TY - JOUR A1 - Dimen, Judith T1 - Culture, comparativity, and psychoanalysis. Reply to commentary T2 - Psychoanalytic Dialogues Vol. 05 (1995), pp. 165-180. N2 - Freud's discussion of melancholy in >Mourning and Melancholia< includes an account of identification as the incorporation of the lost object. This essay first seeks to establish a relation between that incorporative identification and the formation of >the bodily ego.< It then seeks to situate this melancholic condition of the bodily ego in terms of the >loss< of the same-sexed object under prevalent conditions of compulsory heterosexuality. This >loss< might be better understood on the model of foreclosure, suggesting that it is a loss resolved into a melancholic identification and hence central to the formation of same-sex gender identification. This account of the melancholic consequences of a disavowed homosexual attachment is then situated in terms of contemporary conditions of grief over the loss by AIDS of so many gay men. The suggestion here is that the cultural >unreality< of that >loss< may be attributable to the foreclosed status of homosexual love as that which >never was< and >never was lost.< Y1 - 1995 UR - https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-Fromm/frontdoor/index/index/docId/31692 ER -