ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on issues concerning sex and sexuality. It is evident that psychoanalysis has had enormous difficulty in the area of lesbian eroticism: there are very few clinical observations and descriptions of sex involving two women, even where lesbianism is the focus of concern. Jean-Michel Quinodoz, in an article on five lesbian patients, confirms the impression of psychoanalytic silence in relation to lesbian sexuality: The psychoanalytic literature has little or nothing to say about the nature of erotic and sexual exchanges between homosexual women. More recent psychoanalytic work examines countertransference responses to what is considered to be early maternal erotic material. Thus Judith Welles and Harriet Wrye, who also comment on the lack of reporting of erotic transferences, describe – again in relation to seemingly heterosexual patients – possible sources of countertransference difficulties.
