Same-Sex Couples and Other Identities: Psychoanalytic Perspectives edited by Damian McCann. Published by  Routledge, London, 2022;  244 pp, £31.99 paperback.

Same-Sex Couples and Other Identities asserts the need for imaginative psychoanalytic compassion towards LGBTQ people in relationships. Psychoanalysis avers to make unbearable suffering bearable by searching for truth from a position of not-knowing. Instead, it has often compounded the suffering of LGBTQ people by imposing certainty about the inferiority of their relationships. This harm was exacerbated by being long unacknowledged or denied. Recent publications elaborate the effects of discrimination on the psychic health of LGBTQ people, and propose new ways of thinking psychoanalytically about their experiences. This edited volume of papers by therapists from different cultures and theoretical perspectives is the first British book to focus on couple and relationship therapy. Its breadth of topics and strong clinical focus make it a rich resource.

Psychoanalysis and LGBTQ people are the unspoken couple-in-treatment of the book. Their fractured relationship is considered from a third position, and conflicts begin to be worked through. The book's editor, Damian McCann, who is gay, describes the painful, enraging experience of being told by NHS colleagues that his sexual orientation would ‘skew the transference’ in his work as a couple therapist. He writes:

I have now found my voice … But in truth, I am angry for the harm that has been done in the name of psychotherapy over so many years to those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer, and who have had their

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sense of otherness reinforced by a discipline that has for so long basked in the security of its heterosexual privilege. (p. 3)

There are many such moments of conflict and rapprochement in the book, which is, I suggest, an act of grace, a generous mutual reaching for a new relationship. Couple therapists glimpse this impulse when couples entrenched in bitter warfare take the momentous step of beginning therapy together, allowing the possibility of a new thought.

Underpinning the book is the conc