Heteronormativity and Psychoanalysis proposes a critical reading of the Freudian and Lacanian texts that paved the way for a heteronormative bias in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis.
Jorge N. Reitter’s theoretical-political project engages in a genealogy of how psychoanalysis approached the ‘gay question’ through time. This book determinedly seeks to dismantle the heteronormative bias in the theories of psychoanalysis that resist new discourses on gender and sexuality. Drawing on developments by Michel Foucault and lesbian and gay studies on queer theory and feminist theorizing, Reitter draws attention to the normalizing devices that permanently regulate sexuality neglected by psychoanalysis as producers of subjectivities.
Accessibly written, Heteronormativity and Psychoanalysis will be key reading for psychoanalysts in practice and in training, as well as academics and students of psychoanalytic studies, gender studies, and sexualities.
In the English edition
Prologue by Patricia Gherovici
Prologue to the first edition
- Heteronormativity and psychoanalysis
1) Oedipus gay
2) The original entanglement. How psychoanalysis could not escape the heteronorm
3) Oedipus reloaded
4) Towards a post-heteronormative Oedipus
II. Miscellanea
5) On the political incorrectness of eroticism
6) Rethinking the possible as such
7) Felix Julius Boehm
III Bonus tracks
8) Talking with Jorge Reitter: neither the Other nor sexuality exists outside of power relations
Epilogue
Biography
Jorge N. Reitter is former teaching assistant in the Clinic for Adults, Faculty of Psychology at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is former Chair Professor of Sexuality and the Oedipus Complex at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Zacatecas, Mexico, and visiting professor at the Universidad de la República, Uruguay.
"Not just a compelling critique of the heteronormativity of institutionalized psychoanalysis, Jorge Reitter's book offers a bracing performative speech act whose effects will reverberate for some time to come. Out of the shadows emerges---if we dare to name it---a capaciously queer psychoanalysis for the twenty-first century." ---Tim Dean, James M. Benson Professor in English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; author of Beyond Sexuality and editor of Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis.
"Jorge Reitter is one of the present-day most innovative psychoanalysts in Argentina: his work is renowned among all Latin-America psychoanalysts, academics and students who wish to tackle minority gender and sexuality issues. The book very clearly sums up and analyses the main Freudian and Lacanian ambivalent stances on homosexuality and alternative sexualities, and suggests creative ways to renew psychoanalytic theory and practice. The book’s main asset is to try and think of sexuality in terms of power relations, in a Foucauldian approach applied to psychoanalysis, yet from a psychoanalytic point of view." - Thamy Ayouch, Psychoanalyst, Doctor of Research in Psychoanalysis (Université Paris 7), Maître de Conférence (Full Professor) in Clinical Psychology (Université Lille 3), Researcher and director of doctoral research (Université Paris 7), Visiting Professor do Exterior (Universidade de São Paulo), Former student of Ecole Normale Supérieure.
"Jorge Reitter's book Edipo Gay is an important milestone for psychoanalysis as it is practiced in the 21st century. The book reconnects with the fundamental dimensions of clinical experience. However, it does so in a resolutely critical and open manner by purging both practice and theory of any risk of homophobic, transphobic or simply heteronormative conservatism. From a reflection on the so-called sexual minorities, Reitter manages to reinvent ethics at the heart of transferential dynamics and to assume the not only intimate but also political dimension of the analytic act." - Fabrice Bourlez is a psychoanalyst, doctor of philosophy, he teaches at the esad in Reims, at SciencesPo Paris and is co-holder of the Troubles, Dissidences and Aesthetics chair at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He teaches psychoanalysis at the International Institute of Psychoanalysis (Brazil). He has written Pulsions Pasoliniennes (Presses du Réel, 2015) and Queer psychanalyse (Hermann, 2018).
"Jorge N. Reitter's book reminds us that psychoanalysis is first and foremost an act...here an act of writing where the author takes a position, as a psychoanalyst, in the scholarly public debate concerning minoritized sexualities and their conflicting relationships with the theories of Freud or Lacan, which are too often put at the service of a reactionary heteronormativity. As part of Freud's desire, Jorge N. Reitter thus revisits the Oedipus complex and the clinic of castration in the light of LGBTQIA+ approaches from - and this is perhaps the most important - arguments internal to our field." - Lionel Le Corre, psychoanalyst, researcher associated with the CRPMS, Université Paris Cité (France). Doctor in psychoanalytic anthropology. Author of the book Freud's Homosexuality.
"Reitter argues, and I agree with him, that psychoanalysis is not necessarily heteronormative, binary, and patriarchal. Psychoanalysis can do better things than it does by revising that matrix around its nodal concepts. Untying what was tied to conceptions of the time, with what is still sustained and keeps it vital and current. A necessary and avant-garde book that bets on a living psychoanalysis proposing a clinic of the specificity of the intrapsychic and the biopolitical of gay erotica and amorousness, both on the side of the patients and on the side of the analysts." - Débora Tajer, Feminist psychoanalyst and author of the book Psychoanalysis for Everyone. Associate Professor in charge of the "Introduction to Gender Studies" Chair. Regular Associate Professor of the "Public Health/Mental Health II" Chair, Faculty of Psychology, UBA. Co-founder Forum of Psychoanalysis and Gender, Association of Psychologists of Buenos Aires.
"Today the human is breaking with certain prohibitions and limits that were imposed on us a long time ago and in another history, and we do not allow ourselves to be determined externally (we emancipated ourselves with great rage from this); because the human is articulated with multiple pleasures that radically constitute it, with sexual diversities that flood it and complement it, and this is so because the logics of the world have changed, continue to change and cannot be stopped under any signifier Father. Jorge Nico Reitter expresses this becoming of each one of us in a brilliant and exemplary way in hisbook Edipo Gay. Moreover, Reitter, as the clinician that he is, knows it from the inside in the day today pain that the Other suffers in order to be accepted in this society of heteropatriarchal control; it is not only a question of the desire of this or that human being, but we are in the "Hegelian" dimension of the matter, namely, of the logics of power that allow or do not allow the performative and in this to speak of the diversity that we are and, in this, to feel accepted as such; for this reason his book becomes totally necessary for us to understand and transform our present." - Ricardo Espinosa Lolas Chilean writer, critical theorist and philosopher. Member of the Goldsmiths Center for Philosophy and Critical Thought. University of London.
"Jorge N. Reitter's book reminds us that psychoanalysis is first and foremost an act...here an act of writing where the author takes a position, as a psychoanalyst, in the scholarly public debate concerning minoritized sexualities and their conflicting relationships with the theories of Freud or Lacan, which are too often put at the service of a reactionary heteronormativity. As part of Freud's desire, Jorge N. Reitter thus revisits the Oedipus complex and the clinic of castration in the light of LGBTQIA+ approaches from - and this is perhaps the most important - arguments internal to our field." - Lionel Le Corre, psychoanalyst, researcher associated with the CRPMS, Université Paris Cité (France). Doctor in psychoanalytic anthropology. Author of the book Freud's Homosexuality.
"Jorge’s text makes a vital intervention in spotlighting the challenges for the psychoanalytic field of remaining true to the unconscious as what precisely cannot be "normalised" and "mainstreamed." The text is a wake-up call to twenty-first century psychoanalysts to learn important lessons from its own history of (hetero)normalisation and to remain open to the heteros of the unconscious and to an ethics of subjectivity that is irreducible to any social classification or cultural appropriation." - Eve Watson, PhD. Psychoanalyst, Dublin, and Editor of Critical Essays on the Drive: Lacanian Theory and Practice (2023)
