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That Obscure Subject of Desire: Freud's Female Homosexual Revisited. Ronnie C Lesser & Erica Schoenberg (Eds.). New York: Routledge, 1999,265 pp., $18.99 (paperback).
In their edited volume, That Obscure Subject of Desire: Freud's Female Homosexual Revisited, Lesser and Schoenberg have unearthed an "obscure article about desire," compiling various reactions to one of the few cases of female homosexuality in Freud's oeuvre. Lesser's introduction sets the historical stage by describing Freud's Vienna, anti-Semitism, and his outsider status as a Jew. Freud's status as a Jewish man is seen as essential to conscious and unconscious attitudes toward gender and sexuality. His 1920 paper, "The psychogenesis of a case of homosexuality in a woman," opens the volume. A section devoted to critiques of Freud's paper by academic scholars from the social sciences and humanities comes next, followed by numerous psychoanalytic writings and a closing discussion. The collected papers all respond to a question that deLauretis poses in quoting Freud, "`She changed into a man and took her mother in place of her father as the object of her love'-what's wrong with that?" (p. 41). The contributors to this volume are in agreement about the answer: nothing. The authors uniformly concur that Freud's analysis of this case and this young woman needs to be revised. The critiques are similar, with many of the contributors taking up a particular issue or metaphor as their starting point, but all clearly seeing the need for depathologizing lesbianism. The academic scholars ask several important questions that psychoanalysts have...