This presentation will review aspects of the development of desire and sexuality, with attention to connections and separations between intimacy and sexuality. Freud’s ideas about childhood and adolescent sexual development as it relates to separations of adult love or affection from sexual performance, or the madonna/whore syndrome, are also relevant to the childhood development of gay boys and their subsequent gay male sexuality. Clinical material will be used to explore the ideas of Freud and more contemporary analysts in understanding the love lives and sex lives of contemporary gay men.
When
Where
CEUs
Cost
Educational Objective(s)
- Explain how separations between intimacy and sexuality are relevant to gay male sexuality.
- Recognize the connections (and divisions) between adult love and sexual performance, especially as they relate to gay male sexuality.
- Demonstrate the cultural foundations of gale male sexuality and show how they can be used to shape analytic treatment of this population.
Presenter Information
Paul Lynch was the first openly gay man accepted for training at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and in the American Psychoanalytic Association. He is a graduate of BPSI, has a private practice in Boston, is on the Faculty of the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, and a psychotherapy supervisor in the Tufts Medical Center’s psychiatric residency program. He also teaches in the China America Psychoanalytic Association. His paper, “Yearning for Love and Cruising for Sex: Returning to Freud to Understand Some Gay Men” won the Karl Menninger Award of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1997, and was published in the Annual of Psychoanalysis in 2002.