The Dictionary of Homophobia (123 page)

Secondly, he himself gave the key to this pillaging of symbolic order in the field of politics by his immoderate use of capital letters and play on words. To say Name-of-the-Father, the Phallus, the Signifier, or the Other, was to necessarily open the doorway to the imaginary at the very moment when we claimed to close it, because contrary to what it may be in German, using a capital letter in French or in English is to refer naturally to people and figures, and to acts that are imaginatively identifiable by those people and figures. Lacan wanted to say that the proper noun, the Name-of-the-Father was never more than a noun, a manna, which distributed itself into every meaning, anonymously: “To imply that the Name-of-the-Father is God. It is how psychoanalysis, successfully, proves that the Name-of-the-Father, we can just as well do without it, on the condition that we use it.” But, by using the capital letter, he once again set it up—in spite of himself or cynically—as a divine being and, thus, largely contributed to its mystification. After that, the perverse structure logically became the structure of the Perverse, the homosexual drive logically became the drive of the homosexual, the very incarnation of the “more ecstasy,” and, sadly, symbolic order incarnated itself in the Order of Symbols that must be saved at all cost as it has become incarnate in the law of the state. It is the same for plays on words: with Lacan, they inaugurally and subtly serve not to express, but to imply, at the risk of the one listening: but overused alone, they are nothing more than linguistic habits or slogans, circulating the symptoms more than revealing them. Would not the puns run the risk of having homophobic effects among all those who learned to repeat them before learning to understand them? To play the game of playing on words, we could easily say that Lacan, after repeating the same old song, taught some of his disciples to better unsheathe words, certainly to better stab themselves in the foot (or better yet, their patients), but the damage appears to have been done, for today, they only intervene, at least publicly, to prevent real desires from seeing the light of day.

Thirdly, and it is the worst and the most serious criticism: because of his compulsion for reactionary posturing (specifically, in reaction to the supposed illusions of others), Lacan simply taught (or re-taught) psychoanalysis to summarily ignore reality in the very name of the only reality created by symbolic order and to sacrifice the health expected by the ones on the altar of Truth implied by the Other. Thus, he notably taught psychoanalysts who claim to adhere to this theory to turn away from the trivial sufferings of reality, from the “social,” or simply comforted them in their comfortable and cynical indifference. With Lacan, psychoanalysis, at least born from the attention to the suffering of the analyst’s subjects, finished by affirming itself on the scorn for all the suffering inside and outside of the office, suffering that, against his whole theory, cannot be called anything else but absolutely real and that he only took to be symptoms, in themselves indifferent. Certainly then, Lacan had courage to oppose himself, thanks to this indifference and this refusal to fight the symptom, to the Puritan (and homophobic) stupidity of the psychoanalytical majority; and he even went so far as to tell his own disciples or students at Vincennes that if they sought a teacher, they would certainly find one. And of course, the good souls who make money from the suffering of others are often overwhelmingly stupid. But, in the end, courage is never anything more than a simple, narcissistic fantasy, which, by definition, cannot transmit itself, but is constituently
depoliticizing
: it is Lacan, from the bottom of his own revolution, who taught or reminded others that there was no good psychoanalytical policy unless you were reactionary. From this point of view, the way that psychoanalysis in general, and Lacanian psychoanalysis in particular, totally missed, or almost, the political stakes of the FHAR social revolt, of the
decriminalization
of homosexuality, of PaCS, and especially AIDS, says a lot about his contemporary shortsightedness.

For these three reasons, try as we might to save psychoanalysis from homophobia thanks to Freud, for lack of saving psychoanalysts thanks to Lacan, in the end, even Lacan may not quite be savable, and it may be necessary to throw him out with the bath water. And that, not because he was not a “friend” of the Homosexual Cause (to criticize him for it would be ridiculous, or worse, it would be very “Lacan”: the symptom of an inadmissible scorn for the suffering of “private” homosexuals). Even less because he would have been the great demystifier of the illusions tied to all sexual affirmation (here, on the contrary, he could have done a pious deed). But, in the end, simply because he may have traded philosophical megalomania for analytical phobia, thus leaving psychoanalysis in the hands of the reactive phobias, including homophobia, that is to say the phobia of the protesting “Pervert,” the militant homosexual.

