Homosexuality has a birthdate, and clinical psychology helped set it
Downing opens not with the psyche but with a date. Homosexuality is a hybrid Greek-Latin coinage that entered English in 1892, arriving alongside depth psychology and alongside a new habit of construing sexuality in primarily psychological terms. The chronology carries the argument: heterosexual does not appear for another eight years, so the deviant category was minted first and the norm back-formed from it. Depth psychology therefore cannot occupy the position of neutral observer. It is one of the institutions that manufactured the object it then proposed to explain. “There is a sense, then, in which homosexuality is a myth created by clinical psychology.” Myth here is meant in the strong sense—not a falsehood correctable by better data, but a cultural vision with tremendous effective power, which is why it keeps organizing self-understanding even among people who consciously reject it. Naming a construction does not dissolve it. Her second move is to pluralize the category immediately: gathering women who love women and men who love men under one rubric erases the different sociocultural conditions that shape each, and above all the power imbalance between the sexes. A theory that treats the two experiences as symmetrical has already lost what it meant to describe.
Freud, read slowly, turns out to be the more supportive witness
The received account makes psychoanalysis the discipline that pathologized same-sex love. Downing’s slow rereading yields close to the opposite, and she locates the discrepancy in what later analysts made of Freud rather than in what Freud wrote. On her reading he holds that all of us have homosexual impulses, that no single etiology accounts for manifest homosexuality, that homophobia is itself an expression of latent homosexuality, and that attempts to cure homosexuality are pointless. The pivot is the 1915 footnote to the Three Essays and the bisexual hypothesis it supports: if no heterosexual attraction is ordained in nature, then exclusive attraction to the other sex becomes a problem requiring explanation, not a self-evident fact. “Heterosexuality turns out to be as problematical as homosexuality.” The section is a recovery, not an apologia, and Downing marks its limits herself. Freud’s point of departure is pathology and woundedness. His emphasis falls heavily on male experience. Any Freudian account of lesbian love must be extrapolated past what the texts actually say. What she restores is a witness more supportive than his reputation, held strictly to the boundaries of his own evidence.
Contrasexuality is the axiom Jung never audits
Her central judgment about analytical psychology is structural, not anecdotal. Jung’s theory rests on a premise he never puts in question: that mature sexuality is contrasexual, and that the psyche’s real aim is inner wholeness through relation to a contrasexual inner figure, not an actual other. “Contrasexuality as the deepest truth of our inner and outer lives seems self-evident to Jung.” Everything downstream follows from the unaudited axiom. Same-sex love cannot appear as a valid adult orientation; it must be arrested development, a mother-complex, a misguided literalization of the hermaphrodite archetype, or an adolescent stage. Cure becomes both possible and desirable. Literal sexual expression becomes, in a sense, always a misdirection of a soul longing. Compounding this is Jung’s unexamined use of male experience as the norm for human experience, which leaves his few remarks about lesbians thin and deduced, with little observation behind them. Downing does not stop at indictment. The corrective, she argues, is available from inside the tradition: the very method Jung taught—asking what age-old image of transformation is being reenacted—is the instrument with which post-Jungians such as Hillman, Walker and López-Pedraza take the contrasexual bias apart. The archetypal grammar is not abandoned. One of its premises simply stops being exempt from it.
Greece must be demythologized before it can be consulted
Because Freud and Jung both reach for classical Greece as the culture that validated same-sex love, Downing performs a prior operation: dismantling the modern fantasy of Greece before any Greek material is admitted as evidence. Working from Dover, Foucault, Keuls and Halperin, she establishes that the Greeks had no word for a homosexual; that acts were classified as active or passive, with the partner’s gender left out of the category; that the sexual relationship was assumed to be a power relationship isomorphic with social hierarchy; and that the socially validated form, paiderastia, was age-asymmetric, phallocentric, keyed to the older partner’s desire, and premised on the younger partner’s supposed absence of pleasure. She refuses to soften the disillusionment, naming the sadness of the hierarchy and the denigration of the receptive partner. But demolition is not the destination. Once the idealization is stripped away, she argues that the myths themselves exceed the conventions that produced them, carrying images for facets of experience that paiderastia ignored or actively devalued. That distinction—between a culture’s sexual conventions and the images its stories generate—is what licenses the book’s second half and its therapeutic proposal: return homosexuality to the gods, away from the diagnosticians.
Where discovery ends, invention begins, and death revises the whole project
Downing states her method’s limit rather than concealing it. Her sources—Freud, Jung, Greek myth, the classical literary record—speak far more explicitly about men than about women, so she will mine what is relevant to women and then, following Monique Wittig, invent. The tale of Iphis becomes her emblem of what that absence costs: without stories, the desire to love a woman like oneself appears solvable only by ceasing to be a woman. She reads the goddess traditions accordingly, looking not for overt sexual episodes, of which there are few, but for the multidimensionality of erotic bonds between women, drawing distinct patterns from Demeter, Hera, Athene, Artemis and Aphrodite. Those patterns belong to her interpretive method, and she says so—the difference between invention declared and invention smuggled.
The Epilogue then revises the whole project. Written by a lesbian for and about gay men who are dying, it argues that AIDS forces a fresh look at the interrelation of love and death, and makes Freud’s late turn from sexuality to Eros and Plato’s account of love as a preparation for death newly usable. Then Downing turns her instrument against itself: images are indispensable and dangerous at once, capable of romanticizing, of implying judgment, of turning the sufferer into the cause. A book that argues at length for restoring same-sex love to myth closes by refusing to promise that myth is safe. That unresolved tension is not a defect in the argument but its last honest term.