Evans’ critique of Queer Theory. She sees it as the theoretical bedrock of the trans-”female” arrogance she opposes. She argues, persuasively, that, in turn, the ideological foundation of Queer Theory is not primarily anti-capitalism or liberation, but instead, the neo-liberal ideology which places at its center, the narcissistic ideal of the sovereign consumer. “If I, a born male, want to consider myself female, use the women’s bathroom, compete with born-women in athletic competitions for which the prize is a hefty college scholarship, or push transitioning on schoolchildren—then that’s my right, and nobody has the right to criticize me for it!” Similarly—although HBE seems to shy away from this additional problem: “Nobody has the right to criticize me, either, not only for pursuing a gay lifestyle, but also promoting that lifestyle to schoolchildren! They and I, have the right to be presented with the widest range of choices from which to choose—and to make whatever choice we want to make, without any adult offering a critique of some of those choices!”
By accepting either of these essentialist ontologies, as a basis for an “affirmative” rather than critical-psychoanalytic approach to pedagogy, what the psychiatric/psychotherapeutic/psychoanalytic professional associations eliminate from psychoanalysis, is what we will discuss in this chapter:
1) a view of consciousness as multilayered—including an unconscious realm in which choices are made and retained—but unconsciously. This view of conscioussness is the antidote, so to speak, for the “Born That Way” essentialist ontology.
2) Freud’s psychosexual developmental theory, by which people’s desires and needs mature, from the infantile, to the genital--and the heterosexual. This developmental process is mediated by parental guidance, which may be gentle and wise, or it may include undue repression. Yet its result is sublimation of the more infantile impulses and instincts, into full, genital, heterosexuality, and identification with the sexual body into which we were born. it is a process that promotes psychological health. It’s not perfect—nothing in this life is. But we are better off with it, than without it. This view is the alternative to the Queer Theorists’ ontology.
I. The Freudian Theory of Human consciousness and choice: multilayered, with much of it out of conscious awareness
Despite their best efforts to consign the psychoanalytic critique of H/T to the dustbin of medieval history, the fact is that this critique represents the dialectical Aufhebung of both sides of the antinomy between H/T essentialism vs. the medieval religious condemnation as a conscious sin against God, which is now improperly identified by these professionals, as well as the lay public, with the critical psychoanalytic perspective.
The critique is based upon the basic, foundational notion of psychoanalysis that there is region all of have in our minds, or rather, our body-minds, over which we do not have easy conscious control. This is not the conscious region of our minds. Nor is it the region of pure biological instincts
In between these two regions is the region that Freud termed the unconscious.v This antinomy between looking at H/T as a product of consciously decided upon sin, versus of spiritual or biological essence, results from a refusal to accept the existence of this intermediate, unconscious region, its powerful effect upon our consciousness, and its nature, in turn, as a product of our childhood conflicts, between our instincts, and the impact upon us of our familial-social environment. Are we nurtured and loved by our parents, or not? Are our basic needs fulfilled, or neglected? Are we encouraged to assert our needs and desires—or are we punished for such assertion? The answers to these questions are the choices we make as children, that we lodge, alongside our basic biological instincts, in the unconscious regions of our minds—and, according to Reich, our bodies.
The “Born that Way” and the Queer Theory essentialists thus feel LGBT!A+ lifestyles have a purely biological/spiritual basis. They do not. As I believe D.H. Lawrence said, “you must act on your deepest impulse—but be certain it is your deepest!”
This topography of the psyche is integrally related to the Reichian psychiatrist Stanley Keleman’s scheme, which he presented in his book, In Defense of Heterosexualityvi, for “the three realms”, which he conceptualizes as consisting of three concentric circles. These realms overlay more than just the Freud’s layers of the mind. Moving from the inner to the outer rings of Keleman’s , these are the pre-personal, the personal, and the post-personal.
The Pre-Personal: this is “the realm of the impersonal, prior to societal tradition and the development of personality, a realm of hormonal floods and primitive urges toward mating and replicating.”
The Post-Personal [social realm] “has a tremendous impact upon the individual in its demands for compliance and strict role performance.”
“In the Personal realm lies the unique human function, the way of experience we recognize as our own. The personal realm functions in terms of experience, feeling, and cognition.”
