Catherine Stuart Memorial Lecture By Jack Drescher

The William Alanson White Institute LGBT Study Group
presents the first annual
Catherine Stuart Memorial Lecture

Friday, May 9th at 8pm
20 West 74th Street
New York City

Catherine Stuart Ph.D., Fellow, Supervising and Training Analyst, Co-Director Diversity Committee, William Alanson White Institute, was prematurely lost to her family, friends and colleagues on April 5, 2007. This lecture, presented by Dr. Jack Drescher, is the first in a series devoted to diversity and honors her memory.

Jack Drescher, MD
Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis
From the Preoedipal to the Postmodern

Dr. Drescher will review the history of psychoanalytic theories of, and attitudes toward, homosexuality. Psychoanalytic theories purporting to explain homosexuality’s “etiology” can be divided into three broad categories:  theories of immaturity, theories of pathology and theories of normal variation. Freud’s early theory of “homosexual immaturity” was replaced by later Neo-Freudian theories that pathologized homosexuality.  Then, in 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from the DSM.  Dr. Drescher will illustrate the implicit values that psychoanalytic theorists historically used to construct their theories of “etiology.” He will also argue that the history of psychoanalytic attitudes toward homosexuality illustrates how psychoanalytic theories cannot be divorced from the political, cultural, and personal contexts in which they are formulated, and that analysts can take positions that either facilitate or obstruct tolerance and acceptance.

Dr. Drescher is a Fellow, Training and Supervising Analyst at the William Alanson White Institute in New York, Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor at New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at New York Medical College and SUNY—Downstate.

Dr. Drescher is also the author of Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Gay Man (The Analytic Press) and has edited twenty books. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Mental Health (formerly the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Psychotherapy) and Editor of the Bending Psychoanalysis Book Series (The Analytic Press). He has authored and co-authored numerous professional articles and book chapters

A Collation in Catherine Stuart’s honor will follow the lecture.

Seating is limited

RSVP  Sondra Wilk 212-873-7788

or swilk@psychoanalysis.net