ABSTRACT
In pursuit of sources of dissent, we might most plausibly be drawn to those positions which provide radical critiques of psychoanalytic theory, seek to understand and locate its unspoken cultural and political assumptions as reflections of various aspects of the dominant social order. From the mid 1960s onward, however, Robert Stoller put forward arguments that homosexuality was not a diagnostic category, and that to view it as such, or to assume its necessary symptomatic status, was seriously misleading. Stephen Mitchell's article is also an important contribution to the technical as well as the ethical issues involved in the analyst taking up any kind of directive, or other than neutral, position in relation to an analysand's homosexuality. Mitchell suggests that this tendency to block the full expression and working through of the transference that occurs with such directive or suggestive approaches also masks various countertransferential developments.