The task of psychoanalysis is to make us aware of the Ucs.’s profound influence upon the conscious thoughts, feelings, and desires of which we are aware. Without psychoanalysis, this layer, including the choices/adjustments we made as children that we stored in our unconscious minds, has the capacity to control us. It is based upon decisions we have made, mostly in our infancy, in response to the frustrations we feel in our childhood, largely at our parents: at their failures to satisfy our instinctual needs, and indulge our whims. Such frustration is inevitable even for children to feel even with the best of parents, but even more so, for parents armed with repressive attitudes toward childrearing.
The psychoanalytic critique of H/T neither condemns the LGBTQA+, from the standpoint of a traditional, social, post-personal realm, for making a conscious sinful choice. Nor does this critique affirm it as a choice they make that is congruent with and entirely determined by their biological or spiritual essence. Rather, this critique sees a person’s choice of H/T as a response to particular, deficient familial-social complexes and (mis)treatments he experienced as a child: coming out of the post-personal, familial social realm when he was a child.
The affirmative essentialists see repression emanating from the realm of the social (familial, or from the larger society), purely as homo- or trans-phobic, repressive of an innate queer or trans essence.
The psychoanalytic critique certainly acknowledges this repression. But in addition, it argues that psychosexual repression from the social realm, and especially, the familial-social realm, can be greatly responsible for H/T itself. Poor, repressive, neglectful parenting may induce a child to adopt H/T. As his unconscious response to this repression, he may choose to sexualize his relationship with other members of his own sex, or feel as if he was “born in the wrong body”. He may adopt these attitudes, borne from repression, as his permanent lifestyle choice, in order to compensate for his frustration. While this is a choice, a “creative adjustment”, as Fritz Perls would say, that seems the best to and for the child at the time, in response to his environment, such a choice is not deemed optimal by such psychoanalytic critics, in the long term.
II. Freudian Theory of Dialectical Development Toward (Heterosexual) Genitality
Sigmund Freud theorized human psycho-sexual development as a dialectical processvii . It is driven biologically, by a process wherein the sexual instincts and erogenous zones give way to each other. Yet it also requires social-familial nutrients, another vital part of this dialectic, to achieve its ideal goal: (heterosexual) genitality.
This theory is inimical to that of the static, essentialist ontologies we have just discussed. For the latter, there isn’t much of a path, let alone a dialectical one. As with the teleologic of Aristotle, those with an H/T essence either realize their potential, uninhibited by societal repression, and “come out” to adopt an LGBTQA+ lifestyle choice, or they are not living according to their “truth”, and so become repressed, self-hating, and suicidal.
In the dialectical conception of reality, however, as Hegel observed, “Things do not [merely] exist in' their truth“ Instead, they move determinatively, through a process of negation, with each stage of growth superseded in its turn by the next one. As Marcuse writes, “Dialectic in its entirety is linked to the conception that all forms of being are permeated by an essential negativity, and that this negativity determines their content and movement”viii
Within the dialectical path delineated by Freud, the object of a child’s erotic attraction changes from year to year, motivated by the natural movement of erotic energy from one erogenous zone of the body to another—from the oral, to the anal, to the phallic, to the genital. This pleasure principle is sublimated into more orderly, civilized thought, feelings, and behavior, with parental love, repression, and guidance, and the resolution of the Oedipal Complex, from an infantile “polymorphous perversity”, (with the infant attracted erotically to a diverse array of objects) through these early stages, into the stage of latency. It is in this, pre-pubescent latency stage that children naturally feel same-sex attractions. Finally, at the end of the process, there is the genital stage, centered on sexual attraction to, and intercourse with, the opposite sex: mature heterosexuality.ix
Freud argued that people who do not end up at this heterosexual genital stage have “fixated” upon one and/or another cathectic attachment to an object integral to a moment earlier in the process of psychosexual development than the “genital” stage endpoint. The same-sex attractions of the latency stage, to cite the example most relevant to this discussion, have not been superseded by the opposite sex attraction of the genital stage. Thus such people have they have not achieved psychosexual maturity. Instead, they have been blocked, or crippled, via environmental causes (poor parenting, for example) in their development.
Freud insisted that “homosexuals are not sick!” Nevertheless, his theory, as may also have become obvious to the reader, offers an inherent critique of LGBT lifestyle choices, as a less than ideal, neurotic adaptation to environmental stressors/lack of parental support and love for walking the path toward (heterosexual) genitality.
