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Jonathan is the psychological autobiography of an internationally renowned American scientist and professor. It chronicles his early adolescent and adult experiences and struggles with his despised homosexuality, and his successful resolution of the early influences that caused his homosexuality through the experiences of three separate psychoanalyses. Jonathan Crocker is a pseudonym; he avoids his real name and that of others in the book because of his concern that anything that would reveal his true identity may cause embarrassment to some family members or friends; he himself is not evasive about his own life history. Let me state at the outset that I have known this author personally very well for nearly four decades, and have long been familiar with the main elements of his sexual history. The fact of his writing pseudonymously should not cause questions about the honesty of this autobiography. I can vouch for his scrupulous intellectual and scientific integrity; nothing would be distorted to make a spurious point.
His life story is presented clinically. The first part is called Case History, with voluminous notes; the second is Grand Rounds, also with voluminous notes. The Case History — his psychological autobiography — is presented developmentally, from his earliest childhood, including detailed family history, through his later life. To avoid retrospective falsification as much as possible, he quotes extensively from recorded sources (letters, tapes, etc.) contemporary with the period being discussed. His insights concerning these issues and events then come from later periods, including his analyses and his own intense, lifelong self-investigation.
His own developmental history per se, is not the most important aspect of this book, though it is its basis and jumping-off point. Suffice it to say that his development is classically in the pattern described by Bieber et al. (1962): the close-binding, intimate, and seductive mother who hated maleness, and a rela