Like Woman Herself
Juliet Mitchell’s theory of the family
Rosie Stockton
Imagine a group of American radical second-wave feminists in the 1970s, taking turns hurling metal-tipped, winged darts at photographs of Sigmund Freud’s face. According to Juliet Mitchell, in feminist circles at the time, one could find a proliferation of feminist calendars and diaries with Freud's head on a dartboard with a dart through his eye. I picture them lining up and taking aim, puncturing his face. The concentric circles of meaning are not hard to imagine: penis envy, the Oedipal son, the Law of the Father, sexist tropes of the Hysterical Women. Freud encapsulated and symbolized the very order of things against which the Women’s Liberation Movement constructed itself. To these feminists, he bore the title of “one of the greatest misogynist of all time.” Their agenda and their vision were inextricable from this target: a dead Austrian man’s face, white-bearded and imperious, patriarchy incarnate, watching them from the walls of their own rooms.
Raised in London in the 1940s, Mitchell, a British feminist, socialist, psychoanalyst, and critic, has worked assiduously for decades to challenge—and update—this feminist dismissal of Freudian psychoanalysis. A psychoanalytic thinker and dialectical materialist at heart, Mitchell took Freud’s transfiguration into the arch-patriarch as the very motivation for understanding what Freud himself believed about the production of women through the Oedipal family. She was not unfamiliar with the traumatic specter of the Dead Father, his impact on the psychic life of social arrangements, and the fractured myth of the nuclear family. Mitchell writes that she never lived with her father (a geneticist), and he died when she was eleven. She was raised by a radical mother (a botanist and teacher), whose surname she bore, a stepfather, and godparents, in an environment she has since described as left-wing and anarchist. Her maternal ancestors had been stonemasons since the late 1300s, and she recalls visiting her grandfather’s workshops full of tombstones and watching the engravers sign the stones with her own surname, “Mitchell.” As a child, she had mistaken all the graves in the town cemeteries as her own relatives, reading “Mitchell” as the mark of death, rather than the maker’s signature. Call it death, absence, or lack—the mother’s mark would come to influence Mitchell’s later upheaval of Freudian’s Oedipal Complex.
In the aftermath of the National Women’s Liberation conference at Ruskin College, Oxford in 1970, Mitchell and her comrades (notably film theorist Laura Mulvey and conceptual artist Mary Kelly) came together over an interest in psychoanalytic approaches to the political question of women. The nascent group was disturbed by the materialist omissions within radical feminism’s critique of patriarchy and feared the political repercussions of what they saw as an increasingly reductive and reactionary gender essentialism. At the same time, the group shared frustrations over sexist trends in socialism and the leftist movement’s inability to grapple with Women’s Liberation. Mitchell recalls that while working as editor of The New Left Review in the early sixties, she suggested “women” as a theme for an issue about postcolonial Marxism, to which her co-editors responded that women were not a subject of socialist thought.
In response to what they saw as inadequate revolutionary politics, Mitchell’s cohort formed “The History Group,” a feminist reading group dedicated to understanding women’s oppression through Freudian, and—in later iterations of the group—Lacanian frameworks. That group, and its study, were a minor tendency in the broader women’s movement, theorizing in opposition to the feminists who used Freud as a dartboard, an anecdote Mitchell recounted in her 1974 book Psychoanalysis and Feminism. This groundbreaking account was Mitchell’s first attempt at publicly reconciling the hostility between feminism and its Freudian discontents. Mitchell articulates how Freud had been villainized not only by the feminists, but by culture at large, through Hollywood’s perversion of pseudo-psychoanalysis in America, fascist suppression of the discipline in Europe, and the general repression of Freud’s scandalous theories of sex in England. She laments how psychoanalysis came to be seen as a preservation of the status quo, complicit with reproducing patriarchal oppression. Out of this lamentation arrives one of Mitchell’s central claims: that Freud, and psychoanalysis in general, provided “not a recommendation for a patriarchal society, but an analysis of one.”
The villainization of psychoanalysis has raged on since Mitchell’s controversial intervention in the 1970s. For decades, psychoanalysis has been understandably criticized for being anti-Black, transphobic, and bourgeois, and has largely been deemed irrelevant to revolutionary political projects. Today, political thought and struggle find themselves circling around the instability of the deeply entrenched categories of womanhood and the nuclear family in contemporary liberatory movements, the same categories Mitchell herself began grappling with over fifty years ago. Debates around family abolition have been dredged up from their 1970s context, and have been reanimated by contemporary Black feminist, Indigenous feminist, and transfeminist Marxist genealogies, which reveal how the white nuclear family—and its attendant order of the gender binary—is crucial to maintaining systems of patriarchy and racial capitalism. The call for “family abolition” both then and now takes shape in demands like the socialization of housework, gender abolition, reproductive autonomy, a politics of radical care and mutual aid, and proposals for utopic, radical queer kinship structures. Each of these movements work to denaturalize the categories of gender and family by marrying critiques of capitalist exploitation with critiques of libidinal racial and gendered violence. In this context, Mitchell’s early impulse to understand the unconscious and its inexorable power to shape social, economic, and gendered relations is more relevant than ever.