As Alexander Lowen writes, “the sexual drive can be viewed as the biological force that functions to overcome the sense of aloneness and of isolation that the process of individuation produces”, and yet this process, to achieve full fruition, must be aided and abetted by loving supportive parents.x Conversely, it is only through (heterosexual) genitality that real human intimacy, and consequent individuation and maturity can develop. Homosexual activities anal intercourse, fellatio, kissing, use of dildos and sex toys, and mutual masturbation, simply do not measure up to the emotionally and psychologically enriching experience of personal intimacy, experienced via hetero-sex, any more than can the “rear approach” practiced by most non-human mammals:
The change in the coital position from the rear approach used by most mammals to the frontal approach used by most men [i.e. heterosexual human beings] is significant in terms of the relation of love to sex. In the face-to-face position, the awareness of the sexual partner as an individual is extended and deepened. Each person can more easily perceive the other’s feelings. In this position, the frontal surfaces of the body, which are the more sensitive areas, are brought into physical contact. It is an interesting speculation that this change in position may have made men more conscious of the feeling of love.xi
A comparison can be made from Freud’s dialectic of the psychosexual development to the Marcuse’s Hegelian dialectic of the seed becoming the tree. This may be contrasted with Aristotle’s teleological view of tree development—with Aristotle’s teleological view identical to that of the affirmative essentialist views we have discussed above. For Aristotle, everything the seed needs to become the tree—the seed’s telos, its final cause—is already contained within the seed. Unless, of course, some wood chopper cuts down the tree while it is still in its infancy or young treehood.
And so it is with these essentialist ideologies. In the “Born That Way” view, people are born homosexual or in the wrong body. They are only prevented from realizing their H/T potential, by the homo-/trans-phobic repressive forces of society. In the Queer Theory view, we all might remain polymorphously perverse—if it weren’t for those same repressive forces: under the direction of those smug, arrogant, middle class, English, white, capitalist males!
By contrast, in the dialectical view of the development of the plant, and the process of human psychosexual development, the environment is far more important, and complex. The seed is constructed, and in a sense programmed—”hard wired”--through natural selection, to receive the nurturance it requires from its environment in order to grow into a tree. However, the seed is related to the sources of these nutrients--in the seed’s environs—dialectically, conflictually. Instead of nurturing the plant’s growth, too much or two little of them may inhibit or thwart it, or even kill the seed. Too much air—and the seed dries up and blows away. Too much soil, and the seed cannot grow up enough to find the air. Too much water—and the seed is saturated and explodes.
In response to this external, environmental nurturance, the plant grows, toward its final form, ideally, a tall, strong tree, through the different stages of growth. These stages, however, also exist in a dialectical relationship with each other, and each of these conflicts must be resolved successfully, it the end is to be achieved, and achieved ideally. It is not a condition of “anything goes”. The growing tree cannot just “hang out”, choosing to remain in one of its stages vs. another, later one—go shopping in a supermarket of neo-liberal lifestyle choices, all of which are equally ideal. It must take a definite direcion, which involves determinate conditions, and a determinate negation of them, for the plant to grow into its next state of development. As Herbert Marcuse writes,
the things 'do not exist in' their truth. Their potentialities are limited by the determinate conditions in which the things exist. Things attain their truth only if they negate their determinate conditions. The negation is again a determination, produced by the unfolding of previous conditions. For example, the bud of the plant is the determinate negation of the seed, and the blossom the determinate negation of the bud xii
If this determinate negation is not accomplished, perhaps because of lack of nurturance: well, you wouldn’t have to be a botanist to call the growth of such a plant, “stunted”.
