Iam very grateful to Nancy Chodorow and Eli Zaretsky (nlr 96) and to the Lacan Study Group for their interesting discussions of my review of Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism (nlr 93). If in my reply I leave some of the points they raise unconsidered, this is only because I wish to limit myself to those disagreements between us which are amenable to fruitful exchange. In consequence I shall try to avoid, on the one hand, raising issues of very real interest but of quite unmanageable proportions and, on the other hand, niggling away at what are to me evident but nevertheless must be comparatively insignificant misrepresentations of my own position.

So, for instance, in the Lacan Study Group letter it is as though a somewhat inept translator had interposed himself between us, for not only did I find some of my arguments hard to recognize, but in the sixth and seventh paragraphs of their letter, their argument largely eludes me. One peculiarity in their text, to which I might draw attention, is their seeming misunderstanding of the phrase ‘phallic monism’, which is normally used to refer to Freud’s doctrine that for one libidinal phase (the phallic phase) the clitoris plays for the little girl the same role as the penis does for the little boy. I find it hard to square the Group’s use of this phrase with the normal meaning, and my difficulties were only reinforced by their attributing to me the extraordinary view that for Freud all four, and not just the first three, libidinal phases are not gender-specific.

At the other end of the spectrum it is clear to me that neither group of critics is best pleased that I reject the model of a social science offered by Marxism. In writing my review I thought it only right that I should make my position on this issue quite clear, but I did not think it also right that I should argue in the course of my review for my position—any more than Mitchell thought it right that in her book she should argue for hers. Whether or not I am correct in believing that more nlr readers would agree with me in this judgment than with Chodorow and Zaretsky who criticize me for it, it is not a judgment that at this late stage I would wish to reverse. And I am sure that there remain, short of Marxism itself, outstanding issues between the critics and myself about the nature of explanation in psychoanalysis that could benefit from reformulation.