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R. Buckminster Fuller once said “I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process, an integral function of the universe.” The difficulties of conforming to a definition or label of one's self, something inert and delimited, and the idea of an evolutionary continuum of theories constructed to elaborate those constructs, are central themes in Judith Hughes's interesting and well-written new book, Freudian Analysts/Feminist Issues. Just as Fuller chafed against the strictures of scientific orthodoxy and strove not only to find his place within a dynamic community but to expand its bounds, Hughes is an intrepid thinker set upon a course equally estimable and no less arduous.
If the fundamental quandary of woman's place in Freud's theorizing was that it occupied a “dark continent,” history has seen it overshadowed by the related but more dramatic question, “what do women want?” Hughes wisely avoids attempts at concocting a reply. Instead, using a structural convention that is a flash of brilliance, and a homage to the Darwinian/Lamarckian Petri dish in which Freud's own early thinking germinated, she disengages from