“Homosexuality is not a ‘variant’ of human sexuality that can be put on an equal footing with heterosexuality. It is the expression of unresolved conflict tension in a tendency that is separate from sexual identity.” …World Youth Day, 2003
This was actually
an address given by Rev. Tony Anatrella, Psychoanalyst, specialist in Social Psychiatry at a 2003 Conference in Rome (in preparation for the 2005 WYD in Cologne.
That is not a criticism, but we need to place it in context (who said it…and where was it said and to whom).
The whole section in that address is worth considering:
4 - 4 Psychological bisexuality
The post-adolescent also has to deal with psychological bisexuality which is the result of identification with the two sexes - not a case of being a man and a woman at the same time - so as to internalise their sexual identity and to move towards heterosexuality. Psychological bisexuality is the ability to relate with the opposite sex and to be consistent with one’s sexual identity in one’s emotional life and not only in one’s social life. As we said above, post-adolescence is a time when one’s psychological life begins to integrate with exterior reality. Modern society tends to confuse the only two sexual identities that exist, male and female, with sexual tendencies that are multiple, and sexual practices that are unconnected with drives. We should not confuse identity with sexual orientations, especially when they are in contradiction with sexual identity. In this context it is not easy to be at one with oneself and to be sexually consistent especially when homosexuality is valued and presented as an alternative to heterosexuality. The working out of psychological bisexuality could be compromising. As relations between men and women become complicated to the point of encouraging each one to remain single, the social model of homosexuality becomes commonplace.
Many adolescents and post-adolescents are too nervous and unsure of themselves to deal with psychological bisexuality. Young people sometimes encode their passing ambivalence, common during adolescence, in cliched terms of homosexuality. They think they are homosexual although they do not want or desire it, and they sometimes take the “passage to action” that shakes them psychologically. Of course, all individuals have gone through an experience of homosexual identification in order to confront their sexual identity, beginning with the parent of the same sex. When these identifications suffer failure, they risk being eroticised and led into homosexuality. We must remember that the choice of homosexual object, which is inherent in the mind, is not to be confused with the homosexuality to which a person can possibly be oriented.
Homosexuality is not a “variant” of human sexuality that can be put on an equal footing with heterosexuality. It is the expression of unresolved conflictive tension in a tendency that is separate from sexual identity.
Education in the meaning of other and the differences between man and woman is at the heart of the discovery of the real meaning of otherness.
Actually, the whole address is worth a read (see the link above).
