ABSTRACT
The Second Wave of American feminism relied heavily on Jacques Lacan's rereading of S. Freud's texts and on publications by his entourage. This shift of focus from Freud's cases to deciphering the way he wrote them up inevitably sparked the imagination of literary scholars. In the mid-1970s, some professors of English extended the method to a variety of approaches based on Lacanian concepts. Radical women feminists espoused a revolutionary direction, defined and redefined their positions, and much of the time relied on Lacanian thought. By the late 1960s, Jacques-Alain Miller and some of Lacan's feminist followers began to take him to task. Lacan encouraged his feminist disciples to rethink psychoanalysis by exploring the depths of their sexuality and psyche critically and to reconceptualize all of Freud's metaphors in relation to "the other." As noted, by the early 1980s radical French feminists had moved backstage. In fact, many of the militants—both men and women—had become Lacanian psychoanalysts and were seeing patients.