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To demystify the family, in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Mitchell advanced a damning critique of the Women’s Liberation Movement. These feminists might claim to hate The Father and his role in establishing Oedpial sexual difference, but nonetheless kept him right there in the room, throwing sharp, phallic weapons straight toward the wound. In her view, the movement had misread Freud’s work and thus dismissed the role of the unconscious in the ideology of sexual difference. Flipping the accusation against Freud on its head, Mitchell argued that as long as feminists disavowed the unconscious, sexism would remain intact.
Mitchell’s turn to Freudian psychoanalysis was also spurred by the socialist focus on the family as an ideological social form that must be abolished, evinced by the popular 1960s demand “abolish the family.” Socialist thinkers called for the abolition of the economic confines of the nuclear family, believing gender liberation followed from the dissolution of the oppressive social formation. Socialist critiques of the family were published in The New Left Review under the editorial directive of Perry Anderson, who took over as editor-in-chief from Stuart Hall in the early sixties. After graduating from Oxford, Mitchell (who was married to Anderson in 1962) joined the editorial board (as the only woman), and worked to rebuke socialist critiques of the family that failed to address the particular status of women’s oppression.
Influenced by the Algerian Revolution and the Black Liberation struggle, The New Left eschewed orthodox Marxism to account for structures of power that couldn’t be understood through class struggle alone. After joining Anderson to write an article on Brazil and Portuguese colonialism, Mitchell began conceptualizing the oppression of women as a parallel struggle to Black Liberation. As decolonial struggles across the globe were challenging the colonial nation-state, the second-wave feminists identified the family as an analogous institution that must be overthrown in the name of Women’s Liberation.
Mitchell attempted to reconcile the contradiction between “the woman problem” and the socialist agenda of family abolition in her first canonical essay, “Women: The Longest Revolution,” published in the NLR in 1966. “Like woman herself” she wrote, “the family appears as a natural object, but it is actually a cultural creation.” The nuclear family is far from “natural:” it is a historical ideological formation that disciplines workers into normative gender roles and heterosexual coupledom, and facilitates the social reproduction of the middle classes. As such, the socialist tradition figures “woman” in terms of economic exploitation and predicts that her liberation will automatically follow in the wake of the socialist revolution. Yet Mitchell warned that utopian socialism’s focus on exploitation as the grounds to demand family abolition would fail so long as it abstracted how the family reproduced gendered labor relations. Before the family could be abolished, its processes had to be demystified. The “complex unity” of women’s oppression embedded in the nuclear family’s economic structure could be broken down into four parts: reproduction, the heterosexuality of the couple, and socialization of children, all of which were embedded in production, or the larger context of the social economy. The call to “Abolish the Family” failed to reveal coercive reproductive practices, the unfair distribution of household labor, or sexual expectations placed on women. Mitchell proposed a rewording of the call to arms: rather than “abolish,” she implored women to “fragment [the] unity” of the family by attacking and separating its structures. This would allow a view of the diverse forms of kinship which are forcibly compressed into “The Family.”
Written in six weeks in the winter of 1969-70, Mitchell’s first book Women’s Estate extended and contextualized the arguments in “Women: The Longest Revolution.” The earlier work was written with the aim of convincing left-wing men of capitalism’s domination over women, while Women’s Estate was written amidst Mitchell’s involvement with the 1968 Youth and Student movements, the Black Liberation Movement, and the Women’s Movement. Disturbed by the persistence of gender inequality within revolutionary spaces, she insisted that psychoanalysis could shed light on fixed kinship relations. Where socialism could investigate the economic and feminism could investigate the patriarchal, psychoanalysis could investigate the “bio-social” to lay bare the transmissions that kept the family—the very institution that “produced” woman—entrenched in culture. Originally pitching what became Psychoanalysis and Feminism as “a book on the family,” Mitchell spent a summer in the British Museum reading room delving into Freud’s archive to consider the question of femininity in the Oedipal drama. After reading all 23 volumes of the standard collected Freud, she came out of that summer “writing about the unconscious.”
