You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The purpose of this book is indicated by its flyleaf cover advertisement: 'What Dr Rosen attempts to do is to take lesbianism out of the subjective, mythical and psychoanalytic theory stages and bring it into an objective … phenomenological … realm'.
In this reviewer's opinion this book is grossly erroneous and severely slanted, and would not under ordinary conditions be worthy of study by any busy practitioner of psychoanalysis. However, it behooves us as psychoanalysts to correct erroneous concepts masking as psychological truth as to what constitutes healthy vs. unhealthy sexual development. Positions are promulgated by individuals who for reasons of their own wish to 'normalize' the sexual perversions. The politicizing of a clinical condition disserves psychoanalytic research, psychiatry, the public and above all, the individual homosexual himself who in reality wants more psychoanalytic help, not less. In this connexion, it is appropriate to quote Trilling, who warned and excoriated educational facilities which seek to discredit the 'very concept of mind', those who celebrate 'the ideology of irrationalism', in which knowledge is attained only through 'intuition, inspiration, revelation', and even violence and attempt to remedy (intellectual) injustices by surrendering standards of professional excellence. 'Surely it says much about the status of mind in our society, that the profession which consecrated to its protection and furtherance, stands silent under this assault, as if divested of all right to use the powers of its mind in its own defences' (Trilling, 1972). For these reasons a serious examination of the content and method of this book is in order.
According to the author, the first part of this book is a 'much needed up-to-date review of the literature which is divided into patient and non-patient centred studies'. The second part is 'a lesbian research study of 26 women with individual case presentations and psychological test findings'. The t