Homosexuality & Psychoanalysis

Rating:
Summary: Courageous, fascinating, and overdue
Review: Many of us have heard the story of Freud writing the mother and telling her, in essence, that there was nothing wrong with her son being homosexual. The story is so unambiguous that we also have wondered what went wrong--with psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis--that resulted in homosexuality being directly and indirectly stigmatized for so long by professionals whose fields supposedly were largely influenced by Freud, other schools of psychological theory and thought notwithstanding. At the same time, many of us have concluded that perhaps that question didn't matter so much after the APA removed homosexuality from its list of illnesses nearly 30 years ago and the professional practice of psychoanalysis continued its long-term decline both in absolute terms and relative to other theories and methods.

Now Tim Dean, Christopher Lane and their book's contributors--with findings and interpretations drawn from diverse quarters--bring together gay/lesbian studies and queer theory with psychoanalysis, seriously engaging Foucault; making Lacan, Laplanche and others previously omitted from these interchanges relevant to the issue of psychoanalysis; emphasizing the need to integrate lesbians into debates that were for a long-time primarily about (and often by) gay men; and keeping it all timely and relevant in light of queer theory, AIDS, and other recent developments.

Students of gay/lesbian studies (including GLBT history), queer theory, and/or psychoanalysis obviously will profit greatly from this book. Those with a working knowledge of psychoanalysis will find this book easiest to digest while continuously stimulating; those without that working knowledge will find some parts tougher sledding than others but surely worth the effort. There's something truly thought-provoking just about every time you turn the page. It's surprising that no one had written and/or edited a book like this one before and I'd bet that Dean and Lane put years of thought and planning into this one. We should all be glad they did.