From the Editors

We open this issue of JAPA Review of Books with an essay by Nomi Stolzenberg, a legal scholar whose discerning reading of Freud, Winnicott, and Lacan informs a rich body of work at the juncture of law with political theory, culture, and religion. Stolzenberg discusses two books by fellow legal scholars—Maria Aristodemou's Law, Psychoanalysis, and Society: Taking the Unconscious Seriously and Anne Dailey's Law and the Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Perspective—and one by a psychoanalyst, Jill Gentile's Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire. In an informative essay titled “Law, Gender, and the Liberal Project in American Psychoanalytic Thought,” Stolzenberg notes that all three works share “a critical perspective on gender and a keen awareness of the masculine bias present in both psychoanalysis and law.” However, they diverge in their appeals to different portions of the psychoanalytic literature, and—commensurately—in their takes on the gendered nature of legal theory. Aristodemou draws from Lacan, and consequently figures law as a “phallic” system in which forbidden desire for incestuous union with the mother is repressed. In contrast, Dailey's view of legal authority rests on Winnicott's conception of “maternal function.” Gentile's goal, writes Stolzenberg, is to construct a model of “feminine law” that combines “the French tradition of Lacan and Kristeva and the British and American traditions of object relations theory and ego psychology.” Stolzenberg questions whether this combination can succeed in serving Gentile's goal of creating a system of law that “liberate[s]” and “democratize[s] desire.” But she applauds the effort to meld Lacanian and Winnicottian thought about language, perception, infant development, and maternal and paternal authority to construct a model of law based on traditionally female functions. And she notes the timely nature of Gentile's work: “as the specter of illiberal democracy r