Wild Desires and Mistaken Identities: Lesbianism and Psychoanalysis

Based on the authors’ clinical experience as psychoanalytic psychotherapists, this reconsideration of lesbian lives and lesbian experiences offers a new and thoughtful framework that does not inevitably pathologize or universalize all lesbianism. Instead, it argues for the development of a psychotherapeutic theory and practice open to the complexities and vicissitudes of individual life histories, relationships, and identities. Surveying a wide range of psychoanalytic ideas about lesbianism from Freud, Deutsch, and Jung to Lacan and contemporary object relations theorists including Klein and McDougall, O'Connor and Ryan critically address questions of sexual identity, sexual desire, and gender identity, of transference and countertransference, and also of institutional practices in relation to psychoanalytic training.