In essence this search for a physical and emotional rapture could be called a kind of infantile foreplay, and Freud localized it in the oral, anal, and phallic erotogenic zones. The pleasure of suckling for the new born child, quite apart from assuaging its hunger pangs, served as a solvent of isolation, the first temptation in a four-fold movement towards ego development and away from the undifferentiated paradisiacal state. Soon divorced from the whole of life, a psychical wholeness encompassing all of what Freud called the Id, the child becomes an adult.1

Melanie Klein, herself an adherent to the tenets of psychoanalytic thought, redefined some of Freud's schemata - put it on fast forward, so to speak. According to Kleinian theory, the newborn child arrives with an already existent, albeit primitive, ego just waiting to unfold. And when thrust out into the whole of the world outside the mother's womb, it begins doing just that in the form of a spate of unconscious primitive fantasies about every aspect of its new life. The baby instinctively focuses on pleasurable sensations as "good," part of a projective process of identification in order to localize itself. At the same time the little ego engages in splitting off whatever "bad" fantasies the baby cannot hold (e.g. the fear of annihilation) casting them outside the sphere of its own as yet unformed awareness of itself in order to survive.

It is expected that the mother will be capable of receiving these infantile projections, and of transforming them into something that is quite usable in return, such as when the baby's "bad" hunger pangs are soothed by the mother's cooing while the need for food itself is eliminated by taking in milk from the mother's breast. Thus sated with psychosomatic pleasure, the infantile needs are met.

It is rooted in these earliest encounters that projection as a psychological process is formed. That is, as part ofa pattern of projective identification, the child assumes something about the receptacle of its projections that has less to do with the other and more to do with itself.

For those unfortunate individuals who became "fixed" at any of the infantile stages (and we all have to greater or lesser degree), Freud posited that they would develop maladaptive traits corresponding to whatever level they were stuck at. Object relations theory similarly suggests that when the baby's infantile needs are not satisfactorily met, it will carry the same ongoing demands into adulthood. They are often dissociated from adult life experience, however, and, as motivating factors, are stored outside of conscious awareness. It is these unconscious fixations, or unmet infantile drives, which become activated in the course of intimate adult relations and, like a pinball set against the bumpers, start bouncing madly about. Indeed, the aura of such adult experience is said to reconstitute the infantile psychological, emotional, and sexual fantasies first linked together as part of the original mother-child state, and they are then transferred to the adult's partner. As such, transference - the means whereby individuals project onto others the repressed hopes, fears, questions, and conflicts of their past - also enters into the intimacy of the therapeutic encounter, as well. The patient's unfinished business, as it were, produces a distortion in the way the patient perceives and reacts to their therapist, often times as if they were retumed to sit face-to-face with one big breast, ready to have it out.

Under the rubric "coming out inside," I have worked with issues of internalized homophobia, as well as other elements of self discovery and personal growth.2

Inherent in the work is a waking up of repressed or otherwise displaced creative energy, including (though not limited to) the individual's homosexuality. Taking someone under your wing in this context almost always elicits a response, sometimes what could even be called a "father hunger," often transferred with a highly erotic charge.3 By using the term "father hunger," however, I do not mean to imply a "fixed" stage developmental determinant for homosexuality. Indeed, I believe that when psychoanalytic theory reduces development in the gay child to a perversion of the so-called heterosexual norm, it confuses gay child development with a heterosexist bias, rendering incomprehensible what is otherwise an already innate potential - gaiety - of which homosexuality is but a part.3 While seemingly afield from a look at sexual transference, it is not. For "father hunger," as I am using it here, is the archetypal sense of an awakening generative masculinity, distinct from the reproductive model, yet nonetheless libidinal in its source.

Such a force is itself often thwarted by a constellation of a different sort, the Puer Eternis (or eternal youth). As a carrier of creative imagination, the Puer embodies exciting possibilities, and it exerts a powerful influence in the psyche, particularly the gay psyche. Yet without the presence of an equally influential counterpart, the archetypal father, the gay child can often become lost, finding it nearly impossible to fulfill his creative promise. And so he presents himself for the therapeutic encounter. In order to turn the creative potential into an equally fertile life, the pleasure principal, girded by his rising generativity, must be sublimated.4

I am, of course, referring to a need to re-vision the Oedipal Complex for the requirements of the gay child (instead of the other way around), for it's a little wrong-footed to refer to the experience of the mythological King of Thebes when speaking of gay child development. Indeed, when gay child development turns to the assignments of Freud's Oedipal phase, much of psychosexual theory as we know it must be turned upside down.5 That's not to say that the gay baby goes out with the bath water, so to speak, for by enlivening this "father hunger" it similarly touches into childhood, engendering the same renewed hopes formerly embodied in infantile drives, including sexual fantasy. And so, when in the course of the therapeutic encounter the appearance of "father hunger" makes its way out as an erotic response, it is likewise in reality something far beyond somebody simply trying to get into somebody else's pants.

PSYCHIC REALITY

I would suggest it goes farther than mere comprehension, however. Indeed, one of the great achievements of psychology has been the way it has reintroduced to the world what the religious, mystical and esoteric schools of East and West have always taught. In shamanism and the yogic traditions, for example, interpsychic powers such as psychic diagnosis, clairvoyant perceptions of energy fields, telepathy, and the like are commonly induced, peeling back the skin of ordinary reality to gain access to an otherwise nonordinary awareness, thereby penetrating to the psychic root of psychological problems - namely, the basically dualistic notion of the ego or a separate self.