Learning about/from psychoanalysis

“This essay will argue that one interpretive approach to LeVay’s data is to illuminate the relation between, on the one hand, the inertly dimorphic forms of sexuality that his methodology solicits, and on the other hand, the exceptional neurological and sexual forms that his data discloses.”-what his model and framework conveys about him“LeVay contends that an area in the human hypothalamus homologous to this area in animals may be involved in regulating sexual behavior in men and women. Importantly for LeVay, these homologous nuclei in the human hypothalamus had already been reported to be significantly larger in men than in women (Allen, Hines, Shryne and Gorski, 1989). Moreover, this dimorphism in size had been interpreted as evidence that these nuclei may contribute to functional differences not only between men and women, but also between individuals of different sexual orientation: “morphological analysis of the brains of humans with different sexual orientations and identities . . . may lead to further deductions concerning the possible influences of sex hormones on the structure and function of the human brain” (Allen et al., 1989, 504)”“The existence of “exceptions” in the present sample (that is, presumed heterosexual men with small INAH 3 nuclei, and homosexual men with large ones) hints at the possibility that sexual orientation, although an important variable, may not be the sole determinant of INAH 3 size. (LeVay, 1991, 1036)”“Rather, the data demonstrate a reticulating pattern—a co-implication of the disseminated (ranging) with the dimorphic (divided). In this reticulating structure, neither of these patterns governs the field of neurological possibilities to the exclusion of the other. Instead, the data invite another, perhaps more difficult, interpretive challenge: to envisage how dimorphic patterns might relate to, be implicated in, arrest and cleave, but also be partially generative of, more distributed organizations.”“First, it allows the “body” of sexual preference to be instantiated microbiologically”-interesting to consider“it also (accidentally, necessarily) opens sexuality into a broader field of material instantiation. We are thus enabled to think the neurology/sexuality interface more exhaustively—not as an insular coupling, but as a node in a reticulating physiological organization. It is clear enough that LeVay’s 1991 report seriously simplifies sexuality and does not provide data sufficiently robust to support the conclusions that LeVay draws there and in other contexts. It is also the case, however, that the data—generated through a conceptually awkward attempt to envisage the conjunction of neurology and sexuality—reveal a certain neurological complexity that LeVay has been able to register but not fully pursue.”