Queertherapie and Challenging the Historical Exclusion of LGBTQ+ People. Queertherapie is part of an approach that is at once critical, political, and restorative, in response to a long history of marginalization of LGBTQ+ people in mental health care practices. This exclusion is not merely a matter of occasional bias, but stems from a deep seated structuring of Western therapeutic knowledge, historically shaped by heteronormative, patriarchal, and medicalizing norms. In the field of psychoanalysis, homosexuality has long been conceptualized as a deviation, a developmental immaturity, or a fixation, framing queer identities within a logic of deficiency or dysfunction. This pathologization has had concrete effects on our lives: the exclusion of LGBTQ+ practitioners, the invalidation of lived experiences, and attempts at normalization, sometimes even within the therapeutic setting itself. Paradoxically, therapy thus became a space for reproducing dominant norms rather than a space for transformation or liberation. Queertherapie breaks with this tradition by proposing a reconfiguration of the therapeutic framework. The goal is not to integrate LGBTQ+ identities into an existing system, but to transform the very foundations of that system. This transformation requires the recognition of situated knowledge, minority experiences, and forms of knowledge that have historically been discredited. The reintegration of ritual and symbolism plays a central role here. Practices stemming from marginalized traditions, whether rituals, alternative cosmologies, or forms of symbolic storytelling, make it possible to shift the center of legitimacy of therapeutic knowledge. This shift opens up a space where queer identities are no longer analyzed as anomalies, but recognized as legitimate configurations of subjectivity, imbued with meaning, creativity, and transformative potential. From this perspective, Queertherapie does not aim solely to improve individual well-being; it contributes to a symbolic and epistemic rehabilitation. It restores a place for LGBTQ+ identities within narratives of care, in the collective imagination, and in therapeutic practices, by recognizing that queer experiences generate specific forms of knowledge about the body, desire, relationships, and transformation. This process also involves a critical reexamination of the history of care. The goal is to make visible the mechanisms of exclusion, to understand how certain norms have been naturalized, and to create practices that do not reproduce these forms of violence. Queertherapie thus becomes a space for unlearning pathologizing norms and rebuilding new forms of relationship with oneself and others. Finally, this challenge is not limited to a theoretical stance: it is embodied in the very practice of the session, in the therapist’s stance, in the language used, in the symbols employed, and in the rituals offered. Each element becomes a political act in the broadest sense, contributing to the creation of a space where LGBTQ+ identities can not only exist without judgment but also be recognized as sources of knowledge, power, and transformation. Thus, Queertherapie does not merely seek to correct historical exclusion; it proposes a reimagining of care in which minority subjectivities are no longer peripheral but central, and where the therapeutic process becomes a space for healing, reappropriation, and the reinvention of possibilities.

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