America's Lacan .

Lacan's effect in America was dramatic but limited following his 1975 visit. His polemic with ego psychology in radically changed the way literary critics, notably feminist critics, thought about psychoanalysis, while in those same years-the 1970s and 1980s-American psychoanalysts, taken up with their own reactions to ego psychology, paid him little attention. Yet , looking back at that period, Lacan can be counted among those who contributed importantly to a major shift in our conception of psychoanalytic process: our contemporary sense of acts of reading-including clinical listening-as acts in themselves, rather than as steps toward the interpretive determination of hidden meaning.