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(1991). International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 18:115-118

Being Homosexual: Gay Men and their Development.: By Richard A. Isay, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 1989. Pp. 159. (Paperback version published by Avon Books, New York, 1990.)

Review by: Julius Silberger

Richard A. Isay has written a thoughtful and convincing book that deserves the attention of every psychoanalyst. He has reinterpreted a generation of psychoanalytic observations of male homosexual patients from the perspective of a different conception of the basis for male homosexuality itself, and has in the

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Copyright © Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London, 1991

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process recommended an enormously constructive refocus of analytic neutrality as it applies to these patients.

The psychoanalytic attitude towards male homosexuality in the generation just past could be epitomized as a blend of optimism and prejudice. People were limitlessly improvable, the assumption was, and given the choice, any sensible man would rather be straight than gay. Male homosexuality as an adult pattern, the theory went, derived from a childhood experience of a

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