Review of The Gauche Intruder: Freud, Lacan and the White Australian Fantasy, by Jennifer Rutherford

Abstract

Jennifer Rutherford's The Gauche Intruder is one of the few works of Australian cultural critique to use Lacanian psychoanalysis in detail as methodology and framework. In this sense, then, perhaps we can say that Rutherford's text is itself something of an intruder (gauche or otherwise) into the dominant mode of framing or 'doing' Australian studies or Australian literary criticism. This difference makes the book important, but also somewhat unsettling, not only because of what it has to say about Australian culture, but more so in that it could have said much more if it had avoided some of the weaknesses of psychoanalysis.