Abstract
Juliet Mitchell, a trained psychoanalyst and retired professor of English literature at Cambridge, is also a feminist theorist, activist, and self-described Marxist. She is perhaps best known for her 1974 book Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing, and Women, reissued in 2000 as Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis. In that book she attempted to reconcile psychoanalysis and feminism at a time when many considered them incompatible. Claiming that the inferior status the oedipal crisis confers on girls is not an inevitable prescription, but rather a description, she defended Freud from second-wave feminists.
In Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming the Effects of Sibling Relations on the Human Condition (2000), Mitchell highlighted the psychic significance of lateral sibling relationships through an analysis of the effects of siblings on presentations of hysteria. In Siblings: Sex and Violence (2003), she argued that the centrality accorded the vertical axis (parent-child, the oedipal) by psychoanalysis had led to missed opportunities in treatments for exploring the effects of sibling relationships. Implicit in her project is the idea that the sibling complex plays as crucial a role in psychic lives as the oedipus complex. But this revision poses a problem for psychoanalysts. Is it possible—or even desirable or necessary? In a 2014 interview that concludes the collection under review here—Juliet Mitchell and the Lateral Axis—Mitchell finds “what is staggering is the combined presence of siblings in psychoanalysis and also the absence of its implications. That’s why I turned to the question—what is it that is making people miss the implications of this at the same time as working with it? Why have we missed it?” (p. 256).
At various points in this interesting and well-written collection, this question is addressed, with several authors directly considering why indeed we might have “missed it.” Overall, the book is successful in creating frameworks in the humanities to embrace, contain, and apply Mitchell’s ideas.
The volume is the first book-length work devoted to exploring Mitchell’s concept of the lateral axis. Its editors are British psychologist/academics with interests in the intersections of psychoanalytic theory, clinical work, and society—the application of psychoanalytic ideas outside the consulting room. The chapters, written for the most part by academics at European and American universities, focus on the implications of Mitchell’s lateral axis theory for gender studies, politics, social theory, and psychoanalysis. Two chapters are written by Daru Huppert, a psychoanalyst.
Susan Walker, one of the editors, is a British physician turned university lecturer whose doctorate in psychology was supervised by Mitchell. In her clear and enlightening chapter “The Etiology of Hysteria,” which opens the collection, Walker traces in Mitchell’s Mad Men and Medusas a path that begins with an exploration of male hysteria and ends with the discovery of the importance of siblings and the consequent need for a lateral sibling axis to complement Freud’s vertical parent-child axis. Mitchell puts the arrival of a sibling at the heart of the formation of hysterical symptoms, claiming that “the hysteric wants the mother that the sibling has taken, before he wants the mother that the father possesses and prohibits him from having” (Mitchell 2000, p. 66). Walker concludes that “the theoretical implications of the effect of siblings upon the etiology of hysteria need further clarification and exploration, which can only be carried out through clinical observation and practice” (p. 41).
In a thoughtful chapter, “Siblings, Secrets, and Promises: Aspects of Infantile Sexuality,” Daru Huppert, an Austrian psychoanalyst, notes that before Mitchell’s work, siblings had no place in psychoanalytic theory; they were either ignored because they did not fit with oedipal theory, or were incorporated into it without remainder. (I might add that child analysts have been doing this for years.) This neglect, Huppert says, is due to an “ill-fit with the Oedipal theory. . . . in an approach so entrenched it is no longer noticed, siblings are regarded either simply as rivals for the passion of our parents, or merely as parent substitutes” (p. 43). What is required, he says, is a theory that accomplishes what oedipal theory does in regard to parents: it makes their effect on us thinkable and thereby explorable. Huppert examines Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), arguing that “we can only appreciate sibling sexuality if we relate it not only to Oedipal striving but also to the sexual activity found among children who are not siblings” (p. 47). However, according to Huppert, despite Mitchell’s theory having already made thinkable the idea of siblings’ place in psychic life, it is still too early to tell if it will become central to psychoanalysis.
