Perversion and Love in Postwar Psychoanalysis Or

This talk considered the peculiarities of psychoanalysts’ responses to the sexual revolution of the 1960s-1970s. Topics covered included the highly ideological (mis)uses of the ideal and dream of love in marginalizing nontraditional sexualities – as well as the strategies ultimately used by anti-homophobic psychoanalysts to challenge the dominant norms, with particular attention to the late Robert Stoller’s innovative ideas about sexual excitement.

Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has published widely in the history of religion in Europe and the U.S., on the Holocaust and its aftermath, and on the histories of gender and sexuality. She completed Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (2011) and is currently at work on a new project on the European and American histories of psychoanalysis, trauma, and desire. She is also the author of Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics (2008), Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (2005), and Intimacy and Exclusion: Religious Politics in Pre-Revolutionary Baden (1996/2007). She is the editor and co-editor of six anthologies, including, most recently, Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century (2009) and Lessons and Legacies VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective (2007).