The article focuses on different attitudes towards psychoanalysis within the frames of queer theory. Is psychoanalysis conservative power serving stabilisation of social order or has it subversive potentiality which goes hand in hand with queer politics? How Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, Didier Eribon and other queer theorists use psychoanalytical tools in their writings? What are the similarities between Lacanian
psychoanalysis and Foucauldian “history of sexuality” understood as the starting point of queer theory? Are psychoanalytic ideas rooted in given social conditions (as Oedipus complex) useful in describing queer reformulations of relationships and social conditions which “produced” psychoanalysis?
The author tries to answer abovementioned questions but the answers are always partial and unsatisfactory as the relation between queer theory and psychoanalysis is tortous and sophisticated: queer thinking can cut psychoanalysis off (as Didier Eribon proposes) but it can be psychoanalytically motivated as well (as in Lee Edelman's theoretical proposals)
