Homophobic 21.We can separate the universal ideas of Freud from his particular insights; we don’t have defend his homophobia
McGowan ’13 (Todd, Associate Prof. of Arts & Sciences @ U. of Vermont, “Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis,” University of Nebraska Press, July, 2013, pp. 4)
The problem with this appropriation is the point at which it arrests the descriptive process of psychoanalytic interpretation. Psychoanalysis does not merely describe the structure of one culture or socioeconomic formation (such as patriarchy or capitalism); it instead insists on a fundamental validity across cultural and socioeconomic boundaries. It also insists on this validity across different historical epochs. It is, in short, a universal theory concerning the relationship between the individual subject and society.6 Of course, Freud discovered psychoanalysis in a particular historical situation that shaped how he presented his insights and even the ideas he could formulate. But one can separate the particular elements (like the Oedipus complex or the labeling of homosexuality as a perversion) from the universal ones (like the antagonistic nature of society or the fact of castration as the requirement for entrance into society). The challenge for the psychoanalytic theorist is discovering the universality in Freud’s discoveries, but it is this universality that presents an obstacle for any political project. If the antagonism between the subject and the social order is irreducible, then the stumbling block is not just capitalism or patriarchy but human society itself.
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