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If the nuclear family is on the path to abolish itself, what would it take to abolish the Oedipal family?
Anyone who has dreamed up or practiced alternative kinship models, let alone depended on them for their survival, knows that even the most radical, queer, and anticapitalist ways of life struggle to negate gendered structures of power. People may find themselves, consensually or unconsciously, cast into rigid roles around reproduction, caretaking, and affective labor. How these gendered structures of power are produced, internalized, and passed along was at the crux of Mitchell’s interest in Freud. Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974) looks to an “internalized anthropology of kinship” to understand how the Oedipal family creates gendered subjects. 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. We see this in the increasing failure of the nuclear family to contain or represent non-white working-class kinship forms. As patriarchal relations preceded and would exceed the invention or dissolution of the bourgeois nuclear family, psychoanalysis could mediate the relationship between economic domination and ideological domination.
Mitchell believed psychoanalysis was capable of analyzing patriarchal structures as they play out under capitalism. Psychoanalysis could establish a path by which kinship structures and sexual difference might overcome the “Holy Family,” as it is instituted and governed by the Oedipal Law of the Father and made manifest in the nuclear family. The fundamental contradiction—the “Holy Contradiction”—of the nuclear, Oedipal family under patriarchal capitalist kinship is that it is always in a state of unraveling in the face of capital’s crises of surplus and disaggregation, sutured together by ideological social reproduction and carceral enforcement. The family romance—paranoid revenge fantasy against neglectful parents; desire for one gendered parent, murderous rivalry with the other; sibling scarcity and competition—works to prop up an obsolete genre of social relations, taking hold in the unconscious. Mitchell goes to great pains to show, contrary to Marxist psychoanalysts like R.D. Laing and Wilhelm Reich, that the sexual prohibitions that cause unconscious desire are universal, and their expression in the bourgeois nuclear family contingent. Any dream of liberating women—and men—from both the nuclear family and the conscription of normative gender must take aim at this contradiction. The failure to understand this distinction results in a politics that would fail to liberate women, who are still formed, trapped, and devalued through patriarchal Oedipal math. If the nuclear family is on the path to abolish itself, what would it take to abolish the Oedipal family?
Rather than merely dismissing Freud’s theory as sexist essentialism, Mitchell calls on a Lacanian re-reading of the Oedipal myth to get to the heart of sexual difference. In the traditional Freudian reading of the Oedipal complex, during the pre-Oedipal stage all children are bisexual, insofar as they are sexually undifferentiated and contain within them the potential to be produced as both a “boy” or a “girl” (we might now think of this a pertaining to gender and not to sexuality). Later, each infant “resolves” their fundamental bisexuality through the development of a normative, heterosexual genital identification and its attendant symptoms, resulting in the boy’s fear of castration or the girl’s penis envy: one becomes masculine (in pursuit of the place of the father) or feminine (in pursuit of the father’s desire). In lieu of satisfying their demand for sexual love from the parent of the opposite sex, their desire is displaced onto a heterosexual relationship. Under patriarchal capitalism, this drama renders the feminine position psychically inferior; for she has no imaginary claim to holding the position of the all-powerful patriarch.
Despite how Freud’s work has been taken up, Mitchell argues that Freud did not advocate for heterosexuality as a normative outcome of the Oedipal crisis, nor did he pathologize homosexuality. Mitchell reads Freud through Lacan’s theory of castration and sexuation, arguing that the supposed anatomical differences between the sexes operate only as a retroactive alibi imposed by culture, rather than an essential biological truth. Using Lacan, Mitchell argues that the “paternal function” can be taken up by anyone, regardless of sex designation. The father, then, is not biologically nor anatomically determined. He is instituted by an entrance into the symbolic order, organized by language’s failure to have a one-to-one relation with that which it represents. For Lacan, the resolution of the castration complex initiates, and authorizes, sexual difference. All human beings take up different positions in relation to this threat of castration, animating and reproducing sexual difference in the process. Yet there is no fundamental truth about the content of sexual difference. Subjects become “men” or “women” depending on how they relate to their perception of “lack” in relation to the phallus. The phallus does not stand for an object (the penis) but for what is missing. Sexual difference is a contradiction that can never be resolved in a binary. Difference emerges as the impossibility of either subject “having” the phallus. Neither “men” nor “women” can ever take the place of the mythical Father. For feminists to overthrow patriarchy, Mitchell argues in Psychoanalysis and Feminism, it is not men, but the concept of the symbolic father that must be overthrown.
