Psychoanalytic challenges: a contribution to the new sexual agenda

Frosh, Stephen (1997) Psychoanalytic challenges: a contribution to the new sexual agenda. Human Relations 50 (3), pp. 229-239. ISSN 0018-7267.

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/001872679705000301

Abstract

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 “look 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.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
School:	Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences
Depositing User:	Sarah Hall
Date Deposited:	07 Aug 2017 12:49
Last Modified:	02 Aug 2023 17:34
URI:	https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/19316

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