Reviews
Psychoanalysts are supposed to know about sex. Freud’s contributions, centered on sexuality and psychoanalysis, began as a progressive social movement that promised to liberate people’s sexuality. And yet, we psychotherapists and psychoanalysts do not know about sex, at least not nearly enough. Our training rarely includes a thorough study of the diversity of sexuality, and our ignorance limits and even interferes in our work and perpetuates bias and prejudice. With Sex Changes, Mark Blechner, in a brilliant transvaluation of the term perversion, proclaims himself a ‘professional pervert’ and challenges us to overcome our homo-ignorance and our sexual benightedness more broadly, to facilitate a return to psychoanalysis being once again a progressive and even revolutionary ‘queer science.’ He blends an intimate, deeply moving biographical account with a theoretically sophisticated, scholarly, jargon-free narrative. All practicing therapists should read this book – who knows where it will lead?
- Lewis Aron, Ph.D., Director, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis
Blechner’s book is a welcome, straightforward and personal account of many issues that may be neglected in psychoanalytic circles and training today. … Sex Changes is thus a rare blend of the personal, theoretical, clinical, and political. … That Blechner’s book provokes such discussion reflects its relevance to current discourse, and reinforces just how complex the area of sexuality is, and how much more there is to learn about it. I thus want to summarize by saying how much I enjoyed Sex Changes. I found it to be a page-turner, well written, informative, accessible, provocative and, at times, humorous.
- Danielle Knafo, Ph.D., Contemporary Psychoanalysis
Our generation of psychoanalytically oriented clinicians and writers comes to the subject of sexuality from a unique perspective. In our professional lifetime, there has been an extraordinary explosion of information in the area of sexuality and an unprecedented public demand, so much so that the state recognizes and enforces legal rights without regard to sexual orientation. It is a sad fact that psychiatry (in general) and psychoanalysis (in particular) have lagged behind in this area and have remained bastions of prejudice and hidebound attitudes toward gay men and women.
This volume brings together the papers of Mark Blechner, a psychoanalyst trained at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City, who has spent his career thoughtfully and carefully taking on the psychoanalytic establishment.
He has the great clinician’s eye for the details that light up a story and a knack for positing “mind experiments” to help even a disapproving reader make the leap to understand his perspective. I am happy to have had the opportunity to review this volume.
In general, I have a personal distaste for self-revelation in psychoanalytic writing. I am wary of the personal example, especially when it is inadequately disguised as “patient material.” This is the method by which the neuroses of the “Founders of Psychoanalysis” (mostly Victorian, middle class, heterosexual men) became engraved in the “canon” as universal truths about the psychology of human beings. It has taken us more than half a century to insist that modern thinkers link our theory with scientific findings about development and sexuality.
In this instance, however, I state my admiration for Dr. Blechner who, like others of our generation, began his training as a closeted person and endured prejudice and hatred first-hand. I was there, too. I know how hard it was. It was enraging. I recall an instance of listening to a previously admired supervisor speak hateful prejudicial words about a colleague based on a revelation of the person’s sexual orientation. These many years later, I cannot recall the incident without feeling ashamed of the members of my own profession.
Blechner does not simply recall the prejudicial atmosphere. He uses it as a backdrop to explore the means by which young men and women were able to obtain training and examines the effect of hiding one’s true identity on development. He creates a “mind experiment” for the reader. Suppose, instead of mentioning your partner (using the term “we”), you were only able to speak of yourself. He is sure that during his training he had created the sense that he was a schizoid and isolative individual. He came to every social opportunity alone and spoke only of “I” when he spoke of his activities. Speaking plainly, but without self-pity, of the misery and the sense of being estranged, he seeks to document the distortions of personality that are the result of institutionalized prejudice.
A second “mind experiment” Blechner proposes, to be used when evaluating clinical material for anti-homosexual bias, is the “reverse bias test.” Used to great effect in a paper he wrote responding to a published “cure” of homosexuality, he asks the reader to reverse the terms hetero- and homosexual and re-read the conclusions. If no bias exists, both versions should read as equivalent and valid. Of course they do not. Thus, institutionalized homophobia is revealed.
Although psychoanalysis began as a treatment vilified for putting sexuality at the center of human experience, over the past 25 years sex has ceded centrality to a consideration of relationships. Blechner reminds us that gender is not the same as sex and that what is sexual and erotic is as much in the mind as it is enacted with partners. He takes up sexual behavior in a paper exploring the proximity of disgust (“eeuw”) and fascination (“wow”) in the inner world of sexual fantasy as well as the diversity of sexual practices. He further invites exploration of what it means to say that something is erotic in his paper on the erotic transference, adding the term “anti-erotic transference” as a descriptor of the lack of such feeling when used defensively.
Blechner is well versed in the modern and contemporary literature on psychoanalysis and homosexuality. The bibliography alone is worth the price of admission. In his papers, he effectively annotates the bibliography, putting the papers in context from a psychoanalytic as well as political point of view. His insights into what he calls the “closeting of history,” and of Sullivan in particular are scholarly as well as nuanced. How destructive it is not to know that great figures of history were gay! How sad, but predictable, that we still “closet” one of our most original psychoanalytic pioneers. Despite Blechner’s paper, Sullivan is still not “out” in the analytic institute where I was taught and his contributions remain (not coincidentally) unemphasized.
Last, the article on same-sex marriage is extremely timely. We all hope there will be a time when there will be no need for “coming out,” the same way there will be no need to refer to marriage as “same sex.” The paper lays out the case for marriage from the political and legal point of view, and Blechner speaks most eloquently of the “great yearning for socially sanctioned relationships.” In the absence of legislation in every state sanctioning equal rights and protections for domestic partners of every constellation, articles like Blechner’s should not be ghettoized.
I have, then, only one objection to Blechner’s book. I am delighted to have his papers collected in one place and think he has made a necessary and eloquent contribution to the discussion about sexuality, not just homosexuality, in our shared profession. My concern is that he is “preaching to the choir,” and those who most need to read and hear these ideas will not read the book. So please, Dr. Blechner, do not stop writing and presenting your work in mainstream psychoanalytic settings. It is still necessary.
- Sherry Katz-Bearnot, M.D., Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons
Blechner's impassioned plea for a more enlightened psychoanalysis of desire offers the reader an unusual opportunity: to track the emergence of an author's ideas in their personal, social, and psychoanalytic contexts. Consistently illuminating, this book is not to be missed.
- Muriel Dimen, Ph.D., Editor, Studies in Gender and Sexuality
…an ambivalent tale of evolution, both of a brave man and of a not-always-brave field….In this last chapter, in which he maintains throughout that the present issue of same-sex marriage is a social concern requiring the expertise of psychoanalysts, Blechner has gone full circle. By full circle, we mean that, having in large part answered the complex set of questions posed by Foucault in our initial quote, Blechner translates what he has learned about homosexuality, about psychoanalysis, and about social prescriptions into positive, humane, and health-promoting action.
- Gabriel Rupp and Patrick Kubier, Contemporary Psychology