A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference (review)
tity as negotiated, multiple, or intersubjective. Applying this model to Morrison's text, Bergner poses the question: how can a mother "attempt to construct an autonomous identity while maintaining a caring relation to her daughter?" (118). Ultimately, however, Bergner's reading of Beloved only seems to affirm the psychoanalytic position that individuation is constituted by a disruption of the mother-child relation: "the household of women at 124 Bluestone Road is not the safe space of intersubjective recognition that allows articulation of feminine desire . . . but rather a yawning gap of raw desire unsanctioned by language and the social order, and without the luxury of mutual recognition of selfhood. Who or what, if not the father or paternal law, will rupture this overidentification of mother and daughters, bringing them back into the realm of the social?" (137). Taboo Subjects: Race, Sex, and Psychoanalysis represents an important contribution to the ongoing conversation about the intersection of race, gender, and psychoanalysis. It exposes the Freudian primal scene as a male fantasy of female castration that supports the illusion of male power. In addition, it extends the scope of psychoanalysis to race by showing how a "castrating" gaze produces both a feminized and a racialized subject. However, as Bergner herself seems ruefully to admit, in the end, her comparative reading of literary texts and psychoanalytic theory does not seem to achieve her stated goal, which is to find an alternative to a Western model of identity formation that distinguishes the boundaries of the self by the socio-psychic repression of another.