In Huppert’s other chapter in the book, “Marked by Freud, Mitchell, and the Freudian Project,” he establishes Mitchell’s connection with Freud, countering the claim that the lateral axis is a departure from, or stands in opposition to, Freud’s ideas. Identifying points of convergence where Mitchell remains insistently committed to Freud regarding the centrality of sexuality, the death drive, and the unconscious, Huppert shows how these concepts inform her thinking in Mad Men and Medusas. He notes that Mitchell, while maintaining that Freud excludes siblings from his theory, has neglected certain aspects of Freud. To this end, Huppert compares Freud’s and Mitchell’s interpretations of the material in “A Child Is Being Beaten” (Freud 1919), concluding that Mitchell’s interpretation of the sadomasochistic fantasy, though highly suggestive, “involves less psychological detail than Freud’s” (p.143). Her sibling theory, he remarks, “does not yet carry the convincing force that would make it an indisputable part of psychoanalytic theory” (p. 143).
In “Reframing Obsessional Neurosis: The Rat Man’s Siblings,” Robbie Duschinsky and Rachel Leigh take a core Freudian text and reread it in light of Mitchell’s sibling theory. Duschinsky, the book’s other editor, is a British academic who, among other publications, has edited a book on Foucault, while Leigh teaches at Cambridge. In Siblings, Mitchell (2003) suggested that “the introduction of a lateral paradigm reframes the classical neuroses” (p. 19). Where Mitchell focuses in that work on hysteria, Duschinsky and Leigh focus on obsessionality. Duschinsky and Walker note in their introduction that “while Mitchell offers a full account of the role of the lateral axis in the etiology of hysteria . . . its role in obsessional neurosis remains unexplored” (p. 17). By closely analyzing Freud’s case study and several psychoanalytic studies of the Rat Man, Duschinsky and Leigh shed new light on the significance of siblings in the case and lay the groundwork for future reflections on the role of the lateral axis in obsessional neurosis. They show that Freud’s case material was in fact full of siblings but that in writing it up he zeroed in on the father and the fiancée.
Duschinsky contributes another chapter to the book. In “Dialectic and Dystopia,” a dense and well-argued exercise in philosophy and political theory, he looks at how Mitchell sustains a dialectic between her three internal siblings—socialist, feminist, and psychoanalytic—using their ideas to interrogate oppression, contradictions, and possibilities in society. He shows how her feminist and psychoanalytic siblings need the socialist one “as mediator and catalyst, to avoid quietism and fatalism” (p. 102). This kind of language, which crops up fairly frequently in the book, might be considered a weakness by readers (like me) who are unfamiliar with such concepts. Using a detailed example of the Socialist Workers Party in the U.K., which was dissolved following allegations by a young female activist that she had been raped by a leading member of the party, Duschinsky demonstrates how Mitchell’s thinking highlights the woman’s need to dig beneath formal recognition of equality to achieve truly meaningful equality. He shows how the lateral axis helps Mitchell think about the difficulties and meanings of recognition as a condition for achieving equality.
Mitchell herself has two chapters in the book. One, which I have mentioned, is an interview conducted in 2014. The other is her reply to Judith Butler’s address at a 2009 symposium held in Cambridge to mark Mitchell’s retirement. Parts of Butler’s address, “Ideologies of the Super-Ego: Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Revisited,” are published here for the first time. While Butler recognizes Mitchell’s immeasurable influence on feminist and psychoanalytic thought, she accuses her, according to Duschinsky and Walker, of “being tied to an essentialist account of the difference between men and women, which buys into the organizing assumptions of the oppressive culture it tries to resist” (pp.12–13). Drawing on Laplanche’s ideas of unconscious communication across generations (1970), Butler reads Mitchell as saying that sexual difference is invariably identified with masculine and feminine. At its heart, Butler’s argument is that Mitchell takes these terms for granted, as if they were an invariant and universal distinction, with stable and transmissible content (p. 13). Butler points to disparities between unconscious desires, lived social arrangements, and the injunctions of a heteronormative world. Her address is particularly interesting on the question of how psychoanalysis might be reformulated in light of changing kinship arrangements.
