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From Psychoanalytic Bisexuality to Bisexual Psychoanalysis: Desiring in the Real
This is the first book to assess bisexuality through a range of psychoanalytic and critical perspectives, highlighting both the issues faced by bisexual people in contemporary society and the challenges that can be presented by bisexual clients within a clinical setting.
Examining bisexuality through the lenses of Lacanian, Winnicottian and Relational psychoanalytic theories, the book outlines the ways in which the concept is at once both dated and yet still tremendously important. It includes case studies to explore the issue of widespread countertransference responses in the clinical setting, as well as using both bisexual theory and empirical research on biphobia to comment on the social pressures facing bisexual men and women, and the resultant psychological effects.
Bisexual identities and practices have become increasingly visible in recent years, and this important book addresses the lack of critical reckoning with this topic within the psychoanalytic community. It will be of great interest to practicing psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, as well as to researchers across the fields of psychoanalysis and gender & sexuality studies.
Examining bisexuality through the lenses of Lacanian, Winnicottian and Relational psychoanalytic theories, the book outlines the ways in which the concept is at once both dated and yet still tremendously important. It includes case studies to explore the issue of widespread countertransference responses in the clinical setting, as well as using both bisexual theory and empirical research on biphobia to comment on the social pressures facing bisexual men and women, and the resultant psychological effects.
Bisexual identities and practices have become increasingly visible in recent years, and this important book addresses the lack of critical reckoning with this topic within the psychoanalytic community. It will be of great interest to practicing psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, as well as to researchers across the fields of psychoanalysis and gender & sexuality studies.
- GenresGender and Sexuality
170 pages, ebook
Published June 11, 2019
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17 people want to read
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 25, 2021
Esther Rapoport’s writing is very impressive, sensible, and amazingly clear at going deeply into parsing abstractions and deconstructing binaries. I felt warmed up quickly by my appreciation of her strength and firmness and care in writing it.
A passage dealing with Irigary prompted my reflection on what it's like to feel the feminine and the masculine in myself, as I sense them in physical presence (sort of proprioceptively), engaging a kind of positive or affirmative charge, energetically, as though owning or reinforcing something I have no authority to claim by physical evidence, something that also transgresses my standardized identity status as cisgendered male. Is the tweak of energy simply a result of throwing the norm and its assumptions and associations up in the air for the moment? I think there is more going on.
Reading this book was an unusually vital experience! I kept anticipating somehow that the text was going to get more abstract, academic, dry, or ponderous, but ita readable prose never did, and clinical vignettes breathe a special, meaningful life force into the account of various concerns and issues raised. This is a serious, potentially valuable clinical text (which this is, so far as I'm concerned), yet I just felt like reading more -- in far fewer sittings than I would have expected. I continued to find my own personal questions well answered and rounded out, and to contemplate the conditions and challenges that diverse bisexual adults and teens may face. (I think that this is getting a lot more affirmative for those in their teens and twenties today, but there will still be many difficulties with acceptance and sorting oneself out, ongoing, for years and decades. There's a lot to consider, and our societies' reactive oppressions are dynamic and sometimes cruel indeed.)
A passage dealing with Irigary prompted my reflection on what it's like to feel the feminine and the masculine in myself, as I sense them in physical presence (sort of proprioceptively), engaging a kind of positive or affirmative charge, energetically, as though owning or reinforcing something I have no authority to claim by physical evidence, something that also transgresses my standardized identity status as cisgendered male. Is the tweak of energy simply a result of throwing the norm and its assumptions and associations up in the air for the moment? I think there is more going on.
Reading this book was an unusually vital experience! I kept anticipating somehow that the text was going to get more abstract, academic, dry, or ponderous, but ita readable prose never did, and clinical vignettes breathe a special, meaningful life force into the account of various concerns and issues raised. This is a serious, potentially valuable clinical text (which this is, so far as I'm concerned), yet I just felt like reading more -- in far fewer sittings than I would have expected. I continued to find my own personal questions well answered and rounded out, and to contemplate the conditions and challenges that diverse bisexual adults and teens may face. (I think that this is getting a lot more affirmative for those in their teens and twenties today, but there will still be many difficulties with acceptance and sorting oneself out, ongoing, for years and decades. There's a lot to consider, and our societies' reactive oppressions are dynamic and sometimes cruel indeed.)
Displaying 1 of 1 review