Teresa’s anger towards her son is often a displacement of anger towards other close friends or relatives. We have both wondered if Luigi appears to be a safer target for her feelings because of her assumption, as her son, he will always be there for her. Furthermore, Luigi’s sexuality is culturally sanctioned as a scapegoat and her rage, through its displacement, feels justified.
In her exploration of themes associated with her homophobia or homophobias Teresa’s experience of me in the transference shifts between various positions. She relies on me as the mother who, she hopes, can save her from being consumed by her panics and her anger in relation to her son. She has never asked me about my sexuality. This is something Teresa doesn’t seem to want to know about and I think that my openness to the ambiguity of sexuality (of which I think she is aware) is crucial to her.
Can any of these reflections from Teresa’s sessions contribute to an understanding of the unconscious sources or workings of homophobias? My answer to this is both yes and no. There are significant dangers in making generalizations on the basis of one individual or a small number of individuals’ experiences. Quantification is not a solution to complexity. As O’Connor and Ryan point out, this tendency on the part of psychoanalysts to theorize lesbian sexuality on the basis of a small number of cases has been extremely limiting. I am neither offering a definitive explanation of homophobia nor claiming that there are inherent acultural features to homophobia, as has been claimed in classical psychoanalytic theorizing with regard to homosexuality. The value of case examples is that, like reading fiction, they can extend possibilities of thinking and raising questions about individuals’ experiences and alert us to their complexities: they do not and should not claim to offer definitive and universal explanations of certain experiences.
In my presentation I have addressed a number of dominant themes: the role of religious opinion which is likely to have been absorbed by her parents and herself, the question of her ‘causing’ her son’s homosexuality with the implicit assumption that his gay orientation is negative, her own, often abusive, experiences of masculine sexuality, her anxieties in the face of the ‘unknown’, the ‘whatever next?’, her fears of the possible fluidity of her own sexuality, of pleasure in, and enjoyment of it. Enfolded in her phobia or ‘condensed’ within it, to draw on Freud’s concept, are Teresa’s personal experiences in relation to sexualities but these are not acultural or ahistorical. The experiences she describes are specific to her lived relationships in her class and religious background and her gender.