ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis, along its more potentially creative and subversive axis, holds the capacity to analyze the ways we construct our subjectivity, offering a freedom to the ways we see and represent ourselves to ourselves. Yet, as I have been advancing, psychoanalysis is not ``outside'' the binary structure of gender oppositions and all psychoanalytic theories are vulnerable to restricting and constraining our representational spaces. In the relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis, there are, thus, inherent and unavoidable tensions. Although the feminist relational psychoanalytic project deconstructs and revalues ideals associated with the feminine side of the binary, I have argued that this project is not and cannot be without risks. For example, if ideals such as relatedness because of their binary location are overreached in the clinical process, a feminized version of a gendered discourse can be enacted. Perhaps this is something similar to what Adrienne Harris has in mind when she writes: ``I often feel that we practice Enlightenment and think postmodern'' (2005, p. 47).
