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This new book by Leezah Hertzmann and Juliet Newbigin is published as part of the Routledge Introductions to Contemporary Psychoanalysis book series. The books in this series are concise by design (word limit is fixed at 40,000 words) and offer a contemporary and accessible introduction to key topics, ideas and thinkers in psychoanalysis. Hertzmann, a couple and individual psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and Newbigin, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, are editors of a previous volume, Sexuality and Gender Now: Moving Beyond Heteronormativity and are both previous recipients of the Bernard Rattigan Award for Psychoanalysis and Diversity, awarded by the British Psychoanalytic Council. They come, therefore, with a wealth of knowledge and experience, to bring us this book on psychoanalysis and homosexuality. Although a relatively short book, it manages to pack a lot in that is important, covering both historical ground, contemporary psychoanalytic thinking, and deep engagement with clinical material.
The book is structured into five chapters. The first three chapters provide an overview of the historical approaches to understanding homosexuality in psychoanalysis and how such approaches have shifted over time, from Freud’s somewhat open-minded understanding of homosexuality, to later theorising of homosexuality as pathological and perverse, to an eventual move to depathologising homosexuality and understanding it as part of normal sexual diversity. The last two chapters focus on contemporary ways of working clinically with gay, lesbian or bisexual patients.
The first chapter considers some of the historical, pre-Freud, conceptualisations of homosexuality and the work of some of the key sexologists working at the time that Freud began to develop his ideas. This is followed up in the second chapter, which describes the social and family context into which Freud was born, his upbringing and the social and professional context of his developing ideas. I confess that at first