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Mark Blechner's book, Sex Changes: Transformations in Society and Psychoanalysis is a collected volume of essays written by Dr. Blechner, spanning 38 years of his clinical writing on the topics of sexuality, prejudice, gender and psychoanalysis. It is the 10th volume in Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series, edited by Donnel Stern, and offers the reader a personal, historical, and clinical account of psychoanalysis' responses to homosexuality, the AIDS epidemic, and gender identity. It is both richly informative for those new and old to the literature and powerfully persuasive about the detrimental role psychoanalysis has played in the lives of gay and lesbian people. Inspiringly, Dr. Blechner does not end with his critiques. Rather, he calls upon the reader to challenge his/her own prejudices and assumptions, particularly homophobia. He wishes to “sensitize and educate heterosexual readers to the special problems gay people face” (p. 15), and restore psychoanalysis to its standing as a progressive and disruptive discipline, “as the solver of irrational problems instead of the reinforcer of problematic irrationality” (p. 55).
This book is organized into two sections with seven chapters in the first section and nine in the second. Each chapter is introduced with a piece of personal information or reflections from about the period he and the culture were in at the time of the original writings. The first section, entitled, Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, and Prejudice focuses