ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic feminism has been so thoroughly immersed in Lacanian theory for the past decade that taking Melanie Klein at her word—reading her literally, as she asks to be read—seems to risk a kind of theoretical regression. Klein’s focus on the mother and her theories of “prematurity”—her insistence on infant phantasies coterminous with the earliest instinctual experience—offers psychoanalytic feminism a way to rethink both the Oedipus complex and the preoedipal domain. In Lacan’s reading, Klein offers little Dick words, simultaneously locating him in language and in a system of symbolic relations. As Klein herself presents it, the case history of little Dick traces the confused beginnings of symbol formation in a child who would now be regarded as autistic, but whom Klein thought of as schizophrenic. The difficulty in analyzing little Dick, for Klein, lies in the absence of symbolic representations.
