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If Jane Gallop's new book, Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, were only about feminism and sexual misconduct, it might not be of particular interest to psychoanalytic readers. Charges of sexual harassment, or the less serious charge of “consensual relations” in situations that are deemed inappropriate, such as the analyst's office, the classroom, or even the White House, are so common today that the public quickly loses interest. Yet there is nothing uninteresting about Jane Gallop—beginning with her decision to write about the sexual harassment suit that was brought against her by two of her female graduate students, to the deliberately sensationalistic title she chose for her book. As she observes bluntly, she chose a title to emphasize that she was making a spectacle out of herself. The fact that she is a controversial psychoanalytic theorist and teacher, invoking Freudian and Lacanian theory to justify sexual relations between teachers and students, makes her story important to the wider psychoanalytic community.
Gallop is the author of several books, including The Daughter's Seduction (1982), Reading Lacan (1985), Thinking Through the Body (1988), and Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory (1992). The brief biographical sketch on the back of Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment indicates that she is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, but nowhere in the book does Gallop mention the name of her university where the incident took place nor the names of her accusers. Whereas most people who are charged, rightly or wrongly, with a serious crime would remain silent and defensive, content to let the story fade from public attention, Gallop saw her widely publicized event as a research opportunity and went on the attack. The result is a provocative book, closer in length to an essay than a monograph, in which she offers her own account of the experience and then theorizes the implicatio