ABSTRACT

This groundbreaking book provides a challenging exploration of psychoanalytic ideas about lesbians and lesbianism. Based on the authors' clinical experience as psychoanalytic psychotherapists, it offers a new and thoughtful framework that does not inevitably pathologise or universalise all lesbianism. A wide range of psychoanalytic ideas are surveyed, from Freud, Deutsch and Jung to Lacan and contemporary object-relations theorists. Questions on sexual identity, sexual desire and gender identity, of transference and countertransference, and also of institutional practices in relation to training, are all critically - and stimunlatingly - addressed.

chapter |21 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|18 pages

Freud

Disappointment and Repudiation

chapter 2|14 pages

The Masculine Woman

Identification and Rivalry with the Father

chapter 3|11 pages

The Child and the Mother

Deutsch and the Maternal/Erotic

chapter 4|11 pages

Klein

The Phantasy that Anatomy is Destiny

chapter 5|18 pages

Spoiling the Perverse Gratification

Narcissism and Metapsychology

chapter 6|32 pages

'Truth' and 'Reality'

McDougall and Gender Identity

chapter 7|26 pages

Promises and Contradictions

Lacan and Language, Irigaray and Kristeva

chapter 8|14 pages

Jung

The Waters and the Wild

chapter 9|18 pages

Eroticism and Countertransference

chapter 10|44 pages

Different Voices?

Sources of Dissent and Dialogue

chapter 11|28 pages

Identities

Mistaken, Assumed, Revealed or Concealed?

chapter |11 pages

Postscript