Juliet Mitchell

FBA
Born (1940-10-04) 4 October 1940
Christchurch, New Zealand
NationalityBritish
Spouses
  • ​
    ​
    (m. 1962; div. 1972)​
  • Martin Rossdale
    ​
    ​
    (m. 1975; div. 1988)​
  • ​
    ​
    (m. 2000)​
Children1
Academic background
Alma mater
Academic work
InstitutionsPsychoanalysis Unit of University College London (UCL)
Main interests

Juliet Mitchell, Lady Goody FBA (born 4 October 1940) is a British psychoanalyst, socialist feminist, research professor and author.

Early life and education

Mitchell was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1940, and then moved to England in 1944, where she stayed with her grandparents in the midlands. She attended St Anne's College, Oxford, where she received a degree in English in 1962, as well as doing postgraduate work.[1] She taught English literature from 1962 to 1970 at Leeds University and Reading University. Throughout the 1960s, Mitchell was active in leftist politics, and was on the editorial committee of the journal, New Left Review.[2]

Career

Women: The Longest Revolution

Mitchell gained instant media attention with her pathbreaking article "Women: The Longest Revolution", in the New Left Review (1966), an original synthesis of Simone de Beauvoir, Frederich Engels, Viola Klein, Betty Friedan and other analysts of women's oppression.[3][4]

The Cambridge University Centre for Gender Studies

She is a fellow professor of Psychoanalysis at the Jesus College, Cambridge and founded the Centre for Gender Studies at Cambridge University.[5] In 2010 she was appointed director of the Expanded Doctoral School in Psychoanalytic Studies at the Psychoanalysis Unit of University College London (UCL).[6]

Psychoanalysis and Feminism

Mitchell is best known for her book Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing and Women (1974),[7] in which she tried to reconcile psychoanalysis and feminism at a time when many considered them incompatible.[8] Peter Gay considered it "the most rewarding and responsible contribution"[9] to the feminist debate on Freud, both acknowledging and rising beyond Freud's male chauvinism in its analysis. Mitchell saw Freud's asymmetrical view of masculinity and femininity as reflecting the realities of patriarchal culture, and sought to use his critique of femininity to critique patriarchy itself.[10]

By insisting on the utility of Freud (particularly in a Lacanian reading) for feminism, she opened the way for further critical work on psychoanalysis and gender.[11] She was an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University from 1993 to 1999.[12]

Child-rearing

A substantial part of the thesis of Psychoanalysis and Feminism is that Marxism provides a model within which non-patriarchal structures for rearing children could occur.[13]

The lack of the 'family romance' would remove the Oedipus complex from a child's development, thus liberating women from the consequences of penis envy and the feeling of being castrated which Mitchell contends is the root cause of women's acceptance that they are inferior.[14] According to Mitchell, children are socialised into appropriate gender roles, therefore, women grow to be equally socialised into becoming the caretakers of their households.[15]

Feminine sexuality

In her introduction to Jacques Lacan on feminine sexuality, Mitchell stresses that "in the Freud that Lacan uses, neither the unconscious nor sexuality...[are] pre-given facts, they are constructions; that is, they are objects with histories".[16]

Bibliography

Monographs

  • Woman's Estate. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1971. ISBN 9780140214253.
  • Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing, and Women. New York: Pantheon Books. 1974. ISBN 9780394474724.
Reissued as: Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A radical reassessment of Freudian psychoanalysis. New York City: Basic Books. 2000. ISBN 9780465046089.
  • Women, the Longest Revolution. New York City: Pantheon Books. 1984. ISBN 9780394725741.
  • Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria. New York City: Basic Books. 2000. ISBN 9780465046133.
  • Siblings: Sex and Violence. Cambridge, UK Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press. 2003. ISBN 9780745632216.
  • Fratriarchy, The Sibling Trauma and the Law of the Mother. London: Routledge. 2023. ISBN 9781032364407.

