Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Gay Man: Jack Drescher. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1998, 383 pp., $ 55.00.

As psychoanalysis enters its second century, its uneasy and often stormy relationship with homosexuality appears to be giving way to a rapprochement. I am tentative here because the current range of psychoanalytic views regarding homosexuality makes it difficult, as well as dangerous, to generalize about how the profession as a whole regards gay men and women at the millennium. This diversity reflects changes in cultural attitudes about homosexuality as well as a paradigm shift in the approach to general problems of epistemology and questions about what actually constitutes knowledge, evidence, truth, and fact. The result for psychoanalysis has been a gradual move away from a positivist position and to a new appreciation for the centrality of the analyst's subjectivity as the guiding force behind the meaning-making process in psychoanalytic theory and practice both. Nowhere is this more evident than in the ways in which gender and sexuality are being debated and reconfigured in contemporary psychoanalytic discourse.

Within the profession itself there are concrete indications of change where homosexuality is concerned. Lesbian and gay psychoanalysts have come out, and have been accepted into mainstream psychoanalytic institutes. Over the past decade their positions have been expressed more openly, and heard with greater interest. What can we learn about working with homosexual patients from perspectives that are both experience-near and analytically astute? If Jack Drescher's Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Gay Man illustrates this kind of perspective at work, then the answer is—a great deal.

The book's title does not indicate the breadth of its contents. This book is not only about psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy with gay men. It is also a narrative of the relationship between psychoanalysis and the political struggle for gay rights. This political history,