Oedipal Experiences in Same‐Sex Families by YifatEitan‐Persico. Published April 18th, 2024 by Routledge, 328 pp, (w/ 14 Color & 15 B/W Illustrations). £24.74 (Paperback), £97.50 (Hardback) and £24.74 (E‐Book).

In the foreword to this book, the author posits that ‘the need to revise the Oedipal model is deemed, at the time of writing this book, to be one of the most urgently attended endeavours in the psychoanalytic world’ (p. xvii). This book is the outcome of a piece of research which aims to do just that. It is organized into three parts posed as questions: What does Oedipal development have to do with the parent's sex anyway? What does genetics have to do with kinship anyway? What does procreation have to do with parental coitus anyway? The Introduction, painstakingly researched, takes us through each facet of the Oedipus complex and thinks about the ways in which feminist and queer critiques can help us think about its application to same-sex families. The author details the ways in which Freud's radical theories about sexuality became concretized/essentialized with heterosexuality seen as the ideal end-point of a successfully navigated Oedipus complex. We know how this translated to treatments which did not just pathologize homosexuality and exclude LGBTQ+ people from psychoanalytic training and practice, but also offered the possibility of conversion or ‘cure’. I was left reflecting on how long this need to revise the Oedipus complex has been marked as urgent. The positive Oedipal model is still taught as a key component of the psychoanalytic frame, often leaving the harmful heterosexist hegemony intact, so that it is up to the individual to explore on the fringes to find different ways of theorizing psychosexual development. As Barden put it: ‘treatment has often moved on without a simultaneous revision of theory, so it is possible to practice without conscious discrimination while thinking from a theoretical foundation based on it’ (Barden, 2011, p. 334). The author traces the history of research in relation to LGBTQ+ people and families, and how first and second waves showed that children raised in those families had similar or better outcomes. However, heterosexual families were used as a comparison group, meaning the research was based on implicit heterosexist assumptions. A third wave of research focusses on the unique experiences of those families, without holding up a comparative ideal. The author's research is described as aiming to build a bridge between two islands – the psychoanalytic and the empirical – suggesting that both disciplines could benefit from each other as psychoanalysis cannot seem to incorporate or keep up with the pace of social change and empirical research struggles to account for unconscious factors. This extensive piece of qualitative research takes place in Tel Aviv, and the surrounding areas. It details interviews with 33 children between the ages of 4 and 6 and their parents, 11 gay male couples and 12 lesbian female couples, without their children present. The author takes us through her thought process in choosing a sample, and her decision to interview families in which same-sex parents in the same household are raising at least one child who was born as the product of gamete donation. While she wanted to have a sample that was as diverse as possible, after the first round she decided to exclude six families which did not fit this structure for the purposes of this study but intends to use the other interviews for further research. The families are all middle or upper-middle socio-economic class. She spent hours in the families' homes and was therefore able to gather observational data, as well as the data she collected from the interviews. The children were interviewed using visual prompts as part of tests developed for the research intended to elicit phantasy material about their ideas of what a family is, attachment patterns, object choices and questions of how they think they came into the world. The results are as compelling and endearing as you would imagine, and the author's skill in supporting both the children and parents to express their inner world in creative ways is evident throughout the book. She includes the children's own drawings of family constellations, as well as the pictures that the children respond to. She explains what she means by a psychoanalytic stance in interpreting these drawings and interviews. I found myself laughing aloud as the children dramatically and passionately grapple with the vicissitudes of inclusion and exclusion and what they make of its connection to relationships and desire. I was especially struck by the way in which children of this age take what they are told about their origins, their parent's relationship, their siblings, etc., along with messages they receive about what is hidden or off-limits and infuse these with their own wishes, meanings, hopes and fantasies. Eitan-Persico offers us vignettes throughout the book, and while she makes her own interpretations, she consistently reminds us we are free to make our own, meaning the process of reading the book is an opportunity for the reader to think through and test out their own theory of sexuality. The interviews with the parents offer fascinating and often profoundly moving accounts of their own struggles to navigate the expression of their sexuality, and how the decision to start a family and experiences of becoming a parent impacted their relationship as a couple, their relationship with their own families and the conscious and unconscious messages given to and hidden from their children. The findings from each stage of the study show clearly that most children do construct an Oedipal configuration with parents of the same sex, and that the choice of parent as primary attachment figure is based on the parent who served as primary caregiver, or was most emotionally available at the beginning of the child's life, regardless of gender presentation or more traditionally ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ role division. Another fascinating finding was how the hegemonic ideal of heterosexuality places a taboo on homosexuality, and how this is picked up on by children from their parents, family and wider society. As a result, it was more difficult for children to creatively express and work through their erotic desire for parents of the same sex, eliciting defensive strategies on the part of the parent and the child. The findings from the second part interestingly show that biological affiliation itself has no impact on a child's attachment processes, but the meaning that parents give to biological affiliation does have an impact. The findings from the third part relate to the place of the ‘birth other’ (donor or surrogate) in the minds of the members of the family and how easily the intense feelings stirred up by this process can lead to defensive strategies employed by the parents which give a message to the child that their curiosity is unwelcome and can suffuse the children's phantasies with guilt or anxiety. The fact that the parents being interviewed live in a strongly pro-natalist society where having children is seen as ‘the ultimate good’ (p. xxiv), adds an important dimension to the research. As the author reports ‘In Israel, lesbian mothers and gay fathers report an increased experience of social belonging after becoming parents’ (p. xxiv) and the parents interviewed displayed clear assimilative aspirations. Eitan-Persico aligns this to Lisa Duggan's term homonormativity (a depoliticization of homosexuality, so that it does not challenge heteronormativity) and homonationalism (a process by which the homosexual is integrated into the state and used to demonstrate liberal values). These processes by which states and institutions incorporate ‘diversity and difference’ in ways that obscure practices of discrimination while performing the opposite, made me wonder if the same process happens within psychoanalysis: this might be a clue as to why the retheorization of the Oedipal model has still not happened, despite evidence of harm caused to minoritized people. Steven Stern (2019) suggests the phrase ‘living in an airless world’ when someone is seen through a lens so distorted by another's needs and projections that they are not seen for who they are. While much of the lens through which psychoanalytic theory views queerness and queer families can feel like trying to breathe in airless worlds, this book felt like oxygen. The children and parents were given space to exist as they are, rather than by comparison, allowing the reader to grapple with all the inherent complexity of psychosexual development and the added challenges of internal and external heteronormative hegemony and homophobia. The book offers an opportunity for free association in response to the creative, engaging and often deeply moving insights into these families lives. While I think the evidence from her research shows the author has succeeded in demonstrating how a revised version of the Oedipal model could widen its reach and increase its relevance, I am not sure whether or how this will be integrated into psychoanalytic training, thinking and practice. Consistent challenges to the classical Oedipal model still haven't shifted its centrality in psychoanalytic training; instead, those challengers are simply moved to the ‘equality and diversity’ section at the edge of the psychoanalytic library. I hope I am wrong, because I think studies like this should be front and centre.