Sex Changes

Mark J. Blechner, Ph.D., is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in New York City. Along with 50 articles and book chapters, he has published three books - Hope and Mortality (Analytic Press, 1997), The Dream Frontier (Analytic Press, 2001), and Sex Changes: Transformations in Society and Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2009) - and is the editor-in-chief of the journal Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He is a training and supervising psychoanalyst at William Alanson White Institute, where as founder and director of its HIV Clinical Service from 1991 until 2001, he led the first psychoanalytic clinic devoted to working with people with AIDS, their relatives, and caregivers. He has taught at Columbia University, Yale University, and New York University.

• Part I: Psychoanalysis, Sexuality, and Prejudice. Homosexuality and the Rorschach Test. Psychoanalysis In and Out of the Closet. The Experience of Hating and Being Hated. Homophobia in Psychoanalytic Writing and Practice: A Comment on Trop and Stolorow (1992) and Hanna (1992). The Interaction of Societal Prejudice with Psychodiagnosis and Treatment Aims. The Closeting of History. Selective Inattention and Bigotry: A Discussion of the Film Trembling Before G-d. Part II: Sex, Gender, and the Good Life. Maleness and Masculinity. Disgust, Desire, and Fascination: Psychoanalytic, Cultural, Historical, and Neurobiological Perspectives. The Gay Harry Stack Sullivan: Interactions Between His Life, Clinical Work, and Theory. AIDS. Intimacy, Pleasure, Risk, and Safety. Love, Sex, Romance, and Psychoanalytic Goals. Polymorphous Without Perversity: A Queer View of Desire. Erotic and Anti-erotic Transference. The Political is Psychoanalytic: On Same-sex Marriage.

"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, Director, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, USA"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. In each chapter's preface, he recounts how, during the two decades in which he wrote these essays, his own sexuality evolved in tandem with the changing intellectual and professional climate and the development of his own thought. Consistently illuminating, this book is not to be missed." - Muriel Dimen, Editor, Studies in Gender and Sexuality"Mark Blechner’s new book, Sex Changes, traces a most extraordinary arc, both liberatory and tragic. At a personal level – and the work is personal – we can feel courage and anguish alongside delight and growth. Blechner’s papers, accompanied by invaluable personal introductions, link up history, personal history, psychoanalytic history, and evolving theory in a fascinating new gestalt. What we learn is that lifting prejudice improves matters at every level of our being, personal and social. In these essays Blechner shows us an evolving complexity of desire, sexuality, homosexuality and heterosexuality, gender and gender variance, and homophobia, in a way that illuminates that the break for freedom is good for people, but also really good for psychoanalytic theory, its institutions, and its practice." - Adrienne Harris, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, USA