ABSTRACT
PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY ORIENTS THE QUESTION OF WOMEN READING MALE THEORY toward a question of desire: what do women want from male theory?1 I approach this question as traumatic by tracing the historicity of psychoanalytic reading practices through autobiography, a genre that offers epistemological force to feminist theory, though not in predictable ways. The outline of my argument takes place neither fully anchored in the time of theory, nor in the time of feminist politics, but rather in a time that is other to both: dream time. Through the problem of dream interpretation, I consider debates on the nature of accepting psychoanalytic knowledge, a joke used by Freud, and theories of the subject derived through the writings of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud but reconceptualized and renewed through feminist psychoanalysis. In the confrontation between psychoanalytic and feminist reading practices, Shoshana Felman is exemplary in holding the two in productive and creative tension, thus providing what I consider to be a valuable method for reconsidering feminist education even as feminist education also reconsiders the constraints and possibilities of education for women and girls. In order to take feminist and psychoanalytic reading practices together, we must take a detour through Freud and Lacan where, in a dream, we first encounter the unconscious. The singularity of dreams may be that these two incompatible kinds of readings, feminist and psychoanalytic, can get tangled in each other rather than canceling each other out.
