Book Review: Contemporary Perspectives on Psychotherapy and Homosexualities

Abstract

When asked to review this book I hoped that here at last was a collection of papers that would give a deŽnitive account of homosexuality from the perspective of several different theoretical orientations. It does ‘address some of the incoherence in this Želd’ but it also introduces a healthy dose of post-modern incertitude, leaving more questions than answers. Can we speak of just one paradigm of homosexuality? Is it an illness, a deŽcit, or a construction and what other psychological, social, or political issues might cut across this debate? How is homosexuality comparable with other forms of marginalization such as racism or disability? And how many models of psychotherapy are there anyway? These are some of the issues which the various authors in the book introduce and I realized my naïve desire for ‘straight’ answers was unrealistic. Shelley’s introduction presents a brief review of homosexuality and its historical and cultural backdrop. This contextualization leads him to suggest ‘that instead of pursuing monolithic representations of homosexuality, why not abandon the dogma associated with this word of contention and, pursue a concept of homosexualities?’ (p. 1). He argues that this term could then embrace a whole range of sexual behaviour from the culturally sanctioned same-sex rituals of some New Guinea tribes to the practices of the bi-sexual, gay and lesbian communities of the Western world. This review, although interesting and clearly an attempt to contextualize the ‘illness model’ of homosexuality, led me to wonder what the rest of the book was about. This is quickly addressed by Shelley: ‘The purpose of this book is to address some of the incoherence which has resulted from this shift towards afŽrmative therapy, which has been a “reaction to” rather than a “working through” of the preceding illness models’ (p. 8). He argues that the demise of the illness model in most psychotherapies has resulted in a ‘theoretical vacuum’ of understanding about homosexuality that has been ‘sustained’ by the shift to an afŽrmative position. He believes that many schools of psychotherapy are ‘duplicitous’ in espousing such an afŽrmative position without the revision of theory that would support such a shift. This ‘incoherence’ is exacerbated by a profession in which 250 different schools of counselling and psychotherapy have been identiŽed (p. 7, Corsini 1981); although I think Karasu (1986) made it over 400. From these he has chosen BOOK REVIEWS