Description
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.
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION 1. FREUD: Disappointment and Repudiation2 . THE MASCULINE WOMAN: Identification and Rivalry with the Father 3. THE CHILD AND THS MOTHER: Deutsch and the Maternal/Erotic 4. KLEIN: The Phantasy that Anatomy is Destiny 5. SPOILING THE PERVERSE GRATIFICATION: Narcissism and Metapsychology 6. TRUTH and REALITY: McDougall and Gender Identity 7. PROMISES AND CONTRADICTIONS: Lacan and Language, Irigaray and Kristeva 8. JUNG: The Waters and the Wild 9. EROTICISM AND COUNTERTRANSFERENCE 10. DIFFERENT VOICES? Sources of Dissent and Dialogue 11 . IDENTITIES: Mistaken , Assumed, Revealed or Concealed?POSTSCRIPT Notes Bibliography Index
