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In the foreword to this book, the author posits that ‘the need to revise the Oedipal model is deemed, at the time of writing this book, to be one of the most urgently attended endeavours in the psychoanalytic world’ (p. xvii). This book is the outcome of a piece of research which aims to do just that. It is organized into three parts posed as questions: What does Oedipal development have to do with the parent's sex anyway? What does genetics have to do with kinship anyway? What does procreation have to do with parental coitus anyway?
The Introduction, painstakingly researched, takes us through each facet of the Oedipus complex and thinks about the ways in which feminist and queer critiques can help us think about its application to same-sex families. The author details the ways in which Freud's radical theories about sexuality became concretized/essentialized with heterosexuality seen as the ideal end-point of a successfully navigated Oedipus complex. We know how this translated to treatments which did not just pathologize homosexuality and exclude LGBTQ+ people from psychoanalytic training and practice, but also offered the possibility of conversion or ‘cure’. I was left reflecting on how long this need to revise the Oedipus complex has been marked as urgent. The positive Oedipal model is still taught as a key component of the psychoanalytic frame, often leaving the harmful heterosexist hegemony intact, so that it is up to the individual to explore on the fringes to find different ways of theorizing psychosexual development. As Barden put it: ‘treatment has often moved on without a simultaneous revision of
theory, so it is possible to practice without conscious discrimination while thinking from a theoretical foundation based on it’ (Barden, 2011, p. 334).
The author traces the history of research in relation to LGBTQ+ people and families, and how first and second waves showed that children raised in those families had similar or better outcomes. However, heterose