We (Leezah Hertzmann and Juliet Newbigin) have just edited a collection of papers, with the title “Sexuality and Gender Now: Looking Beyond Heteronormativity”. Our aim, in putting this book together, was to assemble authors whose approach confronts the unremarked heteronormative bias that has dominated psychoanalytic thinking and practice until recently. In our talk we will try to explain the shift that we believe clinicians must make to support in a non-prejudicial way, their patients whose sexuality and/or gender may not align with the heterosexual “norm”. We will also explain briefly how this book emerged from the work of the Advisory Group that the BPC initiated to support thinking about sexual and gender diversity.

Leezah Hertzmann is a highly experienced individual and couple psychoanalytic psychotherapist practicing for over twenty years. She is registered with the British Psychoanalytic Council and the UK Council for Psychotherapy and also an accredited practitioner of Mentalization Based Treatment (MBT) registered with the British Psychoanalytic Council (BPC MBT Accredited Practitioners).

Juliet Newbigin is a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy member of the BPF and FPC. She works in private practice and teaches seminars on the impact of significant differences – those of gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity, for example – on the clinical relationship. Juliet’s interest in the subject of gender and sexuality goes back to her work as a trainer in self-development with young people and adults in the 1970’s when the impact of discrimination on individual identity was a hot topic.
She was involved in the working party that wrote the BPC’s Position Statement on Homosexuality and is currently chair of their Advisory Group on Sexual and Gender Diversity