The analysis of the homoerotic and the pursuit of meaning

This paper explores the dynamic tension between an evolving collective phenomenon and the nature of analytic process. Specifically, the focus will be erotic experiences which acquire a meaning through the culture at large, a meaning that may not be supportable when that material is subjected to psychological analysis. This stimulates a conflict between the symbolic attitude and the cultural perspective of the time. While the struggle between the individual and collective consciousness always emerges in analysis, the subject of same-gender sexual relations has become such a controversial and divisive issue in the current political environment that views toward homosexuality demand powerful allegiances and identification with either historic or contemporary ideas. People now identify as 'gay' and tend to see themselves as something akin to a race or perhaps alternative gender. Sexuality and relationship between same gendered people tends to be viewed through the lens of civil rights and the undeniable need for social equality. In this far-reaching and expanding collective phenomenon, psychology, in its support of human rights and accommodation to emerging trends, may be diminished in its capacity to pursue the meaning inherent in these human experiences. The position developed in this paper is that psychological experience, whether in the imaginal realm, dreams or personal consciousness, must be available for full analysis. Clinical experience and dreams are used to amplify this challenge to dynamic analytic practice.     

THE ELUSIVENESS OF MASCULINITY: PRIMORDIAL VULNERABILITY,LACK, AND THE CHALLENGES OF MALE DEVELOPMENT

Reaching beyond the Oedipus prototype to address the unrepresentable vulnerability founded on the boy's infantile helplessness in contact with the mother's body, the author aims to identify the inherent tensions and enigmas of being male. He proposes that both the repudiation of femininity and the overvaluation of phallicity are unconsciously constructed to withstand the fundamental deficiency grounded in the asymmetry of the boy's prephallic relation with his primary object. This bodily based primordial vulnerability, marked by absence and lack, remains elusive—an unsymbolizable experience that provides the archaic matrix for adaptive and defensive phallicism, the oedipal complex, and genital progression. A clinical vignette is presented to illustrate these concepts.     

Birkin's Struggle for Separateness in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love

In Women in Love, Birkin's fulfilment in the relationship with Ursula Brangwen is presented as the result of a struggle to achieve the separation of his self from a devouring mother image. Lawrence's unconscious fantasies concerning the processes contributing to the achievement of this goal are expressed in his depiction of Birkin's strategies. We can distinguish three different strategies: the homoerotic escape, the direct attack on the devouring mother image and the anal erotic self-assurance. We will analyze the devouring mother concept as well as these strategies and check whether the data related in the novel can fit in psychoanalytic formulations of relations and fantasies concerning the separation-individuation process in infancy and early childhood. Finally, we wonder to what extent the eventual relationship of Birkin with Ursula, presented as a fulfilment, can be conceived as a mature sexual love relation.