ABSTRACT
I invoke the title of Andre Green’s (1995) famous jeremiad against the supposed disappearance of sexuality from psychoanalysis not in his tone of shrill indignation but in a spirit of curiosity about the appearance of homosexual themes in some psychoanalytic and other accounts of soldiering and its aftermath. Indeed Green might have been pleased at my discernment of sexuality in a place where its presence is not often noted or theorized. I want to consider how sexuality, particularly certain forms of homosexuality, could become the channel through which traumatic pain undergone in war expresses itself, in intergenerational and other transfers. On the most fundamental level, this homosexualization would seem to represent the projection of the experience of passivity that is in the nature of trauma onto another man. Beyond this, what I will call the homosexual imaginary shares a number of salient features with the traumatic experience of killing in war, which might help us to understand the connections between the two that appear in the source material I will be presenting here. By homosexual imaginary I am referring to the universe of ideas about and representations of homosexuality that circulate in the culture. These include culturally prevalent homophobic images, representations and formulations that nevertheless do not wholly constitute it, and which may or may not overlap with the lived sexual experience of gay men. They form a powerful ideality that shapes experience both within and between individuals of any and all sexualities. As new ideas, images, etc. about homosexuality come into being, as they have in recent years, it is in the nature of this unconscious cultural formation that I am describing that these become agglomerated onto already existing structures, rather than supplanting them.
I believe these shared features, detailed below, may help account for the co-incidence of certain manifestations of homosexuality with war trauma, and may help explain how the psychological aftermath of wartime violation recruits sexuality for its expression. Both homo sexuality and traumatic violence in war are lived or imagined as involving a penetration of a stimulus barrier that is not supposed to be breached; an experience of excess, of overstimulation; a transgression of limits that constitutes a violation of the social order (even if, in war, this limit has sanction to be breached). Leo Bersani (1987) writes of the “self-shattering” (p. 222) effect of passive anal sex, a useful experience, to his mind; trauma, of course, entails a shattering of self of a rather different sort. Homosexuality and trauma share a reputed quality of unrepresentability (homosexuality as “the love that dare not speak its name;” trauma as that which cannot be symbolized by the mind), and are things that adults keep secret from children. Thinking about violence and sexuality together, I am put in mind of the enigmatic message, Jean Laplanche’s (e.g., 1997) conception of the manner in which sexuality is traumatically implanted by the parent into the child. I am led to wonder whether intergenerational (and other) transfers of traumatic war experiences might be understood on the model of the enigmatic message as theorized by Laplanche, perhaps offering new ways to think about the murky issue of mechanism in the literature on intergenerational transmission. Might we think of the intergenerational transmission of trauma as a variety of enigmatic message? In theorizing about the frequently disturbing material I am about to present, I also am addressing a matter of urgent practical concern. Tens of thousands of physically and psychically maimed soldiers have been returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. What can be done to assist them in their healing, and (as we now know to be a regular occurrence) to prevent them from inflicting the sequela of their traumas onto the people in their families and communities (and themselves, for that matter)? While my explorations here may not lend themselves to direct clinical application, I hope they might contribute to our ability to consider the treatment of traumatized soldiers within a larger frame. In engaging this theoretical effort I follow writers like Leo Bersani, who insisted on the importance of theory, even as, maybe, especially as, matters of life and death were at stake. His seminal essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (1987), written at the height of the AIDS crisis in the US, has been an important resource for me in developing my idea of the homosexual imaginary.
