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Charles Silverstein, Amsterdam, Elsevier, 2011, Available as an e-book or print on demand through either elsevierdirect.com or amazon.com
One of the challenges for the guardians of any body of knowledge/ideology/religion is what to do when there are changes that challenge the dominant paradigm. Psychoanalysis and homosexuality have had a difficult relationship. Yet, from the 1970s, certainly in North America, attitudes have begun to change. The UK still has a way to go. Much of Freud's radicalism about sexuality has been tamed, perhaps in an unconscious attempt to appear respectable. Silverstein's book will be an eye-opener to some in the UK. Here are confident gay and lesbian clinicians, including psychoanalysts, talking about non-pathologizing work with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) patients. Almost all of the contributors write from a psychoanalytic or psychodynamic perspective.
Silverstein, a clinical psychologist working both in a community setting and privately in Manhattan, is a gay man and the book is a series of reflections on a single-session assessment for psychotherapy that he conducts with a 30-year-old HIV-negative gay man. The initial chapter has the transcript of the 50-minute tape-recorded session. The patient was ostensibly seeking psychotherapy because of the recent death of his gay brother from AIDS. The author uses the framework of this first session to explain his way of undertaking an assessment. The remaining chapters of the book are contributions from clinicians who comment on Silverstein's work and suggest/speculate, more or less helpfully, what they would, or might have done when confronted with the patient. So the book has a dual function: explaining something of the complexities of a psychotherapy assessment – never a simple task especially for a novic