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The scene is a Bay Area winter afternoon (inasmuch as those exist). I am riding a BART train between several gigs, another early-career millennial using the BART as a mobile office, attempting to maximize the learning potential of every moment by streaming digital media in Bluetooth headphones. I am despondent in the wake of recent conversations in case conferences and grand rounds that seemed to exhibit queer lives and bodies as objects of study and pity for (mostly str8) audiences. Sometimes in these moments I look to Google, entering random assortments of keywords and Boolean operators, in hopes of finding whatever feels lost in clinical spaces, and on clinicians' ears. This is how I first encountered Clinical Encounters in Sexuality, an edited volume that serves both as an academic overview and as a clinical intervention en masse. A few clicks later, the book was on its way.
The book's title immediately reveals the uniqueness of its endeavor — Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory. Here, in 2017, and for the first time, Giffney and Watson gathered a collection of published work that engages queer theory and psychoanalytic clinical practice. To be sure, psychoanalysis and queer theory have long been strange bedfellows. The latter's formative texts have drawn heavily on psychoanalysis or existed in opposition to it (Butler, 1990; Foucault, 1971). But these conjugal encounters have largely existed in academic circles or on queer clinicians' bookshelves — outside the normative spaces of analytic institutes and clinical training programs. The editors immediately acknowledge this fact and that of homophobia in psychoanalytic practice. Their