Starting from a supervisee's declaration that: ‘psychoanalysis is lesbian!’, this article narrates the complex history between psychoanalysis, non-normative gender and homosexuality. Touching on Anna Freud's long relationship with Dorothy Burlingham, Sigmund Freud's letter to the mother of a homosexual, Magnus Hirschfeld's pioneering research into gender and sexuality in Berlin, queer theorist Leo Bersani's difficult experiences in psychoanalysis, gay psychiatrist John E. Fryer's appearance in a mask at the annual convention of psychiatrists in 1973, and Paul B. Preciado's report to French psychoanalysts in 2019, the author argues that Freud forced us to think ‘otherwise’ about sexuality, but that psychoanalytic institutions have, instead, often reinforced normative assumptions about gender and sexuality. Considering Freud's familial nickname for his daughter Anna ‘Antigone’, and reading alongside Judith Butler's reframing of the myth of Antigone, the article suggests that the lesson of Anna-Antigone for psychoanalysis might be found at the threshold between life and death, in an ‘other-sexuality’, a difference that is not bound to identity.
Patricia Gherovici (Wed,) studied this question.