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from Books & Reviews
Sexual Variety and Frequency, S&M Are Part of What Makes
Gay Orientation "Distinctive and Valuable," Says Psychologist
A revealing review of psychiatrist Jack Drescher's
new book, "Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Gay
Man," was recently published in the Archives of
Sexual Behavior (Aug. 2002, vol. 31, no. 4, pp.
380-383, untitled). The reviewer is Kenneth Lewes,
who, like Drescher, is an openly gay man and an
advocate for gay issues.
Lewes notes that Drescher advocates "listening to
the patient" rather than interpreting the
patient's experience in the light of
psychoanalytic theories that might clarify what
his experience could mean. Drescher considers this
posture to represent a desirable value-free
neutrality, but Lewes says such a posture is
neither desirable nor, in the end, value-free.
This posture of merely "listening" is not
neutrality at all, Lewes notes, because it remains
impossible to listen without the filter of some
kind of theory, and it is "imperative," Lewes
notes, "that we be aware of what our theory is, so
that we can recognize its limits and
implications."
Worse yet, in Drescher's effort to avoid any
theoretical conceptualization of health versus
pathology, Lewes says, Drescher is forced to
ignore and deny the very real differences between
gay and straight men. Thus, Lewes notes, Drescher
does not address issues such as gay clients'
"amazing search for sexual variety and frequency,
the importance to them of fantasy and
sado-masochistic scenarios, the abuse of drugs to
heighten sexual experience, their apparently
adolescent narcissistic physical
display....Therapists working with gay men hear
about these behaviors frequently (p. 383)."
Why does Drescher's book fail to acknowledge these
commonalities of gay life? Perhaps, Lewes says,
because of "political reasons for not wishing to
discuss these issues at the present time, but I,
for on, cannot agree with them." In other
words, admitting that gay men are prone to
promiscuity, sadomasochism and narcissism may
stall the push for gay rights in our current
cultural climate, with its lingering taboos; but,
Lewes seems to suggest, there may come a time in
the future when our culture has changed
sufficiently to accept those traits of gay men as
non-pathological.
Thus Lewes thinks it's a mistake to whitewash the
differences between gays and straights. By
ignoring or denying them to make homosexuality
more acceptable to the straight world, he says,
homosexual advocates risk "erasing identities and
styles" that really do characterize gay men.
In fact, Lewes says that these, "very 'asocial'
traits of our patients" - and he places quotes
around the term "asocial," as if to imply that
promiscuity and sadomasochism are only "so to
speak" pathological, not pathological in any
enduring and transcendent sense - "are aspects of
what historically has made gay people distinctive
and valuable."
---by Linda Ames Nicolosi
Updated: 8 February 2008
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