For many years the work of Virginia Woolf has attracted perceptive psychoanalytic interpretation from a variety of perspectives. When Makiko Minow-Pinkney first offers an in-depth account of the relationship between Woolf's texts and the preoccupations of continental psychoanalysis in 1987, the stage is set for radical insights and debate. Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject remains a key text in terms of presenting the framework in which such insight and debate has unfolded. Woolf's aesthetic and feminist concerns entail the deconstruction of a hegemonic masculine discourse whose structure and effects are seen as represented, indeed endorsed, by Lacanian theory. Lacan's Symbolic order, the bedrock of language and culture, is supported by the signifier of the phallus, through which man, as bearer of the phallus, asserts a monosexual control of the Symbolic domain. Feminist writing is, of necessity, a protest against this domain, to which all subjects accede through their assumption of the Oedipus complex. As such feminism's attempt to recover and communicate what has been severed from the Symbolic register of ten involves a circumvention of Oedipus or a return to an earlier stage. Minow-Pinkney, as a feminist critic focusing Woolf's construction of a feminine perspective, highlights the importance of the work of Julia Kristeva who is central to her analysis of Woolf's novels. Kristeva forefronts the significance of a primary pre-Oedipal stage repressed by phallocentricity. The Imaginary and the maternal lie at the heart of Kristeva's semiotic modality and constitute a new means, for Minow-Pinkney, of understanding Woolf's feminist aesthetics.

A focal point in the discussions that follow is Woolf's endorsement of the writer's mind as androgynous. Woman is ideally placed in this respect being simultaneously both inside and outside the Symbolic domain. From this position she subverts the phallocentric ideology which, for critics of Lacan, structures his theories concerning speaking subjects. Minow-Pinkney reminds us that there are dangers in thinking of this androgyny as merely “difference.” She cites Stephen Heath who points out in The Sexual Fix that the idea of female androgyny can simply re-emerge as the term which designates the feminine as not man, not phallic, re-establishing the status quo.