One summer in the middle of the 1980s, I couldn’t stop reading Freud. I had a mission in mind, which was to find the place – if it existed – where Freud referred to the topic of femininity as being like a dark continent. That sounds odder now than it did at the time – or at least than it did in the corner of the university world where, by that time, I had found my place. I was working at the University of Sussex, well known as a coolbed of new kinds of cultural thinking; there was for instance an undergraduate course called Studies in Feminism, while feminist questions were at the heart of the Masters programme in Critical Theory. Endlessly argued over at that time was the issue of whether Freudian psychoanalysis, with its theory of the structural priority of masculinity, was inherently anti-feminist; or whether, on the contrary, its analysis of patriarchal structures was a prerequisite to dismantling them. Much of the impetus for the pro-psychoanalytic version of feminism – the version which said that you couldn’t do feminism without knowing something about psychoanalysis – had come from recent French interpretations of Freud: by the controversial psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and by women analysts and philosophers who followed and also took issue with him and who came to be known elsewhere, collectively, as ‘French feminists’ (even though some weren’t French, and some didn’t think of themselves as feminists).