In her book, Virginia Blum presents a feminist challenge to psychoanalysis by suggesting that its assumptions about the child are fictions not unlike other fictions in literature designed by the adult to gain access to its own desire. Using Lacanian constructs while at times attacking them, her project attempts to expose socially constructed systems of language, particularly attitudes toward family, as schema that determine, sanction, privilege, and perpetuate notions of gender difference and patriarchy. Since these systems view the child only retrospectively, the adult can use the recalled child to construct an identity based on fantasized notions of infantile sexuality and aggression and thus perpetuate existing prerogatives of power. Through the mute child, “the adult hoards its darkest secrets, projects its parental conflicts, tries to understand the machinations of a fantasy-producing unconscious