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The crucial contribution of this volume to the psychoanalytic literature is in providing a persuasive nonpathologic theory of male homosexuality. Regardless of important differences in prior psychoanalytic interpretations of homosexuality, all concur that homosexuality is at best a deviant path for erotic development. Understandably, in the aftermath of the gay-rights movement this view has contributed to skepticism and even antipathy among homosexual men and women towards psychoanalysis. And certainly, psychoanalysts still motivated to alter the sexual orientation of this population, or who are at least dubious that it represents an adaptive alternative, are unlikely to apply their skills optimally to the homosexual person seeking therapeutic aid.
Friedman's scholarly review of psychoanalytic and other research studies on homosexuality leads him to draw clear distinctions between sexual orientation and psychopathological conditions. In systematically illustrating how nongender related pathology manifests in homosexual and heterosexual orientations, he defeats the usual stereotypes: it is the obsessional or the borderline pathologies, for example, that matter and not the sexual orientation.
Still, this study reaches further. It supplies an alternative psychoanalytic theory of male homosexuality. Friedman sharply distinguishes the early differentiation in core gender identity (the sense of being male or female) from another process during late childhood which he refers to as sexual fantasy differentiation. How a child's erotic imagery consolidates, according to Friedman, derives from a variety of biopsychosocial influences and cannot be solely ascribed to, say, a negative oedipus complex. A necessary ingredient of Friedman's theory of sexual fantasy differentiation is that once sexual fantasy has crystallized, it remains impervious to significant alteration—much like the earlier core gender identity differentiation. Even if there is major improvement in the individual'