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The Homosexualities and the Therapeutic Process is a book of 315 pages composed of fourteen chapters written by seventeen authors, one of whom is a woman. Two chapters are specifically about female homosexuality, twelve are primarily about male homosexuality. The homosexualities that are referred to in the title are not only male and female but the “homosexuality” of the female-to-male transsexual, the latent and unconscious homosexualities, the homosexualities of the psychotic, the oedipal and preoedipal homosexualities, homosexual “enactments,” and the particular meanings and structure of male homosexuals' “photoexhibitionism,” “cruising compulsion,” and “wish to contract AIDS.”
In its point of view the book continues in the line of the classical psychoanalytic perspective, finding the primary source of homosexuality in distorted family functioning. However, unlike the earlier classical position, which focused on the problems of the oedipal period and castration anxiety, most of the cases in this book illustrate the editors' (particularly Dr. Socarides') thesis that the true problem in most obligatory homosexuals lies in the preoedipal period where trauma or problematic relationships cause difficulties in the separation-individuation process from the mother. For example, in the male homosexual the separation difficulty interferes with the shift from feminine to male identifications resulting in various ego deficiencies. In the case of the female homosexual a faulty early feminine identification was found to be the result of maternal, often followed by paternal, pathology.
The main position taken by the authors concerning treatment of the obligatory homosexual is that it represents an arrest or fixation that can with analytic treatment in a motivated patient be overcome. The useful contribution that it makes is in outlining a schema for approaching the “conversion” of the homosexual patient. The first