Queering Freud Differently: Radical Psychoanalysis and Ethnography in the 1970s–1980s

Abstract

This introduction to the special issue recovering two pioneering anti-homophobic Freudian psychoanalysts of the 1970s–1980s – the Los Angelean Robert J. Stoller and the Zurich-based Fritz Morgenthaler – situates their contributions in the triple contexts of the history of psychoanalytic theorizing about homosexuality; both men's work at the border of ethnography, including (in both cases) in Papua New Guinea; and the shifting stakes caused by the sexual revolution of the 1960s–1970s and each man's ensuing conceptual innovations in theorizing sexuality more generally. Whether exposing the ‘queerness’ within the heterosexual majority (Stoller), or honoring ‘the sexual’ as a vital force in human life (Morgenthaler), both men – while repurposing Freud in quite distinct ways – came to emphasize that what looked like sexuality very often had non-sexual sources.