Psychoanalysis Was Never Not Queer

For decades, Freud has been labeled a queerphobe and psychoanalysis has been labeled an outdated cis-hetero relic best left in the dustbin of Victorian repression. But what if that’s only half—or less—of the story?

When we dig under the crust of institutional psychoanalysis—the pathologizing, the gatekeeping, the overuse of "mother" as a diagnostic catch-all—we find a queer paradox at its core: Freud never claimed heterosexuality was the norm; quite the opposite, in fact. Everyone’s sexuality is perverse, he said—queerness isn’t a deviation from “normal” development. It simply is development.

Freud saw sexuality not as something tidy, but—to paraphrase queer theorist Tim Dean—as something baroque, complicated, and impossible to straighten out. One of Freud’s greatest insights was that you don’t choose your desires—they choose you, arrive unbidden, disguised, contradictory, and dressed in drag. That’s not a bug in the system—that is the system. So much for “straight.”

Unfortunately, psychoanalytic institutions—particularly in the U.S. and U.K.—betrayed this queer insight in favor of assimilation, conversion therapy, and grotesque theories about “perverted” people. But even then, some clinicians, artists, and queer thinkers began taking the tools back and using them as originally intended. From Laplanche to Bersani to Butler, psychoanalysis became a way not to "fix" queerness, but to uncover its brilliance.

As a queer clinician and Buddhist practitioner, I see psychoanalysis not as the enemy of queer liberation but as a strange and sometimes uncomfortable ally. Psychoanalysis shares with contemplative practice a commitment to uncertainty, contradiction, and the non-self. Both ask: Who are you, really, beneath all the narratives? And both suspect the answer may not be singular or stable… maybe not even speakable.

When queer folks connect with what contemplative psychotherapy calls brilliant sanity—a deep recognition of one’s own wisdom and goodness—it often happens through rupture rather than resolution: Something breaks open, a tear is shed, the ego trips on its own shoelaces...

And then, there it is: Clarity, compassion, absurdity, beauty... With no conversion required.

Psychoanalysis was never not queer. The problem is that some psychoanalysts looked in the mirror and refused to see their own drag.