PTW | Online Lecture: Queer Angles in the Psychoanalytic Archive: Epistemological Insubordination in Psychoanalytic Pedagogy

This talk explores the enduring influence of psychoanalysis’ archival texts on contemporary clinical training, taking historic writing about queer female sexuality as an example. Historic psychoanalytic texts, still taught in contemporary psychoanalytic trainings, mobilise powerful affective responses in trainees, yet remain largely unexamined as transferential objects within training institutions.

Responding to Paul B. Preciado’s call for the ‘depatriarchalisation, deheterosexualisation and decolonisation’ (2021, 76) of psychoanalysis, I propose a method of “epistemological insubordination” that draws on Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology to reorient historic psychoanalytic writing. Through a queer phenomenological historiography of Helene Deutsch’s writings on female homosexuality (1933, 1944a), I trace shifts in psychoanalytic attitudes, revealing how societal norms shape clinical discourse.

I argue that reading historic texts queerly, attending to “straight lines,” “straightening devices,” and “queer angles,” enables trainees to confront normative unconscious processes and their own countertransference. This approach reframes archival engagement as a psychosocial intervention within queer medical humanities, offering a pedagogical practice that neither erases historical violence nor reproduces it uncritically.

By situating queer psychoanalysis as both a theoretical body and a practice within queer historiography and psychosocial studies, the talk contributes to ongoing debates within psychoanalytic institutions about how clinical education can reckon with its colonial, heteronormative legacies.

Harriet Mossop (she/her) is a PhD student and Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, and Research and Development Officer in the Centre for Anthropological Mental Health Research in Action at the School for Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Her psychosocial research on erotic transference and queer female sexuality sits at the intersection of queer, trans, decolonial and psychoanalytic theory. She is a co-founder of the Queer Encounters research network for psychosocial researchers in gender and sexuality (www.queerencounters.org) and an Associate Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council.