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Reading the collection Sexuality and Gender Now: Moving Beyond Heteronormativity, edited by the London-based psychoanalysts Leezah Hertzmann and Juliet Newbigin, I found myself toggling between two distinct historical moments: the present day, including the seminar on transference and countertransference I was teaching, and the winter of 1993, when as a graduate student I attended “Perspectives on Homosexuality: An Open Dialogue” at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, one of the first gatherings to confront our profession's sweeping history of heterosexism.1 Though I was scarcely aware of it at the time, that 1993 symposium occurred at a significant moment: just a few years after the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA), under threat of litigation, agreed to admit homosexual candidates to training (see Drescher 2008); and a half-decade before APsaA would fully renounce its view of homosexuality as pathological, a step that other major U.S. mental health organizations had taken in the 1970s.
A similar sense of history pervades Hertzmann and Newbigin's volume. Although the editors position the book, modestly, as “a training text for students as well as a resource for practicing clinicians” (p. 5), this mostly British collection (four of its eleven contributors are American) is in fact much more than that. Bowing to the inevitable after Parliament banned discrimination against LGBTQ individuals in 2010, the British Psychoanalytic Council in 2011 released a “Statement on Homosexuality” that, for all of its brevity, constituted a startling reversal: