In contrast, focusing on cultural traumas is less familiar and is less articulated in our psychoanalytic clinical theories, supervision, and practice in general but common to the publications just noted. In particular, what is less focused on is an acknowledgment and articulation of the layer within the psyche that contains and secrets crimes of humanity and their history.
"For example, it has been argued that the medical records of post-mortem individuals contain insufficient data to reliably allocate those individuals to different categories of sexual identity, that LeVay's use of the categories "heterosexual" and "homosexual" is modeled on outdated notions of sexual identity, that the post-mortem brains of many of the subjects may have been modified by complications from AIDS, that LeVay conflates male homosexuality with femininity, that the sample size is too small for reliable comparisons between groups to be made, that LeVay's hypothesis can only be sup
24 - “Instead, this essay will offer some wider speculations about the character of neurological substrate revealed in LeVay’s data. The methodological and conceptual limitations of LeVay’s study are indispensable to these speculations, not because they constitute errors (that, presumably, another study could correct) but because these methodological and conceptual constraints twist the data in ways that reveal the texture of neurological structure.”
“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.
"I want to understand Elizabeth's reply by thinking about gender not as an essence but as a set of relations (May, 1986) and to propose that at the heart of gender is not "masculinity" or "femininity" but the difference between them" (335-336)"gender as critiqued and gender as critique, gender as a concept that not only requires scrutiny but can itself illuminate other matters...
337 - “In other words, the category of ‘sex’ is not transparent but is itself a dense weave of cultural significance, and ‘the contrast masculine/feminine,’ as the representation of what psychoanalysts commonly refer to as ‘the anatomical difference,’ addresses a variety of matters, not all of which are germane to sex, gender, or the genitals.” 339 - “ In this process, ‘gender’ appears to be less a determinate category than something resembling a force field.
“she replied that the danger lay in the shoulder, not in the crying: she would cry only on a man's shoulder; she was not interested in women”-it’s so interesting to see what humans assign importance to“the heart of gender is not "masculinity" or "femininity" but the difference between them.
"It is a set of notes, excerpts from clinical reports of my own, literary essays, psychoanalytic theory, notes accompanied by commentary, free association, developed thoughts, fragments of theory - a form that will mirror and predict my topic" (826)"Anxiety, Harry Stack Sullivan is said to have said, is like a blow on the head - it stops you from thinking. To write a coherent essay, you have to think in a straight line.
826 - “Perversion in the context of multiplicity and discontinuity is a discursive construct that, when examined, begins to fall apart so that we must wonder: why do we still talk about it?”827 - “Perversion may be defined, after all, as the sex that you like and I don’t.”833 - “The analyst needs her theory of perversion (if this is a concept she requires in order to think about sexuality), but she also needs to know both what she feels about perversion—its affective meaning to her and the values embedded in that meaning—and what those perverse practices mean to her patients.”857 - “What, a
“Perversion in the context of multiplicity and discontinuity is a discursive construct that, when examined, begins to fall apart so that we must wonder: why do we still talk about it?”“Anxiety, Harry Stack Sullivan is said to have said, is like a blow on the head—it stops you from thinking. To write a coherent essay, you have to think in a straight line.
