A BOY AND TWO MOTHERS: NEW VARIATIONS ON AN OLD THEME OR A NEW STORY OF TRIANGULATION?: Beginning Thoughts on the Psychosexual Development of Children in Nontraditional Families

The author examines the ways in which a psychoanalytic perspective may illuminate the underlying developmental dynamics of children of lesbian parents. Families headed by gay and lesbian parents demand reconsideration of a theory of oedipal development based on heterosexual parents. If triangulation, the move from dyadic to triadic object relationships, depends on 2 primary processes-the child's acceptance of the immutability of generations and the child's recognition that children are excluded from the world of adult sexuality-parental gender or sexual orientation assumes less importance. The emergence of conscience from multifaceted processes of identification is consistent with this view of triangulation as a developmental phase. Children of gay and lesbian parents must be offered theories of healthy development that include them.