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The title of Mark Blechners new book, Sex Changes, is a double entendre depending on whether one reads the word changes as a verb or a noun. That is, sex changes. It changes from culture to culture, from one point in history to another, and from one individual to another. The result of these changes is what Blechner also calls “sex changes”— the multiple variations in human sexuality and practices. I believe that the book's most significant contribution is its revelation of the various ways psychoanalysts have been, and continue to be, prejudiced against this variability, and how becoming aware of our narrow mindedness can only help us as practitioners and as human beings. Blechner's stance throughout the book is “queer” in the sense that it espouses understanding and acceptance rather than judgment, marginalization, and pathologizing. It is, in Blechner's words, “tolerance of the unusual” (p. 167).
Blechner claims that psychoanalysis was once a queer theory because of its emphasis on sexuality, polymorphous perversity, and the unconscious. I agree with him and have sadly noted a “desexualization” in psychoanalytic theory in recent decades (Knafo, 2006). André Green (1995) has astutely commented that something important is lost when we avoid speaking about sexuality and the body. Blechner's book is, then, a welcome, straightforward, and personal account of many issues that may be neglected in psychoanalytic circles and training today.
The format Blechner chose for his book is unusual and refreshing. It is a collection of papers he wrote on the subject over a period of 35 years (from ), with introductions to each paper written from his present perspective. Sex Changes is thus a rare blend of the personal, theoretical, clinical, and political.
Although Blechner's book aims to encompass a wide spectrum of variations in sexuality and gender, much of the book's focus is on maleness,