ABSTRACT
Mary Jacobus's work on literature, feminism and psychoanalysis is distinguished by its meticulous and sophisticated attention to processes of reading and textuality. Melanie 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 Jacques Lacan's reading, Klein offers little Dick words, simultaneously locating him in language and in a system of symbolic relations. Klein concludes that little Dick's arrest is a consequence, among other things, of a difficulty in tolerating anxiety which she attributes to the premature awakening in him of genitality. Klein initiates the process of symbolization, not so much by restoring the womb's injurious contents as by answering his call with her name-calling. Lacan sees Klein as getting access to little Dick's unconscious by means of forcible entry with a crudely Oedipal key.
