Bending Psychoanalysis Book Series
Notes from the Margins
The Gay Analyst's Subjectivity in the Treatment Setting
- By Eric Sherman
Much has been written about the impact of gender and sexual orientation on the intersubjective field. Yet remarkably little has been written about the unique dilemmas faced by gay clinicians who treat patients of different genders and sexual orientations. Given the particularities of growing up gay in our culture, issues of secrecy, shame, alienation, difference, and internalized homophobia necessarily enter into any gay therapist's developmental history. These factors have a shaping impact on the gay analyst's sensibility, on the way he learns to listen to his patients.
In Notes from the Margins, Eric Sherman courageously reveals a wide range of subjective reactions to eight different patients. In detailed clinical vignettes that highlight his thoughts, feelings, personal history, and countertransference struggles, he conveys the experiential immediacy of working as an analyst-and, more specifically, as a gay analyst. Although Sherman is not the first author to write thoughtfully about working in the countertransference, he is among the very few to portray analytic work, particularly in the working through of enactments, as an often untidy affair, marked not only by success but also by the blind spots and insecurities that contribute to failure. Notes from the Margins is not only an illuminating overview of the special challenges faced by gay and lesbian analysts, but a window to grasping the messy realities intrinsic to the psychotherapeutic process.
Published March 23rd 2005 by The Analytic Press.
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Uncoupling Convention
Psychoanalytic Approaches to Same-Sex Couples and Families
- By Ann D'Ercole, Jack Drescher
What does it mean to be member of a gay/lesbian couple or family? The contributors to Uncoupling Convention: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Same-Sex Couples and Families address this question by drawing on two cultural movements of the twentieth century: psychoanalysis and the gay/lesbian civil rights movement. Taken together, these traditions provide a framework for understanding, and providing psychotherapeutic assistance to, gay and lesbian patients who present with troubled relationships.
The contributors to this volume espouse a clinical focus that supplants the heterosexual perspectives of traditional psychoanalysis with new narratives about family life. Drawing on cultural, feminist, gay/lesbian, and queer studies, they illustrate how concepts of gender and sexuality are routinely informed by unproven heterosexist assumptions - both conscious and unconscious.
By examining the changing developmental needs and family dynamics of gay and lesbian families, the contributors broaden our very understanding of what a family is. They illustrate how contrasting cultural constructions of homosexuality and family life play out in same-sex couples. They delineate the multiple realities of gender subjectivity, both in children and in their gay parents. They ponder how technology is shaping reproductive experiences, as lesbians become part of the biomedical system. And they explore recurrent themes of feeling different and ashamed, including the shameful secrecy surrounding same-sex couples' financial matters. In uncoupling conventions, the contributors are effectively coupling post-Freudian psychoanalysis with the insights of queer theory and the critical edge of contemporary cultural studies. The result is a framework for addressing the relational and family-related challenges of gay and lesbian patients that ranges far beyond traditional approaches and will benefit analytic, couples, and family therapists alike.
Published April 30th 2004 by The Analytic Press.
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Who's That Girl? Who's That Boy?
Clinical Practice Meets Postmodern Gender Theory
- By Lynne Layton
Hailed on publication as "an impressive integration of postmodernism and relational psychoanalysis" (James Hansel) and "an intelligent and stimulating account of where the issues of identity, gender, and difference are joined" (Jessica Benjamin), Lynne Layton's Who's That Girl? Who's That Boy? is a major contribution to the postmodern understanding of gender issues.
This new edition, under the aegis of the Bending Psychoanalysis Book Series, includes a Foreword by Series Editor Jack Drescher and an Afterword in which Lynne Layton addresses the evolution of her thinking since the book's publication in 1998.
Published March 30th 2004 by The Analytic Press.
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