Why not follow your "slight embarrassment" to its logical conclusion? You actually don't think that "Freud's version of the mind and its drives" is correct, do you? Have you read _Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America_, eds. Joel Pfister & Nancy Schnog (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998), for instance? You might find the book interesting.
>Adorno takes the position that Freud's version of
>the mind and its drives is correct, but that his assigning normal, healthy
>status to the genital drives while consigning the partial drives to the realm
>of pathology was ideological, i.e., the status of particular types of social
>arrangements, notably the traditional family, had to be defended against
>even the possibility of something else.
Terms like "the traditional family" don't help either. To historicize the emergence of the modern space for the "psychological" is to historicize "families" or modes of social reproduction (esp. paying attention to the point when "families" lost the character of _production_ units), keeping in mind the uneven character of transformaiton (relative to classes, regions, etc.). It seems to me what we need here is not psychoanalysis but social history (the works of people such as Stephanie Coontz, John D'Emiliio & Estelle Freedman, Johnathan Ned Katz, etc.). The post on Renaissance England by John Mage, which discusses the political context of the employment of the term "sodomy," is another pointer to history. Those who study English Restoration literature have also noted the political uses to which the term was primarily put in that era. The change from "sodomy" to "homosexuality" obviously had much to do with the (apparent) separation of "economy" from "politics" (in contrast to the manifestly political character of surplus extraction in feudal relations) that the emergence and growth of capitalism effected. "Sodomy" was a public and political charge; whereas "homosexuality" is a privatized, psychologized, and medicalized term, a historical product of a different political terrain. "Sodomy" was useful in struggles for primitive accumulation and political forms appropriate for it; "homosexuality" appeared after the enclosure was over.
Yoshie