Based on the author's 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, but instead 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, O'Connor and Ryan critically address questions of sexual identity, sexual desire, and gender identity,...