| Long abstract |
Academic writing about psychoanalysis does not often engage the practice of psychoanalysis in today’s USA, or vice versa. There are many reasons for this, and one is always wishing there were more mutual interest. The canons differ; academics still read a lot of Freud and later continental theory, less often Anglo-American object relations theory, and much less often, Thomas Ogden, Robert Stoller, Muriel Dimen, Joe Natterson, or Mark Leffert. In my experience, American psychoanalysts too often abdicate their intellectual responsibilities and the social impli-cations thereof; too few of us regard ourselves as minds shap-ing and being shaped by the urgent questions of our time. In turn, academic psychoanalytic work does not, in my view, grap-ple closely enough with the reasons why particular people seek treatment, and with the ethics of responding or not responding to misery experienced as “personal,” that is, felt to be “inside.” Queer theory has, remarkably, been to-and-fro-ing all over this ground, in its agōn with psychoanalysis, powerfully critiquing it, and equally powerfully re-thinking it, finally changing policy and helping to usher in “an exciting [era] of discovery” of sexu-ality’s range and resourcefulness (Roughton 2002, 757, referring to the first decade of the twenty-first century). The chapters to which I’m responding here show that the ground shared by queer theory and psychoanalysis is still something of a battleground, but they also show that the debate is a highly creative one, born of a provocatively uneasy intimacy.
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