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Catching Sight of the Axiomatic
2002 to 2012. A bygone era, long, long ago. There were axioms floating around everywhere. Elusive and practically invisible. How to catch sight of the axiomatic? Here are the clues I use:
Number 1. My intuition. I pay attention when texts make me bristle. If I experience an affective response, I note this. I then assume it's because of hysteria, and I analyze: Why did my uterus jump just now? Oh, it's because an author said X. And this X differed widely from my 2014 understanding. Q.E.D., a disparity in our respective contexts and ideologies must have given rise to my bristle.
Number 2. Proximity clues within the text. Phrases like "we all know" or "it is common to believe" indicate that I should listen up: The text is about to tell me, or has just told me, something axiomatic.
Number 3. Other rhetorical markers within the text. Is the author being polemical? Is s/he trying to undo or correct something? If so, I've got myself an axiom: where one discourse abuts another.
We start our search for axioms in Ralph Roughton's plenary speech to the American Psychoanalytic Association in 2001. It commemorated the 10-year anniversary of the APA's removal of homosexuality from their list of reasons to reject candidates for psychoanalytic training. The next year, his speech appeared in the APA's journal (Roughton, 2002).
Brava, Queen Roughton! Way to make a splash in 2002! You open the decade in question.
At the turn of the millennium, says Roughton (2002), the APA contained "at least fifty openly gay or lesbian candidates in training, perhaps as many as twenty faculty members, and at least three training analysts" (p. 740).
Score one for 'Murica. I mean seriously. Quite remarkable, given that there were no openly gay analysts in the UK at this time, nor were there any in Italy - at least not in the IPA (Twomey, 2003; Lingiardi and Capozzi, 2004). So, yes, for once the Americans got something right. In the decade following their 1991 decision, the APA formed a committee on lesbigay issues to educate psychoanalysts nationwide. They held workshops at their APA-affiliated training programs. They instituted the Ralph E. Roughton Paper Award to promote homosexual scholarship. They...