Sexuality, intimacy and subjectivity in social psychoanalytic thought of the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

AbstractHomosexuality has been one of the most contested issues in the history of social psychoanalysis. To better understand the issue's medical and social significance, we need a micro‐historical analysis illuminating doctor‐patient interactions in changing historical contexts. This paper sheds light on the clinical practice of the well‐known founder of interpersonal theory, Harry Stack Sullivan (1892–1949), with a focus on four patients: two from the 1920s and two from the 1930s. During these decades, many psychiatrists, including neo‐Freudians like Sullivan, considered homosexuality a mental illness. But Sullivan himself was a gay man, and he attempted to create efficacious therapeutic relationships amid a generally homophobic medicine. This comported with his effort to create professional coalitions with social psychologists and sociologists. In both clinical and non‐clinical settings, he tried to find solutions to individual problems by redefining a limiting socio‐cultural environment of therapy. Ambitious as this plan was, his patients' response to his approach varied from cautious cooperation to apparent rejection, as his actions became more immersed in the ambiguous realm of sexual subjectivity. In examining this change, I raise the question of what constituted ethically sound, professionally acceptable behaviours and efficacious therapeutic relationships, particularly in the historical context of the emerging collaboration between psychoanalysis and social psychology. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.