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In their brief introduction to this book, which represents a major step forward in psychoanalytic thinking about the lives of lesbian women, the authors ask the reader to imagine three standing bookcases:
The first bookcase contains works by psychoanalysts; the second contains works by feminists; the third contains the work of gay and lesbian writers. A few texts can be shelved in either the first or second bookcase because their authors identify as psychoanalysts and as feminists. Some works can be placed in either the second or third cases because their authors identify as feminists and as lesbian. When we began our own writing, not one book could be filed on either the first or third bookcase as the work of a homosexually identified psychoanalyst (p. xxix).
Now Lesbian Lives could occupy any of the three shelves, and that fact alone is enough to make Magee and Miller's work important. But their contribution goes far beyond that, incorporating and synthesising an impressive range of psychoanalytic theories, biological studies, and clinical case material that is seasoned with lesbian poetry, literary criticism and gender studies.
The book begins with the authors confessing that when they began psychoanalytic training, they believed that they would come to understand the aetiology of female homosexuality and wanted to move towards a psychoanalytic understanding of lesbian identity that neither pathologised lesbians nor accepted lesbianism as something ‘pre-given’. But they rapidly began to see ‘that the apparently simple question “What causes female homosexuality?” contained unquestioned assumptions about the feelings, behaviors and relationships of women who love women’ (p. xxiii). These unquestioned assumptions have been combined with the nearly twenty centuries of historical omissions and silences that the authors review, including silence on the part of psychoanalytic institutes. By the end of the introduction we learn that the focus of the authors has shifted. Rat