This book offers the first challenging, systematic, and comprehensive survey of psychoanalytic writings on lesbians and lesbianism available in English. 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, including Freud, Deutsch, Klein, Jung, Lacan, Kristeva, and contemporary object-relations theorists. Contemporary European philosophical perspectives on language and identities illuminate O’Connor and Ryan’s critiques of psychoanalytic conceptualisations of lesbianism.