You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Jack Drescher, a gay psychoanalyst educated at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City, has based his book on clinical experiences with approximately 400 gay men, 300 of whom were seen in consultation and the remainder treated in psychotherapy since 1984. His patients have been white, American born, generally college educated, and from the NYC metropolitan area.
Although organized psychoanalysis lagged behind psychiatry in adopting the view that homosexuality is not inherently pathological, it did abandon its invalid ideas about sexual orientation a number of years ago. The American Psychoanalytic Association, for example, has a standing committee devoted to homosexual issues, and welcomes gay and lesbian psychoanalysts, as does The American Academy of Psychoanalysis. A number of scholarly publications—including those by Isay (1989), Lewes (1988), Freidman (1988), Greenberg (1988), and Bayer (1981)—influenced psychoanalysis to discard the old paradigms about homosexuality.
Although these contributions are cited as references by Drescher, he devotes a good deal of space to arguing against ideas that earlier contributors had already demonstrated to be outmoded.
It is understandable that a gay therapist should feel outraged by the erroneous and prejudicial ideas about homosexuality that dominated psychoanalysis for so long. Richard Isay, the first openly gay psychoanalyst in The American Psychoanalytic Association, had to cope with antihomosexual prejudice often of virulent intensity. Nonetheless he succeeded in Being Homosexual , in preserving a professional stance toward his material so that his audience did not get the impression that his ideas about homosexuality were primarily motivated by anger. Drescher is less successful in that regard. The sections of the book that are not focused on clinical process tend to be polemical with a tone of righteous indignation.
A particular problem in this book is the stance taken toward gender identity and gender role b