The liberal notion of privacy enshrined in The Wolfenden Report has strong resonances with the practice of psychoanalysis which also takes place between two consenting adults in private–and which depends heavily for much of its theorising on a radical distinction between inner/private, and outer/public. It is only with difficulty and even then very incompletely that contemporary mainstream psychoanalysis has been able to acknowledge that the private analytic relationship may bear and enact the signs and emotions of the wider society. The leading proponents of this position within psychoanalysis are the various relational schools, exemplified in the work of Stephen Mitchell and Lewis Aron. For the most part, these relational schools maintain a traditional individual/society, inner/outer, dualism, albeit paying more radical and critical attention to the ‘social’ aspect and the dynamics of e.g. racism or homophobia that can arise within therapy relationships and that are structured by wider social forces and histories.
It is only with the incorporation of a more Foucauldian/Butlerian approach that we can raise questions as to the pre-suppositional nature of these categories and dualisms, and the performative functions they can come to serve. For example, in the case of homosexuality, with latent and manifest, and within the associated Freudian assumption that bisexuality is universal, then the manifest could always become sublimated or latent, anyone could be heterosexual and prevention and cure are possible; this fuels therapeutic omnipotence. ((Of course the opposite argument is also possible–as in the 70’s slogan, ‘Any woman can!’))[v] Historically however, it has been those psychoanalysts who abandoned the Freudian notion of bisexuality in favour of some more naturalistic version of heterosexuality who have been most pathologising of homosexuality. Whilst the Freudian version is more liberal in many senses, Freudian bisexuality ultimately, as Butler has pointed out, only reinstates heterosexuality since the gender dualisms of male/female, masculine/feminine are inherent in it.
Before leaving The Wolfenden Report however, I want to make two further points. The first is to raise a question about the effect of these reforms on individuals: to wonder in what ways and to what extent they not only opened up a more viable space in which to forge identities and have relationships but also facilitated greater degrees of internal freedom in relation to homosexual desires; how or whether the kinds of conflicts that as therapists we may hear about were touched by the changes in legislation; to what extent the personal legacy of years of illegality, secrecy and oppression could be affected by these social changes. This is an issue which is still with us, despite the far-reaching legislative and social changes we are now living through. It is evident in some of the clinical material in the papers that follow in this issue. I think one of the contributions that psychoanalysis can make is to understand the trans-generational legacies of these kinds of histories in the personal lives of people now. Another is to understand the considerable personal strengths required to forge lives and loves under conditions of stigma, danger, and discrimination, as well as the conflicts and ambivalences produced by this.