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Throughout the 1980s a wave of books and anthologies appeared, written mainly by English professors, articulating psychoanalytic theory with other critical discourses and disciplines, such as feminism, literature, deconstruction, and film theory.1 So rapidly did these books become a recognizable and marketable genre that by 1990 an anthology could be titled simply Psychoanalysis and…. Even without a subtitle, Psychoanalysis and… presented no mystery—one had a fairly clear sense of what one was getting when one purchased it. A legacy of the theory wave in literary studies and part of the explosion of cultural studies in North America, these books elicited an oft-voiced concern that psychoanalysis, rather than encouraging authentic interdisciplinarity, might simply colonize other discourses, narcissistically finding its own reflection everywhere it turned.
One version of this concern—which Joan Copjec's new book answers—was expressed in the widespread objection that psychoanalytic theory tends toward ahistoricism, that by finding the same structures of desire in all cultures and periods psychoanalysis sloughs off historical specificity and overrides cultural differences. For this reason, critics often contend, psychoanalysis teaches us nothing about the historical period or culture under consideration, and everything about itself. In deference to this legitimate concern, anthologies and books articulating psychoanalysis with some other discourse became more or less adept at claiming that the other discourse—say, literature or feminism—was being used to interpret psychoanalysis as much as the reverse. For example, Shoshana Felman wrote in her introduction to an anthology titled Literature and Psychoanalysis, “In the same way that psychoanalysis points to the unconscious of literature, literature, in its turn, is the unconscious of psychoanalysis” (10). Psychoanalysis was warned to respect the “otherness”—the cultural difference or disciplinary specificity—of whatever it