Homophobia: A Psychodynamic Analysis| Biomed Grid

The World Day to Combat Homophobia and Transphobia is commemorated, in the Cuban archipelago and beyond our island geographical borders, since 1973; date in which homosexuality -as a no so graphic entity- was eliminated forever from the International Classification of Mental Illnesses. To evoke this historical event, I make this article available to the readers of this periodical publication. It is not possible, in any way, to explain what homophobia is without first conceptualizing the words homosexuality and phobia. The specialized literature defines homosexuality as sexual preference or attraction for people of the same sex, while phobia describes it as intense and persistent fear towards a specific object, situation or activity. Homophobia, as a superficial motivation of the subject's behaviour, is the fear of homosexuality, but from the depths of human subjectivity it is nothing other than the fear of the homoerotic impulses that emerge from the instinctive component of the Freudian unconscious. Homophobia manifests itself through intolerant attitudes towards those individuals with homosexual behaviour; attitudes ranging from contempt to physical or verbal aggression and are an expression of an unconscious mechanism that Sigmund Freud, the Father of Psychoanalysis, called projection (attribute to people, situations or things hostile feelings that seize the subject). For the person with homophobia, the subject with homoerotic sexual orientation is a «plague» or «incurable patient», whose proximity can «infect the supposedly healthy», and when, for one reason or another, circumstances require him to interact with that other person «different» is not only decompensated from the psychic point of view, but also blocks emotional intelligence, understood as the difficult art of putting our feelings and emotions in order to optimize the relationship with others.