By arguing that patriarchy itself is the “law of the hypothesized prehistoric murdered father,” Mitchell suggests that “human society itself”—not simply men, or even patriarchal kinship structures—must be overthrown. This revolutionary call is both the radical possibility and the historic limitation of Mitchell’s theory. Asking feminism to overthrow the very category of the human as it is constructed in opposition to the animal opens a path towards resonant theorizing and solidarity with Black liberation. Many scholars of Black studies and psychoanalytic theorists such as Frantz Fanon and later Hortense Spillers have cited “The Human” as the original means by which the violent psychic production of race emerged. Racialization is fundamentally linked to Western modes of differentiating between human and animal, and its attendant sexual differences. The sex and gender binary as we know it is a product of a Western racist cultural order the depends on coherence of the category of “The Human” which psychoanalysis assumes to be universal. Spillers[1] encourages the reader to turn to Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism in order to understand the social context under which Freud developed his theories to critique the universality of psychoanalysis. But where Spillers asks us to consider the “race matrix” as an “enabling discourse of founding psychoanalytic theory and practice itself,” Mitchell remains inside her self-admitted universal humanism, abandoning this pivotal moment where she seems to propose that “human society” itself be abolished. Perhaps unable to free herself from the 1970s feminist analysis of Black liberation and women’s liberation as parallel struggles (rather than race being the enabling structure of sexual difference), Mitchell never answers how psychoanalysis might help denaturalize the category of the Oedipal human and the historical conditions in which it emerged.
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After contradictions arose in the women’s movement, Mitchell turned from theory to the clinic and became a psychoanalyst herself. Her later work, Mad Men and Medusas (2000) and Siblings: Sex and Violence (2003) draws on twenty years of patient case studies and clinical observations. Out of this, she constructed her next radical intervention into the field of Freudian psychoanalysis: rereading the Oedipal complex by looking to sibling relations and conceiving of the “Law of the Mother” as an axis through which to destabilize the Father’s grip on legitimizing violence.
In Mad Men and Medusas, Mitchell began looking at cases of “male” hysteria. If, as Freud argued, hysteria is a maladaptive response to the universal Oedipal complex, then hysteria is universal, rather than a symptom of the feminine position as it has been canonically associated. For Mitchell, the discourse of the hysteric is one of fundamentally questioning the Law of the Father. If we are all hysteric, or have the potential to be, we might find new ways to disavow the hierarchical power of the phallus in favor of lateral modes of co-authorization. In this view, we might see a world in which the hysterics reimagine sovereignty, coming together to collectively question and overthrow the Law of the Father.
To further understand the trauma of hysteria, Mitchell turned to sibling relations. Published three years after Mad Men and Medusas, Siblings: Sex and Violence extended, and corrected, gender theory’s lamentation over the intellectual failure of psychoanalysis. Perhaps one of the most famous condemnations against psychoanalysis during this time was Judith Butler’s (1990) rejection of the field for its failure to theorize the reification of heteronormativity. The meeting ground between gender theory and psychoanalysis seems made of quicksand: attempts to reconcile the discourses sink in the morasses of identity, performativity, ontology, politics and, most famously, the logics of gender difference vs. sex difference. In a dialogue between Butler and Mitchell at Cambridge in 2009, moderated by feminist psychoanalytic theorist Jacqueline Rose, Mitchell argued that while critiques like Butler’s remain unfairly ignored in dominant psychoanalytic trends which favor sexual difference over gender difference, Butler’s theory of gender neglects the psychic life of fantasy and sexual prohibition that produces sexual difference in the unconscious. Butler, Mitchell contested, had misread and reduced her analysis to a dusty, rad-fem dualism of “sex is biological” and “gender is cultural.” (Reading Butler and Mitchell’s back-and-forth feels like walking in on your parents fighting about something you aren’t supposed to hear, breath held, desperately searching for the possibility of reconciliation.)
Mitchell looks for reconciliation by rereading the Oedipal complex along two axes, the parent-child “vertical axis” and the sibling “lateral axis,” which register distinct orders of difference resulting from sexual prohibitions. Mitchell calls the lateral axis of siblinghood the “Law of the Mother.” Not simply a pat feminist reclamation of the Law of the Father, the Law of the Mother reaches horizontally into what Mitchell believes is the great “theoretical omission of psychoanalysis:” the sibling axis of the Oedipal drama. The Law of the Mother upholds the pre-Oedipal family by prohibiting siblings from playing out the parthenogenic fantasy. When a new child comes on the scene, children fear displacement through a fundamental ambivalence toward the new baby (the enemy). Siblings, Mitchell argues, are compelled by the taboos of incest and murder, not only against their parents along the “vertical axis” but also against their peers on the “lateral axis.” Since we can’t kill our siblings without losing our mother’s love, the methods taken to ward off the threat of replacement happen via the establishment of serial “minimal differences.” This, Mitchell argues, is the terrain of gender difference as opposed to traditionally theorized sexual difference.
