ABSTRACT
Denman has written a deeply felt chapter in which she takes to task various societal and analytical assumptions which define homosexuality as pathological a priori. She is right to emphasize that heterosexuality can on occasion be deeply perverse and may need careful scrutiny to demonstrate this. How much any individual’s sexuality may be pathological or not, or any attendant phenomenology be defined as ‘co-morbid’, must depend upon scrupulous and rigorous analysis of the individual concerned and not on a-priori assumption. We must as ever approach the individual on all occasions without knowledge, memory or desire and always remember that interpretation should never fail to be, as its etymology suggests, a consensual negotiation rather than the delivery of a higher truth. In addition, we need to remember how deeply ignorant we are about minds, psyches and brains and that such ignorance puts us all in great difficulty at the point at which we wish to define what is ‘pathological’ against any bench-mark of ‘normality’.