The Huge Labyrinthine System of Homosexualities
Thus, there is doubtlessly nothing to expect from psychoanalysis as such, at least in regards to gay and lesbian struggles. But to definitively turn our backs on it would be the greatest risk: to forget from where, from which huge labyrinthine system constructed on multiple contradictions, such a renouncement would take its sense. For, as apolitical and phobic as psychoanalysis may be, it remains that the different gay, lesbian, or queer associations and communities continue to confront the same contradictions that psychoanalysis has the merit of having revealed, for lack of having resolved them. Notably, these: How can one promote the very notions of homophobia and differences in genders while renouncing all notions of homosexuality and gender differences, even symbolic? How, concerning AIDS, can one claim to clean up one’s own back yard in regards to certain unsafe practices (bareback, etc.) without revisiting, one way or another, the question of the relation between desire and law, as much as between love and ecstasy? How can one claim to both affirm the nature of one’s sexual identity
and
its transgender free usage while renouncing the very notion of “unconscious choice of object,” which best expresses this ambivalence? How can one disown any reference to the Phallus-king without simply and foolishly denying the absolutely real abyss that separates gay sexuality from lesbian sexuality? Or how can one renounce all ideas of perversion, in the sense of diversion and specific structure of desire, without surrendering homosexual communities to a certain petite bourgeoisie Puritanism (“We are normal!”) or without dissolving the very notion of community (since there would no longer be anything specific)?

It is probable that there is no unambiguous answer to these questions. Simply, at this level, a certain usage or a certain poaching of psychoanalysis may help to continue the analysis, and thus to remember that in the battle of sexualities, as in any battle, alliances and ruptures are as often internal as external, and it would no doubt be a mistake to forego them. With his inexhaustible and mean humor, Lacan, ever the same, questioned himself thus: “Are we equal to what we appear to be called to bear, by Freudian subversion, i.e. the being-for-sex? We do not seem very willing to hold the position. Nor much gayer. This, I think, proves that we are not quite there yet.” We could look closely, and we could replace “Freudian” with “militant homosexual”: despite himself and in spite of everything, it may well be a warning for everyone.
—Pierre Zaoui

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Le Monde
(June 26, 1999).

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, no. 1 (2003).

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.]

———.
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———.
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(1997).

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———.
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—Abnormal; Ex-Gay; Heterosexism; Inversion; Medicine; Otherness; Perversions; Psychiatry; Psychology; Shame; Symbolic Order; Treatment; Vice.

PSYCHOLOGY

Psychology is the science of the mind or mental phenomena, but the word’s origin, which is Greek, means “study of the soul.” Psychology is a social science whose development has been greatly influenced by a number of disciplines, including
philosophy, biology
, physics, cognitive sciences,
sociology
, and
medicine
. Despite its diverse origins, however, psychology has adopted the scientific method as its primary means of investigation.

From this perspective, the study of human sexuality has been constructed as a legitimate object of scientific research: this process has led to what Foucault called
scientia sexualis
. The first studies in this field of sexuality in general, and homosexuality in particular, were largely influenced by the dominant social norms that condemned deviant sexual behavior and turned homosexuality into a pathology (Richard von Krafft-Ebing). However, certain researchers and political activists of the time who did no conform to the social norm, such as Havelock Ellis and Magnus
Hirschfeld
, tried to oppose this orthodoxy. Thereafter, such researchers pursued their own work in this field, notably biologist Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues. Kinsey demonstrated that homosexual behavior was far from rare, and proposed a concept of sexuality as a continuum ranging from exclusively heterosexual behavior to exclusively homosexual behavior. Similarly, in her studies on the relationship between sexuality and psychopathology, Evelyn Hooker demonstrated that, in this regard, homosexual men do not distinguish themselves from heterosexual men. There was some scientific “proof” indicating that homosexuality was neither an anomaly nor a pathology; however, most psychiatrists and psychoanalysts (such as Edmund Bergler and Charles Socarides) were persuaded of homosexuality’s psychopathological character. And yet, the father of
psychoanalysis
, Sigmund Freud, did not consider homosexuality to be a pathology.

A significant step was achieved in 1973 when the American Psychiatric Association voted in favor of removing homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But for some, this resolution was motivated more by political pressure from gay and lesbian associations than by any careful consideration of medical evidence. Regardless, even though homosexuality is no longer officially considered a mental illness, some therapists continue to advocate renovation therapies for their gay patients. For them, the problem is homosexuality itself, rather than its potential lack of social acceptance.

The systematic analysis of attitudes on homosexuality (measured through questionnaires) has been an important means of investigation in many of psychology’s sub-fields, and its notions of homophobia and
heterosexism
are largely taken from this. The American psychologist George Weinberg, a heterosexual therapist, used the term “homophobia” to describe what he called “the fear of finding oneself in proximity to a homosexual,” as well as the feelings of self-loathing experienced by some homosexuals. Others preferred terms such as “heterosexism,” which draw attention to social attitudes and institutions that, in a diffuse manner, contribute to the domination of homo-, bi-, or transsexual individuals. More recently, American psychologist Gregory Herek proposed the term “sexual prejudice” to designate “any negative attitude based on sexual orientation, whether the person targeted is homo-, bi-, or transsexual.”