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Richard A. Isay has written a thoughtful and convincing book that deserves the attention of every psychoanalyst. He has reinterpreted a generation of psychoanalytic observations of male homosexual patients from the perspective of a different conception of the basis for male homosexuality itself, and has in the
process recommended an enormously constructive refocus of analytic neutrality as it applies to these patients.
The psychoanalytic attitude towards male homosexuality in the generation just past could be epitomized as a blend of optimism and prejudice. People were limitlessly improvable, the assumption was, and given the choice, any sensible man would rather be straight than gay. Male homosexuality as an adult pattern, the theory went, derived from a childhood experience of a too-binding mother and a father who was either literally or figuratively absent, or who was actively rejecting. The son then would be left with unresolved massive resentment both of women for their control and of men for their abuse, abandonment, or rejection. This would explain what was thought to be the relative paucity of sustained attachments among homosexual men, the almost invariable impersonality and ubiquity of transient sexual encounters, and what was interpreted as covert hatred of women, particularly noticeable in men who made their careers in the women's fashion industry or in the arts.
Psychoanalysts in their clinical experience however encountered many people who seemed not to conform to this rubric, homosexual men whose early lives seemed not to fit the proposed model, and heterosexual men whose early lives seemed to prefigure them for homosexuality, but who, whatever their conflicts, seemed not to be gay by any reasonable criterion. Further, those psychoanalysts who were not committed to changing their patients' gender orientation had the experience often enough of being consulted by homosexual men who, whatever th