ABSTRACT
Ralph Roughton has presented a paradox and provided a challenge to reconsider important aspects of the psychoanalytic process as the role of the analyst in facilitating the analysand’s search for enhanced personal integration. The paradox is how to explain changes in the clinical theory of psychoanalysis, while the challenge posed for clinical psychoanalysis requires reconsideration of received wisdom regarding the analysis of persons with alternative sexual lifestyles such as gay women and men. From the outset, understanding the interplay between the intrapsychic and the social has posed problems for psychoanalysis. The emergence of a period termed “Youth” posed particular issues for the psychoanalysis of young adults. Clinical psychoanalysis remains in a quandary regarding intervention within the lives of gay men and women. The analysand’s expression of wish and intent is founded in a presently told life story including both social context and particular life circumstances woven into an account or narrative of presently understood lived experience.
