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Psychoanalytic Challenges: A Contribution to the New Sexual Agenda

Department of Psychology, Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX; and Child and Family Department, Tavistock Clinic, 120 Belsize Lane, London NW3 5BA

Behind its conservative facade and the rigidity of much of its clinical practice, psychoanalysis retains a disruptive attitude toward conventional discourses on gender and sexuality. This attitude derives from psychoanalysis' capacity to "ook awry" at experience and consequently to undermine notions of fixed identity, including sexual identity. In contemporary work, much of the debate on psychoanalysis' disruptive consciousness, particularly among feminists, has centered on the contribution of Lacanian thinking and in particular on the question of whether Lacan offers a more rigorous alternative to object relational accounts of gender identity and sexual difference. In this paper, the debate on psychoanalysis' contribution to the "new sexual agenda" is introduced and furthered by exploration of the notion of identification as used first in some non-Lacanian work by Jessica Benjamin, and then in a classic seminar of Lacan's. It is suggested that both Benjamin and Lacan offer insights into the "provisional" nature of adoption of specific sexual identities and that a continuing critical contribution from psychoanalysis can be found in this work.

Key Words: psychoanalysis • sexual difference • sexuality • identification

Human Relations, Vol. 50, No. 3, 229-239 (1997)
DOI: 10.1177/001872679705000301


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