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Jack Drescher' Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Gay Man is a pleasure to read, gracefully written and blessedly free of jargon, obfuscation, and pomposity. Drescher' tone is remarkably humane, and he disagrees with other clinicians in a respectful, though sometimes exasperated tone.
Drescher reflects a current psychoanalytic tendency to turn away from metapsychological theory and concentrate instead on the details and nuances of what patients themselves have to say. For Drescher, the primary therapeutic project is the sympathetic and informed attention to accounts of life experiences, and the privileged place of respect accorded to what Drescher calls “unofficial stories,” the unique and idiosyncratic ways patients try to make sense of their experience. The book is thickly interlarded with stories that capture for the reader what the world looks like from a gay man' point of view. For Drescher a prominent issue in the treatment of gay patients is the experience of antihoinosexual attitudes. His project of sensitizing therapists to this issue has a particular urgency, since such homophobic damage is sometimes repeated in therapies intended to alleviate it. Drescher illustrates this with an extended discussion of so-called “reparative therapies,” which seek to lead the gay patient out of the dark world of homosexuality into the bright day of heterosexuality, showing very clearly and convincingly that such a project represents a homophobic assault on the dignity of the patient. The book ends with an account of how gay men emerge from their closets and overcome the dissociation that imprisoned them.