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A groundbreaking analysis of the troubled relationship between homosexuality and psychoanalysis, including two previously untranslated essays by Michel Foucault

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

The Austro-American psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut was one of the foremost leaders in his field and developed the school of self-psychology, which sets aside the Freudian explanations for behavior and looks instead at self/object relationships and empathy in order to shed light on human behavior. In How Does Analysis Cure? Kohut presents the theoretical framework for self-psychology, and carefully lays out how the self develops over the course of time. Kohut also specifically defines healthy and unhealthy cases of Oedipal complexes and narcissism, while investigating the nature of analysis itself as treatment for pathologies. This in-depth examination of “the talking cure” explores the lesser studied phenomena of psychoanalysis, including when it is beneficial for analyses to be left unfinished, and the changing definition of “normal.”

An important work for working psychoanalysts, this book is important not only for psychologists, but also for anyone interested in the complex inner workings of the human psyche.

A scholar, psychologist, physician, and experienced psychoanalyst, Marshall Edelson is uniquely qualified to respond to questions about the scientific status of psychoanalysis. He has written this book both for psychoanalysts and for philosophers of science, intending to bridge gaps in communication between them. It is also a book for anyone interested in the nature of psychoanalytic knowledge.