Hertzmann, Leezah & Newbigin, Juliet (Eds.). Sexuality and Gender Now: Moving Beyond Heteronormativity. The Tavistock Clinic Series. London:  Routledge. 2019. Pp.  358. Pbk. £29.99.

This book helps move psychoanalysis beyond its heteronormative origins firmly into the 21^st century. The pathologization of homosexuality has been a shameful episode in our profession's history, with damaging consequences for analytic trainees and patients alike. This is an important contribution to the task of repairing some of that damage. Progressive thinking is often harder to identify in relation to gender than sexuality, however. The book is divided into three parts.

Part one, Sex and the Consulting Room, begins with a paper by one of the book's co-editors, Juliet Newbigin, who argues that there can be something intrinsically subversive about sexual excitement. This means the analyst may need to accept sexual desires previously regarded as perverse. She employs the work of Jean Laplanche to explore how this entails a ‘Copernican revolution’ of the psyche in which the centrality of the ego is overthrown. The following chapter examines the way that gay and lesbian people struggle with internalized shaming homophobic assumptions as they grow up. The section closes with a chapter that looks at the impact of sexuality on the supervisory relationship. So far so good.

Part two, Desire, continues to develop a discourse in which same-sex desire can be explored from a non-pathologizing psychoanalytic perspective. It opens with an excellent chapter from the book's other co-editor, Leezah Hertzmann. She describes working with a couple struggling with ‘lesbian bed death’ and shows how each partner unconsciously recreates unresolved elements of their experiences with their Oedipal mothers in their own relationship. These are then played out in the therapeutic relationship as one partner develops an intense erotic transference which leaves the other feeling excluded and betrayed. Hertzmann works sensitively and thoughtfully with this dynamic in a way that eventually enables some of the dysregulated affects (associated with the original experiences with their mothers) to become