Wild Desires and Mistaken Identities

Based on the authors' clinical experience as psychoanalytic psychotherapists, this book provides a challenging exploration of the psychoanalytic ideas about lesbians and lesbianism. The framework to the book draws on a philosophical concern with the assumptions about language, truth and knowledge underlying the substantive statements that psychoanalysts make about lesbians. The authors use a deconstructive and Foucouldian framework to argue for the development of a psychotherapeutic practice and theory which is open to the complexities and vicissitudes of individual life histories, relationships and identities, but which is not confined to universalist or fixed developmental systems.