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.
This book is an extremely valuable and refreshing contribution to the debate about psychoanalysis and homosexuality. Although almost entirely American, it speaks most appositely to the charged and complex nature of similar discussions in the UK. It contains a challenging mixture of accounts from lesbian and gay analysts and therapists of their experiences at the cutting edge of psychoanalytic homophobia, combined with discussions of what theoretical and clinical innovations are needed to provide more adequate psychoanalytic approaches to homosexuality. The three chapters of personal accounts (Drescher, Goldman/Schaffner, and Martin), of lesbian and gay analysts experiencing and struggling with professional exclusion, discrimination and prejudice, are in themselves essential documents in this shaming aspect of the history of psychoanalysis. But these records also allow us to appreciate the courage and integrity of the authors in the other sections of this book who have overcome the many hurtful and crushing aspects of psychoanalytic homophobia to do innovative, creative, and respectful analytic work with their lesbian and gay patients, and also put forward new theoretical critiques and ideas.
This difficult insistence on the value of psychoanalysis in the face of its pathologizing of homosexuality is at its most acute in Domenici's thoughtful and detailed chapter on Fairbairn's theories, which should be of great interest to many object-relations therapists in this country. Fairbairn is notorious (although perhaps this is not so widely known) for suggesting that homosexuals should be segregated into settlement camps. He regarded homosexuals as psychopaths, incapable of healthy relationships. Domenici traces the origin of this in Fairbairn's particular use of the notions of exciting and rejecting objects in oedipal structures. He argues that Fairbairn is not true to his own relational position at certain crucial points, and tries to develop some of Fairbairn's ideas fur