De quoi LGBTQI++ est-il le nom ? Une psychanalyse en mutation

Abstract

ObjectivesThe aim of this article is to show how the hyperonymous term “homosexual” invented in 1864 has covered up and erased a series of terms designating sexual practices between men and women. It aims to open a reflection on the epistemology of psychoanalytical practice in a context of LGBTQI++ visibility. In what way are certain dogmas of psychoanalysis questioned, or even seem, for some, threatened? One of the epistemological and clinical ruptures introduced by Freudian theory in a psychiatric context of categorization of sexuality and nosography of its “deviances” consists in the depathologization of the human sexual fact in all its dimensions, and Freud kept until the last texts the idea of a polymorphy of infantile sexuality. To what extent do these reflections on the identities of sex and gender allow psychoanalysis to reinvent what has made and still makes its subversive edge? MethodThe reading of archives, queer theory and gender studies texts, articulated with psychoanalytic texts concerning questions of sexuality, shows how the acronym LGBTQI++ is the emergence of a new dissemination. ResultsThis dissemination defeats universalizing categories, politicizes bodies and pleasures. A certain psychoanalytical practice would be reinvented here, or at least displaced. DiscussionSome call for a “mutation” of psychoanalysis in the face of what defeats categories and invents a language. LGBTQI++ would be the return of the epistemological repression of psychoanalysis. ConclusionWould LGBTQI++ be the acronym for the mutation of psychoanalytic practice? A dialogue between psychoanalytic theory and practice and the so-called sexual minorities is reinforced by the de-categorization of LGBTQI++. It is therefore a matter of “reinterrogating Eros” at the heart of analytical theory and practice, of accepting the re-readings of analytical theory and criticism – coming from gender studies, as well as from LGBTQI++ culture – of its vocabulary.