#juliet mitchell

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Juliet Mitchell, Feminine Sexuality.

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Juliet Mitchell - Woman's Estate - Random House - 1973

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The contradiction between psychoanalysis and politics, as Mitchell puts it, is that psychoanalysis espouses a fundamental disinterest in change, prioritizing descriptions of societal and individual suffering over curative prescriptions. In and of itself, Mitchell writes, psychoanalysis “is not a revolutionary theory—it’s an observation with revolutionary implications.” Because psychoanalysis claims to be a universal theory, capable of application within any cultural, social, and economic formation, it promises the persistence of a fundamental antagonism between the individual and the group. Even if we use psychoanalysis to sharpen the call for the liberation of women and the abolition of the family, whatever universal taboos structure a post-capitalist, post-Oedipal society would remain productive of ongoing, unconscious desires. In human culture, Mitchell believes, the unconscious cannot be wholly abolished. If we maintain the concept of “the human,” a utopian human society, no matter the forms of kinship that emerge, will remain elusive.

Rosie Stockton, Like Woman Herself: Juliet Mitchell’s Theory of the Family

[areadersquotelibrary]

One has to be always alert to what goes on outside treatment.

Juliet Mitchell, Mad Men & Medusa's, Reclaiming Hysteria

[elanormcinerney]

jacqueline rose & juliet mitchell & juliet jacques & catherine malabou

[jacobwren]

The bourgeois nuclear family—the expression of the Oedipal complex under capitalist relations—is how sexual difference is produced and transmitted. The Oedipal complex is a patriarchal law that orders sexual difference: the roles, identifications, and symbolic processes by which men and women learn to be in the world. Freud insisted that the Oedipal complex could exist under any economic regime or mode of social relation and is distinct from capitalism’s nuclear family. Crucially, Mitchell argues that the nuclear family renders the archaic Oedipal kinship structure and its foundational taboos obsolete while simultaneously adhering to and preserving them. The nuclear family gives the patriarchal law a “last hearing,” as the capitalist drive toward work and accumulation constantly threatens to unravel it.

Rosie Stockton, Like Woman Herself: Juliet Mitchell’s Theory of the Family

[antirelation]

The change the concept of bisexuality has undergone corresponds to a shift in Freud’s way of reading its event: instead of starting with the baby and following its evolution (a tendency of the method of presentation in the Three Essays) he has done what he had undertaken with every other concept and reversed direction—as he has always done in his discoveries. He has this time presented his reading backwards from the experience of the adult in analysis to the problems of the infant. In changing direction, the concept of bisexuality has moved from being a simple notion, a postulate of a sort of infantile unisex, to being a complex notion of the oscillations and imbalance of the person’s mental androgyny. It is this dilemma, in which the subject is still resolving the precise point of the place he occupies in the world, in terms of his (and her) wish for it not to be the feminine place, which is the only, and ever-present, alternative to where anyone really wants to be—in the male position within the patriarchal human order. If I am not a man, then I am being a woman. Bisexuality has become linked to the crucial psychoanalytic tenet of the castration complex. In a footnote Freud points out that the man’s castration anxiety does not, of course, prevent his passive relationship to a woman, just to another man—as we can see, for example, in the implications of homosexuality so central to the follow-the-leader/father position. Masochism and passivity of a man before a woman imply no danger of loss of manhood as it is in that very role that the mother accepted him. In other words, the feminine predicament, for both sexes, applies only in the relationship to men.

Juliet Mitchell, from Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis

[antirelation]

It has often been claimed that Freud’s understanding of what is sexual is so large as to be too vague and all-inclusive for the demands of scientific precision. In fact this all-inclusiveness is, on the contrary, a characteristic of analysts who came to disagree with him. For there is nothing general or vague in Freud’s theses on sexuality. To replace a simple unity (the Havelock Ellis notion [of sexuality as a monistic essence]) by a complex unity is to define more precisely, not more loosely, its constituents. Those critics who say we might as well name what Freud calls sexuality or ‘libido’ simply general life-energy are inverting his investigations to produce a banality. What Freud did was the opposite—he said that ‘life-energies’ (if that is the term we must use) are sexual. A reversal of Freud’s contention does not amount to the same thing—in fact it is an absurd restatement of the incomprehension Freud had to try and decipher. Freud showed how those acts which convention regarded as ‘innocent’, deeds apparently free from pleasure and the desire for pleasure, were in fact sensual acts. When, as he frequently does, Freud comments that he means sexual in the broadest sense of the term, what he is referring to are all the components of the sexual drive and all the manifestations of the drive, perverse and normal, which are much more numerous than anyone had previously been inclined to believe. On the other hand, we must be careful not to go overboard in the other direction, for having accepted the fact that to say ‘life-energies’ are sexual is not the same as to say that sexuality is just life-energy, is no excuse for trying instead to say everything, everywhere, is sexual. Against this pan-sexual reaction to his discoveries Freud fought no less hard than against the denial of infantile sexuality. Freud’s whole theory of mental life is a theory of conflict—if everything were sexual where would the conflict be?

Juliet Mitchell, from Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis