ABSTRACT
At a recent talk at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Robert Young described psychoanalysis as ‘a theory of unhappy relationships’, including those with other disciplines and bodies of theory (In conversation, 18 March 1987). The relation of gay men and lesbians to the institution of psychoanalysis is undoubtedly unhappy in the extreme. For neo-Freudian analysts, our sexuality is still widely regarded as a result of ‘hidden but incapacitating fears of the opposite sex’ (Bieber et al., 1962, p. 203), while openly gay men and lesbians are still categorically excluded from the very possibilities of training as analysts ourselves by all the leading centres of psychoanalytic training in Britain and Western Europe. This is not, however, to conclude that we have nothing to learn from the larger project of psychoanalysis as envisaged and developed by Freud. In this essay I want to consider some of the ways in which Freud’s work illuminates many aspects of the general ‘sleep of reason’ surrounding AIDS, including the assumption that we can ever be entirely rational about sex.
