Oedipal Rejection

"Scott Harms Rose takes up questions about intimacy among gay men, which even in these post-postmodern times is not a well-traveled subject ... The exploration of the subjects' sense of masculinity, and of their relationships with their fathers and with romantic partners in adulthood, sheds light on the interplay of identity and relationship as it plays out for gay men in a heterosexist environment ... As truly good clinical and theoretical work usually does, it also calls to mind the various experiences of gender and intimate relations across the spectrums of orientation, desire, identification, and biological sex." - Dr. Paul E. Lynch, Instructor in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School and Boston University School of Medicine

"Scott Harms Rose has given us a deeply moving account of the ways in which inner experience and outer realities shape the emergence of self and the course of relational life in gay men. His case studies are carefully informed by his experience as a clinician as well as a rich appreciation of the object relations tradition and empirical study in contemporary psychoanalysis. His renderings of persons and lives deepen our understanding of vulnerabilities across the course of development and enlarge our appreciation of essential concerns in the therapeutic endeavor. This work belongs to that rare category of book that promises to engage theoreticians, researchers, and psychotherapists alike." - William Borden, Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Service Administration and Lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Chicago

"If you want to gain a sense of what it is like to read this book, think of Eugene O'Neill's 'Long Days Journey Into Night' or Miller's 'Death of a Salesman'. For Rose's case studies--the core of this deeply moving study of the life of homosexual men--have a painful accuracy to them. Rose's work is ostensibly a study of homosexuality and his review of the literature is thorough and his discussion of his findings clinically illuminating. It is also a book about fathers and sons and in this respect it helps us to see some homosexualities in a universal context. A fine book." - Christopher Bollas, author of The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known,Cracking Up, and Being a Character.