From Classical and Patriarchal to Relational and Queer: Histories and Theories of Psychoanalysis

Abstract This two-paper study investigates the historical and conceptual contexts of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, focusing on queer identity, sexuality, and gender. It examines the historiography and metapsychology of psychoanalysis to highlight the marginalized status of lesbian, gay, transgender, and gender non-conforming (LGBTGNC) people within the structure of the discipline itself. Part one explores the transmission of Freud’s foundational concepts through the leading histories of the movement over the past 125 years. It begins with Freud’s historical narratives about the movement and then traces the conditions that shaped the post-Freudian schools through subsequent chronicles. These historiographic sources document the impact of the end of the Victorian era, the World Wars, migration, Cold War politics, and social change movements within both progressive and regressive developments. Notably, most canonical texts ignore queer identity, gender, and sexuality within the overarching narrative. Part two evaluates the contributions of post-Freudian schools to metapsychology, starting with Freud’s Topographic and Structural models and tracing subsequent contributions from Ego psychology, Relational psychoanalysis, and Self Psychology. These schools decentered sexuality, leaving questions of queer (and non-queer) identity, gender, and sexuality under-theorized. The study concludes with a reconsideration of psychosexuality, dual-drive theory, innate polysexuality, and oedipal complexity as keys to a renewed psychoanalysis with queer people in mind, useful for the formulation of a new metapsychology relevant to a more fluid analysis of identity, gender, and sexuality today. Keywords: queer psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, LGBTQ+, metapsychology, Oedipus complex, Freud, Ego Psychology, Self Psychology, Relational Psychoanalysis, history of psychoanalysis