May, Robert. "Re-Reading Freud on Homosexuality." In Domenici & Lesser, Eds. Disorienting Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Reappraisals of Sexual Identities. Routledge: New York, 1995. 153-65.
May begins be asking why it is that gays and lesbians, queers more generally, are so prone to distrust psychoanalysis. He discusses "two books representative of mainstream American Psychoanalysis's view of homosexuality from the late '50s through the early 70s" these being Irving Beiber Ed. Homosexuality (1962) and Charles Socarides The Overt Homosexual. (1968). & gives some quotes from each that show just how pathologizing each text is.
May, though is trying to clarify Freud's radical unlikeness to the thought of these American analysts.
"The Freud who interests me, and whom I think is the redeeming Freud, is the Freud who is constantly doubling back to undercut distinctions, distinctions to which he himself has allegiance, or even has himself constructed. This self-destructing Freud is in tune with our contemporary sense of the instability of meaning, the limitations of binary positions, and the importance of noticing what's outside the frame" (157).
& restated somewhat
"The Freud who I believe remains most persistently interesting and valuable is the Freud who could never be content with a given formulation and was constantly revising and undercutting" (157).
Writing of the American psychoanalytic establishment;
"To be established, respected, socially empowered to judge others—this was the triumph of orthodox psychoanalysis in the 1950s. It became, then, an irresistible target for the righteous anger of the unwillingly diagnosed and of those who had good reason to feel excluded and demeaned: women, gays, even psychologists and social workers wanting admission to mainstream psychoanalytic institutes. The rise of biological psychiatry, the radical decline in society's willingness to pay for long-term psychotherapy, and ideological shifts in the culture all have combined to destroy the foundation of psychoanalysis' social power. It will be interesting to see if the anger against psychoanalysis decreases in turn" (158).
…this book was published in 1995, but in the 17 years since then, while surely less people know less overall about Freud, it seems to me that much of what has been retained is the bullshit. Certainly the unthought rejection of Freud is still extremely common, even amongst those who have not heard of 'The Oedipus Complex.'
May notes that while perversion, and pervert sound "harsh and assaultive to many" that "it's important to notice that the vocabulary Freud is trying to free himself from centers around the label 'degeneracy,' a pseudo-neurological term used in his day to categorize (and stigmatize) homosexuality" (159). & indeed this is a good point, though one that dogs all discussion of perversion (and in a different way, psychosis). Still, it bears repeating that Freud was fighting against a large group of medical and sexological and psychological folks who were all positive that homosexuality was the result of some as yet to be found degeneracy of the body itself, against which to classify variation of the sexual instinct as inversions or perversions or whatever was a more (though clearly not totally) value neutral approach.
May writes of Freud's subverting of the definition of 'perversion' that he had himself given. "Here is the enlivening paradox: a binary distinction is bridged, and therefore subverted, by contact between any any two adjacent links in the chain. There must then be a place where the distinction breaks down and we can't tell the difference" (160). As May plays out in more detail that I've reproduced here, Freud sets up the distinction of perverse to "normal" sexuality then almost immediately begins to problematize "perverse" such that much of what we all take for granted as very common 'things to do' with one another, sexually, might be thought of as perverse as well.
May discusses the insistently "Knowing" attitude (162 & elsewhere) taken by Freud in the work, an all-too-questionable posture it seems from our current perspective. But he is at pains to show how Freud is continually oscillating between statements that seems to be erecting hierarchies and classificatory schemes only to undermine their stability with his next utterance. Likewise, we might grant Freud a bit of leeway as well in that I think we would be hard pressed to find anyone publishing papers in his time who adopts a rhetoric of uncertainty or who insists on ambiguity or undecidability when discussing sexual matters - my hunch is that the were we to look at the discursive situation his works were joining in to we would find a discursive norm everywhere present such that authors presume in advance that classifications are possible, that researchers will be definitive in their claims. This was Freud's academic culture in large part, that he so frequently operates within its rhetorical demands and nonetheless undermines the stability of so many of his and other's classificatory schemes is quite radical in many ways.
That article is all that I am going to mention, but here is a link to the book if anyone is curious about the other articles. Below are several pictures of people turned up by a "Robert May" google image search. I doubt that any of these is the author.
