ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book focuses on various psychoanalytic discourses in which questions of lesbianism and lesbian sexuality arise, and shows the diverse and multiple aspects of these discourses, their continuities and discontinuities, their location within a complex body of psychoanalytic thought on gender and sexuality. It discusses what is said and seemingly required by the various theories, the ways in which such discourses can act as 'practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak'. The book raises the question of who does the speaking 'about', as opposed to the speaking of symptoms and suffering, and from what position. The gendered split between desire and identification which typifies the classical Oedipus complex appears to us to rest on a prior assumption that the complementary necessity for each other of male and female constitutes the source of 'real' desire.
