Correspondence

To the Editor:

I am grateful to The American Journal of Psychoanalysis for this opportunity to respond to two recent, similar reviews by Richard C. Friedman (1999; 2000) of my book, Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Gay Man (PT&TGM). I appreciate that he acknowledges my “empathic, thoughtful posture toward gay patients” and calls me a “thoughtful clinician” (1999, p. 654). Nevertheless, Friedman also maintains that PT&TGM is a polemical and political book, rather than a clinically or scientifically reasoned one. For example, in his review in this journal, he says I am “hostile toward sex researchers generally”; in his other review he places me in the ranks of those who are “opposed to science itself” (p. 657).

In any discussion of clinical and scientific material, it is ideal if the participants can maintain some degree of objectivity. It should be noted, however, that even among scientists, most levels of discourse, including legitimate disagreements, are inevitably characterized by a subjective interpretation of data. It is only when there is a definitive proof for a theory that subjectivity becomes irrelevant (Kuhn, 1972). Where Friedman and I legitimately disagree is on how to make sense of and incorporate extra-analytic findings into analytic theory and practice, and from which fields psychoanalysis should draw useful knowledge. Friedman writes and speaks as if he believes the scientific and psychoanalytic community have reached the level of proof in the biological study of gender and sexuality. To argue that those who disagree with him are “hostile to science” might be accurate if those theories were proven, rather than just hypotheses. However, because those proofs do not exist, I present thoughtful challenges to the narrative assumptions of some popular biological, and psychoanalytic hypotheses in PT&TGM.

Such an endeavor inevitably has political implications. Like many analysts of my generation, I believe that “In the postmodern world, personal and political nar