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The Course of Gay and Lesbian Lives: Social and Psychoanalytic Perspectives contains treasure troves of information for the working psychoanalytic clinician. The problem is, they are often hard to find in this archipelago of a book.
With a mandate from the American Psychoanalytic Association to provide a state-of-the-art report on the extant research-developmental, biological, social, historical-on the contemporary gay and lesbian experience, the distinguished interdisciplinarian Bertram Cohler and his collaborator Robert Galatzer-Levy have produced an encyclopedic volume on this complex subject. Presenting evidence throughout the book to support the thesis that sexual orientation and psychopathology are in no way correlated, Cohler and Galatzer-Levy offer detailed reviews of the extensive literature on the subject, which has proliferated in the wake of the 1969 Stonewall Riot.
Mostly these critiques try to tell us what homosexuality is not. Thus, the authors
found that nonnormative expression of sexual desire and same-gender sexual orientation has little relationship to adjustment or experience of personal distress. Social theory and study of the lives of gay and straight men and women converge to show that the experience of sexual desire is not fixed but varies across the course of life. Sexual orientation should not be viewed from an essentialist perspective that regards sexual desire as predetermined by either innate or developmental factors; sexual desire is fluid and changing in its significance for society and persons over historical time and in lived experience within lifetimes. Little is known about factors leading to either heterosexuality or homosexuality. The meaning of same-gender desire is founded in social and historical circumstances which change over time and across generations or cohorts. Social contexts and personal life circumstances alike influence the presently told life story narrated and collaboratively reconstructed in psychoanalysis … [p. 423]