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This book, edited by Dr. Ann D'Ercole and Dr. Jack Dresher is a series of short chapters each of which can stand alone. It addresses the question of what it means to be a same-sex couple or family and draws on both psychoanalysis and the gay/lesbian civil rights movement. These two traditions are brought together to provide a theoretical framework for conceptualizing clinical constructs that are effective in the treatment of gay and lesbian patients with troubled relationships.
The authors who contributed to this volume adopt a clinical and theoretical focus that replaces the heterosexual perspectives of traditional psychoanalysis with alternative views of family life. In doing so, they try to reshape and broaden our understanding of what is and what is not a couple or a family.
In the introduction, and first chapter, the authors make us aware of the “emotional complexities of parenting in a world of diverse familial configurations where fewer than twenty five percent of Americans live within the nuclear television families of the 1950s. Gay families in the United States are now estimated to include fourteen million children.”
Chapter Two deals with the concept of “gender indifference” in lesbian families. The author uses the planned lesbian family as a model “through which we can explore and rethink our notions of gender development.”
This chapter makes the point that lesbian relationships have the potential to “move beyond a simplistic dichotomized version of gendered parenting.”
In doing so these unions may produce children whose development is affected by several factors, including more fluid gender identifications, and self-states and interactions that are relaxed and less gender marked. The author concludes that these children may grow up without the experience