One of Mitchell’s most vital critiques of psychoanalysis is the discipline’s inability to attend to the complexity of gender. Her Law of the Mother, then, refigures the relations and rules of the family to account for the lateral forms of gender differentiation, which earlier psychoanalytic models omit. Mitchell’s map of sibling relations is ornate and, at times, difficult to untangle, but her central proposition of a lateral axis, overseen by the Law of the Mother, extends beyond the confines of the gender binary. (Those interested may eagerly await more clarification in her forthcoming book on the topic.[2]) On the vertical access—long accounted for in psychoanalysis by the Law of the Father—Mitchell argues the the child must repress their fundamental bisexuality. On the horizontal axis, the child retains their bisexuality as a subject position, and uses gender difference to distinguish themself from their peers. If Freud writes that we are all born bisexual, Mitchell contends as we are all at times—or have capacity to be—“transgender.”[3] With this provocative assertion, Mitchell shows both how psychoanalysis has failed to address gender and how gender theory has failed to account for the unconscious.
For good reason, gender theory, and trans politics in particular, has been wary, if not wholly dismissive of, psychoanalysis. Mitchell’s retheorization of both sexual and gender difference via sibling tranference might help us depathologize transness clinically and politically, and reconcile the failures of each discipline. Her attention to violence between siblings might also shed light on how violence organizes society, offering psychoanalysis more political efficacy in diagnosing the “minimal differences” that emerge through the threat of the sibling, both in the family and beyond. Mitchell calls for psychoanalysis to look at kinship structures across class and culture that exceed the Western nuclear family, showing how other modes of authority beyond the vertical Law of the Father govern group systems. By reapproaching the logics of sovereignty and nationality on her lateral axis, Mitchell argues that we might find models of social organization outside the Law of the Father, opening up the possibility for non-Oedipal family structures and unprecedented variations in sexual and gender difference.
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Reading Butler and Mitchell’s back and forth feels like walking in on your parents fighting about something you aren’t supposed to hear, breath held, desperately searching for the possibility of reconciliation.
Even those convinced by Mitchell’s larger interventions might be hesitant to accept the notion that psychoanalysis holds the secret to combatting the trans-exclusionary turn of second-wave feminism. Mitchell’s invocation of a feminist reading of Freud remains as provocative today as it was nearly fifty years ago: she refused to believe that a unilateral rejection of the father, of masculinity, could heal the wounds of gender and the family. Revisiting the revolutionary elements of her work provides a vision of another path for feminist politics, one which refuses complicity with essentialist sexual difference, fascist and carceral structures of power, and obsolete modes of patriarchal kinship. Yet, in traversing Mitchell’s work, we are left with the same question that has always plagued psychoanalysis: how do we use it towards a politics of revolutionary material transformation?
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.
In her 2005 essay “Theory as an Object,” Mitchell writes that she hopes “we have been destructive of psychoanalytic theory.” If psychoanalysis has survived, she offers, “its survival can only be assured by the fact that it has changed, though certainly not utterly.” Can we assume she feels the same way about the family, and womanhood, as objects of study? And, using Mitchell’s own logic, can we assume there is always something we unknowingly preserve in that which we long to destroy? To read Mitchell’s body of work is to be haunted by the tautologically constrained question: Who authorizes the Law of the Father? Who, and what, grants the dead father’s absence such sovereignty? What difference initiated Oedipus into his humanity, and why does its invisibility persist? Though Mitchell’s body of work falls short in matters of race and “the human,” her dedication to both upending and defending psychoanalysis offers a searing condemnation of white feminism and sexist socialism and makes important interventions that pave the path for solidarity with Black, Indigenous, and transfeminist politics that question the Oedipal nuclear family. The occlusions within her work are as revelatory as her questions themselves, evidencing one of her most elemental claims—that we can only transform if we attend to the unconscious.
[1] Hortense Spillers. “‘All the Things You Could be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother:’ Psychoanalysis and Race.”
[2] Juliet Mitchell. Fratriarchy: The Sibling Trauma and the Law of the Mother. London: Routledge, 2023.
[3] Juliet Mitchell. “Why Siblings? Introducing the ‘Sibling Trauma’ and the ‘Law of the Mother’ on the ‘Horizontal’ Axis.” The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. 2022, VOL. 75, NO. 1, 121-139. https://doi.org/10.1080/00797308.2021.1972697