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This book is intended as an introduction, but not just for beginners. The brief from the publisher is to be accessible without compromising complexity and to
express the authors' personal views and their own contributions to the field. Hertzmann and Newbigin achieve all this and much more, showing how a psychoanalysis that moves beyond the heteronormativity and homophobia of many of its traditional theories and practices is both needed and possible. They do this by a review of past and contemporary psychoanalytic approaches, and through further chapters on internalised homophobia and present-day clinical challenges. Given the wide compass of the topic, it is necessarily compressed, but nevertheless extremely informative, with plentiful references for further reading.
The first chapter traces the social origins of concepts of homosexuality from the nineteenth century onwards and their influence on the emerging psychoanalytic concepts. This historical framing is important in underlining how extensively moral and social attitudes came to pervade supposedly ‘scientific’ psychological and psychoanalytic notions of sexuality and gender. For example, Hertzmann and Newbigin show how ‘The resulting posture of scientific certainty traditionally adopted by psychoanalysts has tended towards a view of unquestioned heteronormativity as a form of “bedrock”’ (p.113). This, they consider, led to a reluctance to critically question the basis of these theories, and to their implicit and explicit homophobia and heteronormativity. The consequent damage of this has yet to be adequately acknowledged within the profession but includes damage to patients wrongly considered perverse or otherwise pathologized; to those who were deterred from seeking help; and to those who were rendered celibate or seriously depressed, faced with the impossibility of a change in their sexuality, where this was seen (by the analyst) as a goal of treatment.
In 2019, the American Psychoanalytic Association issue