Juliet Mitchell and the Lateral Axis: Twenty-First-Century Psychoanalysis and Feminism

289 Pages·2015·1.6 MB·English

by  Robbie Duschinsky, Susan Walker (eds.)

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN’S
CRITICAL STUDIES IN GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND CULTURE
Highlighting the work taking place at the crossroads of sociology, sexuality
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Series Editors:
PATRICIA T. CLOUGH is Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies
at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. Clough is on the edi-
torial boards of Women’s Studies Quarterly, Body and Society, Subjectivity,
Cultural Studies/Critical Method, Qualitative Inquiry, and Women and
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R. DANIELLE EGAN is Professor and Chair of the Gender and Sexuality
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editorial board of Sexuality and Culture.
Titles:
Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom: A History of the First
International Sexual Freedom Movement
Elena Mancini
Queer Voices: Vocality, the Uncanny, and Popular Music
Freya Jarman-Ivens
On the Literary Nonfiction of Nancy Mairs: A Critical Anthology
Edited by Merri Lisa Johnson and Susannah B. Mintz
Antarctica as Cultural Critique: The Gendered Politics of Scientific
Exploration and Climate Change
Elena Glasberg
The Parallel Lives of Women and Cows: Meat Markets
Jean O’Malley Halley
Positioning Gender and Race in (Post)colonial Plantation Space:
Connecting Ireland and the Caribbean
Eve Walsh Stoddard
A Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopias
Edited by Angela Jones
Young People and Pornography: Negotiating Pornification
Monique Mulholland
Juliet Mitchell and the Lateral Axis: Twenty-First-Century Psychoanalysis
and Feminism
Edited by Robbie Duschinsky and Susan Walker
The Aesthetics of Cute in Contemporary Japanese Art
Yoke-Sum Wong [forthcoming]
Juliet Mitchell and
the Lateral Axis
Twenty-First-Century
Psychoanalysis and Feminism
Edited by
Robbie Duschinsky and
Susan Walker
JULIET MITCHELL AND THE LATERAL AXIS
Copyright © Robbie Duschinsky and Susan Walker, 2015.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-38117-0
All rights reserved.
First published in 2015 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
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Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-47958-0 ISBN 978-1-137-36779-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137367792
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Juliet Mitchell and the lateral axis : twenty first century psychoanalysis
and feminism / edited by Robbie Duschinsky and Susan Walker.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Brothers and sisters—Psychological aspects. 2. Psychoanalysis and
feminism. 3. Women and psychoanalysis. 4. Mitchell, Juliet, 1940–
I. Duschinsky, Robbie, 1986–
BF723.S43J85 2015
150.19(cid:25)5—dc23 2014035155
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: March 2015
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction 1
Robbie Duschinsky and Susan Walker
Chapter 1
The Etiology of Hysteria in Mitchell’s Mad Men and Medusas 23
Susan Walker
Chapter 2
Siblings, Secrets, and Promises: Aspects of Infantile Sexuality 43
Daru Huppert
Chapter 3
Ideologies of the Super-Ego: Psychoanalysis and Feminism,
Revisited 57
Judith Butler
Chapter 4
Debating Sexual Difference, Politics, and the Unconscious:
With Discussant Section by Jacqueline Rose 77
Juliet Mitchell
Chapter 5
Dialectic and Dystopia: “This might come as a shock . . . ” 101
Robbie Duschinsky
Chapter 6
Marked by Freud, Mitchell, and the Freudian Project 131
Daru Huppert
Chapter 7
Hysteria between Big Brother and Patriarchy 147
Paul Verhaeghe and Eline Trenson
Chapter 8
Reframing Obsessional Neurosis: The Rat Man’s Siblings 169
Robbie Duschinsky and Rachel Leigh
vi CONTENTS
Chapter 9
Minimal Difference: On Siblings, Sex, and Violence 193
Mignon Nixon
Chapter 10
Crimes of Identity 207
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Chapter 11
Sisters at the Gate: Mean Girls and Other Sibling Phenomena 229
Gillian Harkins
Chapter 12
How Can We Live Ourselves? An Interview with
Juliet Mitchell 255
Preti Taneja
Bibliography 273
List of Contributors 283
Index 287
Introduction
Robbie Duschinsky and Susan Walker
J
uliet Mitchell is widely acknowledged as a groundbreaking theorist and
psychoanalyst. Mitchell’s work has been influential, and there are many
testimonials to its influence. Grosz (1990, 19) has described her ideas
as a “moment of radical rupture” and as having inspired a generation of
researchers. And Lament (2013, 12) writes that “Mitchell’s far-r anging
sleuthing among numerous domains—psychoanalysis, anthropology,
sociology, psychology, literature, and her own personal reflections
deserves our applause and high praise.” Mitchell’s role is also significant
as a contributor to and commentator on the developments in Western
thought since the 1960s. In particular, as Flax (1992, 179) observes,
“Mitchell has been an influential contributor to the development of femi-
nist theory. She has entered into and affected some of the most impor-
tant intellectual and political debates stimulated by the re-emergence of
women’s movements.”
However, there has yet to be any book dedicated to Mitchell’s ideas.
Perhaps part of the reason for this absence is, as Connell (2012) has
noted, that Mitchell’s work has “the energy and passion of the liberation
movement without the showing-off.” Another volume could have been
written as a retrospective on the debates impacted by Mitchell’s work.
However, we were inspired by the acuity of her insights for tackling con-
temporary concerns. Changes in society have, curiously, made many of
her reflections on equality, violence, collective movements, subjectivity,
sexuality, and power more rather than less relevant over time, as these
issues have developed and become core parts of public and academic
debates. Reading Mitchell now, engaging with her ideas, offers access
