Juliet Mitchell

Juliet Mitchell (1940-) is a British Psychoanalyst and socialist feminist, who was a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge and Professor of Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies at Cambridge University.^{[citation needed]} In 2010, she's appointed to be the Director of the Expanded Doctoral School in Psychoanalytic Studies at Psychoanalysis Unit of University College London (UCL).^{[citation needed]} She is a retired registrant of the British Psychoanalytic Council.^{[citation needed]}

Mitchell was born in New Zealand in 1940, and moved to England in 1944. She attended St. Anne's College, Oxford, where she received a degree in English, as well as doing postgraduate work. She taught English literature From 1962 to 1970 at Leeds University and Reading University. Throughout the 1960s, Mitchell was active in leftist politics, and was on the editorial committee of the influential journal, New Left Review.

Mitchell is best known for her book Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Freud, Reich, Laing and Women (1974).^{[citation needed]} In it, she tried to reconcile psychoanalysis and feminism at a time when many considered them incompatible.^{[citation needed]} A substantial part of the thesis of the book is that Marxism may provide a model within which non-Patriarchal structures for rearing children could occur.^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]}

According to Mitchell, children are socialized into appropriate gender roles. Therefore, women grow to be equally socialized into becoming the caretakers of their households.^{[citation needed]}

Works

• Woman's Estate, Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1971
• Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Freud, Reich, Laing and Women, 1974, reissued as: Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis, Basic Books 2000
• Women: The Longest Revolution, Virago Press 1984
• (editor), Feminine Sexuality. Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, W. W. Norton & Company 1985
• (editor), Selected Melanie Klein, The Free Press 1987
• (editor, together with Ann Oakley ), Who's Afraid of Feminism?: Seeing Through the Backlash, New Press 1997
• Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria, Basic Books 2001
• Siblings, Sex and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003)

External links

• Jesus College: Juliet Mitchell
• Juliet Mitchell Archive at marxists.org
• Women's Rights: Radical Change – video of Mitchell appearing in a BBC debate first televised in 1974
• A Conversation with Juliet Mitchell