The Daughter's Seduction. Feminism and Psychoanalysis: By Jane Gallop. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982. 164 pp.

This intelligently argued, provocative book is at once a lucid introduction to Lacan's thought and an incisive reading of major French feminist texts. The book consists of a brief, summarizing introduction followed by nine chapters, each of which forms a lively dialogue between Gallop and selected passages from Lacan and the feminist authors. Three of the chapters appeared, in earlier versions, in Diacritics, SubStance, and Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought. The footnotes, bibliography, and index reflect the scholarly care that generally holds the book together.

Gallop's subtitle echoes an important earlier book by the British feminist writer, Juliet Mitchell. Her Psychoanalysis and Feminism1 drew on the work of the French feminists and of analysts strongly influenced by Lacan. Mitchell used the French rereading of Freud to reject a biologistic view of Freud and to undercut the stereotyped negative responses to Freud made by many American feminists. For this, Gallop is grateful. But she contends that Mitchell does not really understand and utilize Lacan and his stress on the importance of language, so that she "fails to come to grips with the feminist's place (her place) as desirer" (p. 12). The subject's desire, she indicates, is articulated by an unconscious that is structured