Similarly, a baby may be nurtured, and frustrated, so optimally as to move through all of Freud’s psychosexual stages to achieve heterosexual genitality. This success will also be the result of his hard-wired biological potential. But here, too, the environmental conditions—his familial environs—must be just right. His mother must love him unconditionally—and yet his father must love him, and eventually take him out of her orbit, and love him in his own way, share with him his pride in being a man. For the girl, her mother must give her unconditional love, and share with her, her pride in being a woman. The father plays his role, similarly pulling her out of Mom’s orbit, by letting her know he appreciates her as a woman Or as Clifford Allen writes, a bit more concisely:
The boy must mould his personality on that of his father and “learn to be a man” from contact with him. Similarly, the girl should learn feminine attitudes from her mother. The boy should find reasonable affection in the relationship with his mother (and the girl with her father) so that later on they may be able to have proper feeling to those of the opposite sex.xiii
For both sexes, a big part of this process is, as Joyce McDougall asserts, is to guide him or her gently, with support, through the Oedipal frustration he or she wlll experience by becoming aware of the “primal scene”, where he becomes aware of the fact that he cannot becomes his mother’s husband, or her father’s wife, nor sleep with her or him.xiv Without this gentle support, as we will discuss in the next chapter, he or she may very well find a (H/T) way to “delude” himself or herself into thinking he or she may “disavow” this scene: he need not live with the pain of this frustration.xv Thus, as with Hegel ad Marcuse’s unnurtured seed-plant-tree, instead of “realizing his true LGBTQA+ essence”, such a person’s growth toward psycho-emotional-sexual maturity, will be stunted, aka, perverted.xvi If members of the LGBTQA+ find themselves at peace with this perversion, that’s fine with me. I respect your choice. But note that I do not say further, as the saying goes, “more power—let alone all power-- to you”. We should not grant to you the power to promote your personal choice to schoolchildren, as if it is an ideal choice for the latter to make. If you want to practice affirmative therapy, to adults, that is your business, just as much as it should be our choice--unmolested--to practice critical psychoanalysis/reparative therapy. But yours is not an ideal choice. We should not promote confusion and perversion. Our pedagogy should be tolerant, yet hetero- and cis-gender normative. And our therapy for schoolchildren, suffering such confusion, while tolerant, should be reparative, not “affirmative”. We should encourage them to resume the natural path toward full genitality-heterosexuality.
In the next chapter, of Part II, I will further critique the essentialist ideology of “affirmative” pedagogy, as we examine the work of Michel Foucault, whom I consider to be a founder of Queer Theory. Ironically, I will continue to rely upon the work of Heather Brunskell-Evans: who, as we have seen, is a critic of QT: but considers herself to be a “Foucault Scholar”.
Notes:
i Ronald Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis. Princeton, 1987, Christopher Doyle, The War on Psychotherapy.
ii The gay manifesto - Carl Wittman | libcom.org
iii Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, Harper and Row, 1956, pp. 33-34.
iv Those who would try to pass off Wittman’s extremely hostile version of Queer Theory, must be living in a bubble, enveloping them since at least the 1990s. No, Wittman’s spirit lives on! I see in my Microsoft Bing newsfeed this morning (1/19/24) an article, in the New York Post, with the following title: “Seattle Teachers tells students it is ‘offensive’ to identify as straight.”.
For some reason, decades ago, when I was a grad student at CUNY, I was roaming floors other than that which housed my own Political Science Dept (maybe I was looking to meet girls?). On a blackboard outside the theater department, I came upon the following (from what I remember) “Call for Papers”: “We are looking for research on the following question. Why is it that so many women seek to marry men, move out to the suburbs with them, and bear and raise children?!” I resisted the urge to find a magic marker, and deface the flyer with the following: “Yea, what’s their PROBLEM?!!!!”
v Radicals like Jean-Paul Sartre and Fritz Perls didn’t favor this term. They aimed to discard the baggage accompanying the “unconscious”, as used by Freud, whereby Freud insisted that only a Freudian psychoanalyst could reveal to the patient the contents of his unconscious mind. Otherwise, these contents were completely and utterly repressed by the patient’s superego. Without the psychoanalysts’ interventions, the patient’s conscious mind was the mere passive recipient of its directives. Thus, Sartre and Perls employed other terms for Sartre, “bad faith,” for Perls, “creative adjustment” These concepts were based on these radical psychoanalysts’ view that granted to the conscious mind, in league with the psychoanalyst, a more active role in the process of healing, which they co-created.
vi Stanley Keleman, In Defense of Heterosexuality, Berkeley, CA, Center Press, 1982.
vii For a fascinating comparison of Freud’s psychosexual development to Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit, see Anthony Vacante, On Freudian Psychosexual Development as a “Spiritual Successor” to Hegelian Phenomenology, Jan 20,2021 https://vacanteanthony.medium.com/on-freudian-psychosexual-development-as-a-spiritual-successor-to-hegelian-phenomenology-3dafe945aa56
viii Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution; Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, 2nd ed., Routledge and Kegan, 1941, , p. 27.
