| Title | Identity: Precarious Sexualities: Queer Challenges to Psychoanalytic and Social Identity Categorization |
|---|---|
| Contributor | Alice Kuzniar (author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0167.1.03 |
| Landing page | https://punctumbooks.com/titles/clinical-encounters-in-sexuality-psychoanalytic-practice-and-queer-theory/ |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Kuzniar, Alice |
| Publisher | punctum books |
| Published on | 2017-03-07 |
| Long abstract | In the essay “The Theory of Seduction and the Problem of the Other” (1997), Jean Laplanche writes of a concept that attrac-tively resonates with the term queer, insofar as queer sexuality is quintessentially defined by its inexplicability, incoherence, vola-tility, and contingency in contradistinction to a sexuality whose owner would claim is stable, fixed, and identifiable as an integral part of the self. Destabilizing claims to an abiding, undisturbed notion of the self, Laplanche speaks of das Andere—the other-thing in us, the otherness of our unconscious—that all attempts at psychoanalytic interpretation cannot master. Laplanche pos-its that sexuality is an enigma, both for the child confronted with the riddle of sexuality that the adult represents and for the adult who can never master the uncanny as first encountered in childhood. The parent in turn unconsciously transmits an aura of sexual mystery to the child, perpetuating and completing the cycle. Das Andere is hence the internal otherness that we perpet-ually carry within us and that de-centers us, but that is founded by contact with an external otherness. |
| Page range | pp. 51–76 |
| Print length | 26 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |