Pink Herrings

The question of the relationship between homosexuality, transsexuality and psychoanalysis has long plagued the field. Answers to this question have typically taken the form of either pathologising or affirmative accounts of homosexuality and transsexuality, with both accounts recouping the work of Freud to warrant their position. Pink Herrings seeks to move the field beyond these two accounts by taking as its organising principle the claim that the unconscious is not organised in relationship to a pre-given sexual orientation or gender identity. Rather, through a Lacan account of sexuation, the book argues that the question of object choice is fundamentally a question of fantasy, and that what requires our attention are the fantasies, as much as structures, that shape the unconscious. To demonstrate this claim the book engages in a re-reading of six of Freud's case studies, focusing first on instances of what are termed 'pink herrings' - moments where Freud misread a particular fantasy as indicative of homosexuality or transsexuality. The book then examines cases where Freud failed to attend to the homoerotic fantasies of his patients, and in so doing misread their object choices. In undertaking these new readings, Pink Herrings signals the need to move beyond an account of psychoanalysis that attempts to map contemporary identity categories onto the unconscious, and instead to pay greater attention to the role of fantasy and object choice in the sexuation of all people.