ix I consider myself a neo-Freudian: not, as Woody Allen says about his therapist in Annie Hall, a “strict” one. The most prominent Left psychoanalytic dissidents of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute—Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, and Karen Horney—as well as the Object Relations, Self-Psychology, Gestalt, and Attachment theorists, all add much, and pose valuable critiques, to Freud’s work. Let’s just take the BPI dissidents, for example. They rejected Freud’s belief in the universality and inevitability of the Oedipal Complex. Horney revealed the greater importance of environmental deprivations over innate biological drives; while, relatedly, Fromm pointed, as revealed by Fromm’s teacher Harry Stack Sullivan, the importance of “interpersonal relations. As opposed to Freud’s thesis, Reich and Fromm argued instead that the Oedipal Complex was a psycho-social construction of the capitalist class, allowing fathers to instill in their male heirs both the ego-strength (from Mom’s “second womb” of unconditional love in the oral stage) and ruthlessness (redirected rage at the father seen by the son as the more powerful, unbeatable rival for his mother’s sexual affection) necessary to advance the family’s fortunes in the largely entrepreneurial competitive market of the capitalist era before the rise of the corporate economy. See Mark Poster, The Critical Theory of the Family. Nor did Reich share with Freud his conservative view that parental repression of children’s desires and needs—preventing them from “playing doctor” with each other, for example, was a necessary precondition for the very existence of human civilization. While “Unlike Freud, Fromm does not posit any specific developmental stages."* Reich at least did not reject Freud’s basic conception that children naturally undergo a dialectical process, with specific stages, of psychosexual development. Freud, Fromm, and Reich, however, all agree that this developmental process culminates naturally in (heterosexual) genitality. There is evidence—from the reference in Ego Hunger and Aggression to the work of Wilhelm Stekel—that Reich’s student Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt Therapy, also upheld this view (despite his wife Laura’s positing of a homosexual genitality—an oxymoron, and a politically correct cop out, in my view). And while Ira Gollobin, author of the masterful work, Dialectical Materialism, had little use for Freud due to the latter’s conservatism, his understanding of Jean Piaget’s stages of mental development as dialectical, can easily be applied to Freud’s theory of psychosexual development.
*Robert Ewen, An Introduction to the Theories of Personality, 2nd ed., Academic Press, 1984.
x Lowen, ibid, p. 78, et passim.
xi Lowen, ibid., p. 38.
xii See Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, op cit., pp. 64-72. He is discussing Hegel’s Science of Logic. When we get to our chapter dedicated to critiques of two essentialist texts, one of which was written by Permanent Revolution’s Frank Brenner, we will see that this conception of the dialectic is completely lost on him. He confuses it with the neo-liberal essentialism of Queer Theory.
xiii Clifford Allen, “Homosexuality: Nature, Causation, Treatment”, in The Problem of Homosexuality, by Charles Berg, M.D., and Allen (also M.D.), The Citadel Press, 1958, p. 63.
xiv A beautiful portrayal of such a gentle process of guidance through the Oedipal complex, is presented in an episode of The Andy Griffith Show, “Opie Loves Helen.” Opie, played by future film director and Happy Days star Ron Howard, son of Sheriff Andy Taylor (played by Griffith) lost his mother early in his life. When his schoolteacher, Helen Crump (Aneta Corsaut), who is also, unbeknownst to Opie, his father’s girlfriend (and future wife), is teaching dancing to her class, and Opie is left without a partner, Helen volunteers to dance with him. Mother-starved, he falls in love with her, so to speak, and wants to buy her the gift of nylon stockings. His father figures things out, and sits Opie down, with Helen. The following dialogue ensues between father and son, in Helen’s presence:
Andy: Miss Crump is a fine person – just a fine person – and I can understand you likin' her a lot.
Opie: Yes.
Andy: But, Opie, the, uh, the truth of the matter is: Miss Crump is a little more in line with my age. As a matter of fact, she's my girl. You're kinda steppin' into my territory. Well, that's right. She's my girl – like Sharon McCall was your girl.
Opie: Gee, Pa, I didn't know that.
Andy: I know you didn't, son.
Opie: Well, I won't do anything to break it up. If she's your girl, I just won't call her anymore.
Andy: Well, thanks.
Opie: You mean you and Miss Crump might get married someday?
Andy: Oh, I don't know. We, we might.
Opie: Gee, Pa, that's swell. As long as she's in the family, I don't care if she's my wife or my mother.
xv Joyce McDougall, Plea for a Measure of Abnormality, Routledge, 2015; The Many Faces of Eros: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Human Sexuality, Norton, 1995.
xvi Note: I am not calling anyone a “pervert”. I strongly object to any revival of this vulgar use of the term, to stigmatize human beings: alienating them from their full humanity, and our compassion and empathy. “Nothing human,” Terence (and Marx, in a prefatory quote to the first volume of Das Kapital!) wrote, “shall be alien to me”. I only apply it here to the process by which the path toward genitality is distorted by one’s deficient upbringing, and one’s unconscious adaptation to that upbringing.