Building lesbian sandcastles on the shore of relational psychoanalysis

B. Decker

Stephen Mitchell, one of the founders of relational psychoanalysis, wrote two early (1978, 1981) articles challenging the then widely held view in psychoanalysis that love between same-sex persons was inextricably pathological. His writings gave me hope that, as a lesbianidentified therapist, I could actively participate in a psychoanalytic community of ideas and practice. However, in the 1980s, when I entered psychoanalytic training, the sandcastle of hope I had built from Mitchell's papers was destroyed with the incoming tide. I describe here a personal journey related to lesbian identity in various contexts from 1978 and 1981 when Mitchell spoke so authoritatively about psychoanalytic attitudes towards homosexuality to 1996 when he described "the plight of the perplexed clinician" with regard to "gender and sexual orientation in the age of postmodernism."[Copies are available from: Haworth Document Delivery Center. The Haworth Press, Inc., 10 Alice Street, Binghamton, NY 13904-1580, USA]