Edited books

  • Mitchell, Juliet; Oakley, Ann (1976). The Rights and Wrongs of Women. Harmondsworth New York: Penguin. ISBN 9780140216165.
  • Mitchell, Juliet; Lacan, Jacques; Rose, Jacqueline (1985). Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne. New York, London: Pantheon Books W. W. Norton. ISBN 9780393302110.
  • Mitchell, Juliet; Oakley, Ann (1986). What is Feminism?. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell. ISBN 9780631148432.
  • Mitchell, Juliet; Klein, Melanie (1987). The Selected Melanie Klein. New York: Free Press. ISBN 9780029214817.
  • Mitchell, Juliet; Bourgeois, Louise (2016). Louise Bourgeois: Autobiographical Prints. London: Hayward Gallery Publishing. ISBN 978-1853323430.
  • Mitchell, Juliet; Larratt-Smith, Philip (2021). Louise Bourgeois, Freud's Daughter. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300247244.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Juliet Mitchell interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 6th May 2008". Alanmacfarlane.com. 6 May 2008. Retrieved 1 March 2018.
  2. ↑ Benewick, Robert; Green, Philip (1998). "Juliet Mitchell 1940–". The Routledge dictionary of twentieth-century political thinkers. Psychology Press. p. 228. ISBN 9780415096232.
  3. ↑ Mitchell, Juliet (November–December 1966). "Women: The Longest Revolution". New Left Review. Newleftreview.org. I (40). Retrieved 1 March 2018.
  4. ↑ Singh, Sunit (August 2011). "Emancipation in the heart of darkness: An interview with Juliet Mitchell" (PDF). The Platypus Review.
  5. ↑ "Professor Juliet Mitchell | Jesus College in the University of Cambridge". Jesus.cam.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 28 September 2020. Retrieved 1 March 2018.
  6. ↑ UCL: Juliet Mitchell Archived 2 November 2012 at the Wayback Machine
  7. ↑ Mitchell, Juliet (1974). Psychoanalysis and feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing, and women. New York: Pantheon Books. ISBN 9780394474724.
  8. ↑ Juliet Mitchell Archive at marxists.org
  9. ↑ Gay, Peter (1988). Freud: a life for our time. London: Dent. p. 774. ISBN 9780460047616.
  10. ↑ Herik, Judith (1985). Freud on femininity and faith. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 15. ISBN 9780520053335.
  11. ↑ Tandon, Neeru (2008). Feminism: a paradigm shift. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers & Distributors. p. 83. ISBN 9788126908882.
  12. ↑ Dietrich, Penny (2018). "All Professors at Large, 1965–2023". Program for Andrew D. White Professors at Large. Retrieved 8 November 2018.
  13. ↑ Mitchell, Juliet (2000), "The Oedipus Complex and the patriarchal society", in Mitchell, Juliet (ed.), Psychoanalysis and feminism: a radical reassessment of Freudian psychoanalysis, New York City: Basic Books, pp. 377–381, ISBN 9780465046089, Under capitalism, the mass of mankind, propertyless and working socially together en masse for the first time in the history of civilization would be unlikely, were it not for the preservation of the family...
  14. ↑ Mitchell, Juliet (2000), "The castration complex and penis-envy", in Mitchell, Juliet (ed.), Psychoanalysis and feminism: a radical reassessment of Freudian psychoanalysis, New York City: Basic Books, pp. 95–100, ISBN 9780465046089
  15. ↑ Mitchell, Juliet (2000), "Conclusion: The holy family and femininity", in Mitchell, Juliet (ed.), Psychoanalysis and feminism: a radical reassessment of Freudian psychoanalysis, New York City: Basic Books, pp. 364–416, ISBN 9780465046089
  16. ↑ Lacan, Jacques (1985). Mitchell, Juliet; Jacqueline Rose (eds.). Feminine sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne. New York London: Pantheon Books W.W. Norton. p. 4. ISBN 9780393302110.
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