Juliet Mitchell

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

• 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.

• 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.