ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors focus on psychoanalytic texts which analyse lesbians and homosexuals in terms of symptoms of a more serious psychic disturbance such as, for example, psychosis. In his paper on 'Female Homosexuality', Masud Khan sees himself as continuing the work begun by Deutsch. Female homosexuality is perverse, he argues, because it is the expression of a: false situation, where the secondary gains have become too rigidly integrated into the superstructure of personality and its modes of dealing with anxieties and instinctual conflicts. Although he stresses the complexity of the homosexual syndrome, Adam Limentani claims that immaturity and narcissism are common personality features, as are denial and projection of emotional difficulties. Khan argues from his own clinical work that there is confusion in the inner world of the female homosexual between the defence mechanisms of isolation and those of splitting. Confusion, he claims, drives her to seek instinctual gratification with another woman to share her confused state.