to distinctive and highly valuable ideas that contribute directly to these
debates. For example, we live in a society in which women must walk a
tightrope of assumptions in performing an identity perceived as asser-
tive but not aggressive, successful but not square, sexy but not a slut;
Mitchell’s work offers resources for making sense of how sexuality, which
had been touted as the site of freedom, has itself become a fundamental
site of oppression in an ostensibly equal society.
2 ROBBIE DUSCHINSKY AND SUSAN WALKER
Mitchell is a socialist, a feminist, and a psychoanalyst, and has com-
bined these three positions in her theorizing. Her career spans five
decades from the 1960s to the present day. In the 1960s, “The Longest
Revolution” pioneered the conjunction of feminism with Marxist
thought, laying the ground for socialist feminism in Britain. In the
1970s, Psychoanalysis and Feminism opened the way for feminist usage
of Freud. She edited influential volumes of the work of Lacan, Klein,
and Balint. In the 2000s, her work on the importance of siblings posed
a new research agenda for psychoanalysis and gender theory. The “lateral
axis” of the psyche, along which siblings and peers are encountered, is
considered by Mitchell as different from and complementary to the verti-
cal axis of parent–child relations and the Oedipal complex. In proposing
a “lateral axis” Mitchell has provided a rich new seam of insights and has
opened up a new horizon for those wishing to combine psychoanalytical
insights with sociological observation.
This volume addresses the contemporary implications of Mitchell’s
ideas for social theory, gender studies, politics, and psychoanalysis, with
a focus on the significance of the lateral axis as a new and powerful
theoretical framework for addressing concerns in each of these domains.
The development of these themes in the fields of politics, art, philoso-
phy, sociology, gender studies, cultural studies, anthropology, education,
peace studies, criminology, and psychology promises rich rewards. This
volume takes some of these disciplinary fields and looks at how Mitchell’s
theory can be applied and developed. Students of these disciplines will
find the book a useful source of applied psychoanalytical theory. Readers
well versed in Freud and psychoanalytical theory will find that this
volume allows the theory to be taken in a new and unexpected direction.
The volume provides the readers with the background to the theory, and
demonstrates how the lateral axis is of pressing significance for readers
from a range of disciplines, and for those interested in the currents that
move our social and cultural worlds.
* * *
Throughout her academic career, Mitchell has been concerned with
explaining the intractable nature of the position of woman as the second
sex, oppressed and positioned as inferior. It is from this starting point
that she encounters and develops new perspectives on six fundamental
issues: equality, violence, collective movements, subjectivity, sexuality,
and power. These themes were initially considered through a Marxist
perspective in her essay “The Longest Revolution,” published in 1966. In
this text, Mitchell was critical of the overly simple expectation of much
INTRODUCTION 3
socialist theory that with the revolution, and subsequent “freedom” of
the working classes, would follow a revolution in the status of women and
their own emancipation. Mitchell, unsatisfied with socialist reductions of
women’s position to that of women position within the division of labor,
identified four bases upon which this position rested. These were pro-
duction, reproduction, sexuality, and the socialization of children:
The classical literature on the problem of woman’s condition is pre-
dominantly economist in emphasis, stressing her simple subordi-
nation to the institutions of private property. Her biological status
underpins both her weakness as a producer, in work relations, and
her importance as a possession, in reproductive relations. The fullest
and most recent interpretation gives both factors a psychological cast.
The framework of discussion is an evolutionist one which nevertheless
fails noticeably to project a convincing image of the future, beyond
asserting that socialism will involve the liberation of women as one of
its constituent “moments.”
What is the solution to this impasse? It must lie in differentiat-
ing woman’s condition, much more radically than in the past, into its
separate structures, which together form a complex—not a simple—
unity. This will mean rejecting the idea that woman’s condition can
be deduced derivatively from the economy or equated symbolically
with society. Rather, it must be seen as a specific structure, which is a
unity of different elements. . . . Because the unity of woman’s condition
at any one time is the product of several structures, it is always “over-
determined”. The key structures can be listed as follows: Production,
Reproduction, Sex and Socialization of children. The concrete com-
bination of these produces the “complex unity” of her position; but
each separate structure may have reached a different “moment” at
any given historical time. Each then must be examined separately in
order to see what the present unity is and how it might be changed.
(Mitchell [1966] 1984, 26)
In setting out this schema, it seems to us that Mitchell is wrestling with
a fundamental concern—of as much pertinence today as when “The
Longest Revolution” was written. Women continue to be oppressed and
positioned as inferior, regardless of major changes in the form taken by
that oppression through history and in the relations of production. If
more women are in work than ever, then why does there remain a femi-
nization of poverty? If women are free from Victorian sexual mores, then
why does a sexual double standard still operate? Mitchell was interested
in how continuities in the oppression of women could occur, given overt
intentions in individuals and in society to achieve a more meaningful
equality. The Marxist answer is ideological subjugation: power does not