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Psychoanalytic Therapy & The Gay Man is a most welcome addition to the psychodynamic literature and one that shows how psychoanalytic psychotherapy can understand and affirm the sexual identities of gay men.
Dr. Drescher notes that “Psychoanalytic Therapy & The Gay Man is not just a book about doing psychotherapy with gay men. It is also a chronicle of the historical state of relationships between two controversial cultural movements of the twentieth century: psychoanalysis and the political struggle for gay rights” (p. 2). Even if this important work were just a book about doing psychotherapy with gay men it would have been quite successful pedagogically. But Dr. Drescher is modest in his description, for this volume is much more than a psychotherapy text. Indeed, it is a work that incorporates an historical overview of today's cultural reevaluation of homosexuality with a scholarly review of the many theories about its presumed etiology. Utilizing his clinical experience with a large gay psychotherapy practice, Dr. Drescher invites the reader into his consultation room to hear firsthand the many narratives of his gay patients as he works with them to discover what being gay means to each of them. In this process, the multiple faces of antihomosexual bias and its effect on the individual patient is likewise uncovered and explored. As Dr. Drescher notes, “it is the rare member of society who has not been exposed to some degree of antihomosexual bias that is both culturally normative and embedded in other value systems” (p. 84).
The beauty of Dr. Drescher's book is that it is successfully written for a wide audience. This is not a volume aimed exclusively at a gay readership. It is a skillfully written treatise that addresses both the expert and student of homosexual psychology, whether heterosexual or otherwise, while being neither superficial nor overly technical. This is a volume that immediately confronts the very question of what it means to be “gay” to the pat