Mitchell disagrees with Butler’s claim that she sees sexual difference as invariably identified with masculine and feminine. She argues that Butler’s interest in heteronormativity has led her to neglect what is specific to the oppression of women (p. 77). Mitchell suggests that Butler is focused on culture at the expense of fantasy, which misses two key points. One is that the position of women is shaped variously by the psychological consequences of differences in reproductive possibilities. The other is that all human societies require prohibitions on desire and murder, though the content of these prohibitions can certainly differ (p. 13). This spirited exchange is represented here in great detail, and a lively discussion of their differences and commonalities is offered by Jacqueline Rose.
In “Hysteria between Big Brother and Patriarchy,” a bleak but bracing piece, Paul Verhaege and Eline Trenson, his colleague at Ghent University, discuss two interconnected topics by way of a Freudian/Lacanian perspective: hysteria in relation to gender, and siblings in relation to contemporary politics, Using Lacan to think about Mitchell’s account of hysteria, they argue that Mitchell expanded Lacan’s account of castration by recognizing hysteria as a possibility for human subjects regardless of gender. They point out that today hysteria is often called borderline personality disorder. According to Verhaege and Trenson, BPD is the form hysteria takes in a society dominated by lateral rather than vertical forms of power. They claim that BPD is a response to our contemporary political world, in which everyone is constantly performing, the Master is invisible, and Big Brother cannot be challenged (p. 162): Big Brother has replaced Lacan’s Law of the Father. They predict that Mitchell’s ideas will become more relevant as late-patriarchal society shifts toward a society of kinship and siblings.
Mignon Nixon, a British art historian, wonders how ideas of the lateral axis might help us understand war, militarism, and sexualized violence. She notes that the publication of Siblings in 2003 coincided “with the abuses of Abu Ghraib and the clandestine horrors of rendition, torture and secret prisons” (p. 199). Nixon draws our attention to Mitchell’s understanding that violence, both individual and social, requires a theory of sex and violence at the level of the social. More than a decade after Siblings was published, Nixon can point to “its radical rethinking of psychoanalysis [a rethinking that still] reverberates in the humanities, particularly in art, which has embraced ‘thinking siblings’ as a means of working against the grain of hierarchy and gender ideology” (p. 203).
The academic and humanitarian feminist activist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak also applies Mitchell’s ideas to violence, particularly rape. In a dense but beautifully written piece that traverses time and ranges over concepts of philosophy, history, politics, and literary analysis, Spivak wonders about the many meanings of the word rape. Mitchell’s concept of reproductive heteronormativity is taken to be “the social account of the transcendental and unconditional discursivity of rape in the general sense” (p. 217). Thinking by way of ideas from Kant, Derrida, and Lacan, Spivak considers what meaningful protection from violation might look like.
In the collection’s final chapter, Gillian Harkins, Professor of English and of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, considers the biblical story of Lot and his daughters from Genesis 19 in light of Mitchell’s lateral axis. After the destruction of Sodom and the death of Lot’s wife, his daughters ply Lot with wine and intentionally become pregnant by him in order to continue his line: “daughters become mothers of their own siblings” (p. 229). Harkins’s close reading of Siblings reveals parallels and discontinuities between Mitchell’s ideas and the parable of Lot. Harkins states that this biblical story cannot find adequate psychoanalytic interpretation without Mitchell’s ideas regarding the interplay of the lateral and vertical relations and sexuality and reproduction.
To conclude, this book opens up a valuable, much-needed space for academics in the fields of gender studies, politics, and social theory to find new ways of reflecting on social and psychological processes using the concepts offered by Mitchell’s lateral axis. It is clear that these concepts can find fruitful application in the humanities, even if at times a density of language results that demands familiarity with a range of terminology and complex ideas. The chapters here that closely consider the concepts of lateral axis from psychoanalytic perspectives find Mitchell’s ideas useful but often problematic, leading me to conclude that they seem more limber when freed from psychoanalytic application. That said, this collection is an important contribution in exploring links between the lateral axis and its complex relationships with existing and evolving ideas in psychoanalysis.