Psychoanalysis and politics Juliet Mitchell then and now Lynne Segal ʻWell, Iʼll think about women thenʼ, Juliet Mitchell on, where that entrenchment could be undermined proposed in 1963, suggesting a topic to research as and eroded in some way.ʼ4 Today, it is Mitchell herself she sat, the lone woman, on the editorial board of New who worries that psychoanalysis, and in particular Left Review – alongside her husband, Perry Anderson, feminismʼs embrace of it, may have served to displace the freshly minted editor of the journal. The inevitable politics. ʻDoes [psychoanalysisʼs] self-described, non- response greeted Mitchellʼs startling proposal in such political discourse draw all potentially radical use of circles at that time: ʻthere was silenceʼ.1 A decade later it into the apolitical?ʼ, she recently queried. Or con- and Mitchellʼs next move seemed just as eccentric, at versely, and perhaps more surprisingly, she wonders: least to many of the women who had by then raced ʻdoes the recurrent demise of feminism … turn a in to erase that earlier embarrassed silence on the radical investigatory mode which is psychoanalysis ʻsecondʼ sex once and for all – during the passion- into an apolitical discourse?ʼ5 Good questions. Her ate early years of Womenʼs Liberation. She turned, worries are just the ones we need to address if we increasingly, towards psychoanalysis for assistance want to ponder the conjunction of psychoanalysis and with her political task. The challenge, obviously, was feminism over the last three decades. The first ques- not just the serene sovereignty of male domination, tion, at least, expresses some of my own misgivings. sexism and misogyny, which had reigned over every Yet, oddly, while regularly fielding the right ques- domain in the 1960s, but the infeasibility of disclosing tions, Mitchellʼs replies are equivocal and puzzling. its elemental presence using the prevailing political Her theoretical and professional engagement in languages of the Left: of class, colonialism, or impe- psychoanalysis, although critical and creative, does rial aggression. not itself direct us to any particular social, let alone Juliet Mitchell would appear to be the ideal author- historical, circumstances which she seeks either to ity to turn to if one wants to discuss the fraught issue erode, or only to change, in order to further her of psychoanalysis and politics. This is not only because feminist goal of increasing the cultural power, agency her book Psychoanalysis and Feminism was seminal and personal happiness of women. On the contrary, for so many women radicals in the 1970s, busy attend- she has consistently dismissed ʻthe sociologizing of ing their Marx and Freud reading groups.2 It is also psychoanalysisʼ by theorists like Nancy Chodorow because she has consistently insisted that she remains and Jessica Benjamin, who stress the impact of the steadfastly attached to being political – even in these particularities of culture – especially the shifting very different times, when many have discarded their dynamics of parenting – in the psychological domain.6 former ideals as yesterdayʼs folly. Psychoanalysis and Mitchellʼs own resolute, now less than fashionable, Feminism, she has recalled, ʻwas asking if we could universalizing of psychoanalytic explanations of the use psychoanalysis to bring feminism into the socialist structural/symbolic origins of sexual difference seem project. That project has to take off from there.ʼ3 Or, as more symptomatic of what many have seen as the she put it elsewhere: ʻThe question for me in that book obstinacy of a psychoanalysis which works to fix or was that if patriarchy is so entrenched, there must be naturalize, rather than to diminish, coercive sexual historical circumstances which a politics could work and gender binaries. Psychoanalytic insights, in my 12 Radical Philosophy 103 (September/October 2000) view, can be used – often must be used – to help us Gender and Sexuality.9 They all emphasize that sexed grasp aspects of the political moment and, especially, identity is never internalized as a single entity (posi- the belligerence and dread so often greeting change tively or a negatively), but operates subjectively within in the personal and sexual arena. Yet, as Freudʼs an array of always conflictual mental representations most compelling feminist, Foucauldian and newly born and self-perceptions. These are sedimented out of Deleuzean critics all insist, its traditional dilemma the unique identifications each child makes with its is that in practice psychoanalysis has routinely been own parents, siblings and significant others, however deployed, and often still serves, to reinforce a coercive much these interactions are always already permeated normalizing of heterosexual, reproductive sexuality with the polarizing effects of symbolic phallocentrism and identity, rather than calling them into question. and the still prevailing – though increasingly diverse This is most apparent in the arena where it is routinely and disputed – social and familial patterns of male invoked, in sexual and gender politics, as I think we dominance. can see in the work of Juliet Mitchell. A somewhat different account, although not dis- similar in its consequences for the psychic formation Sexual binarism or gender ambiguity? of sexual difference, comes from those influenced by In talks and interviews delivered in the 1990s, Mitchell the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche (promoted suggests that the depoliticizing of both feminism and most comprehensively in Britain by John Fletcher).10 psychoanalysis in recent decades has something to do Laplanche explains the inevitable installation of the with the increasing academic interest in sexuality and unconscious in the child as not so much the effect representation at the expense of kinship, ideology and of the childʼs identifications as, from the outside, the the reproduction of society around sexual difference. implantation of an always unique bundle of enigmatic The former, she suggests, attempts to valorize mother- signifiers or untranslatable messages coming from the hood and the pre-Oedipal as an alternative female and unconscious desires of the mother, or other significant feminine sphere. In contrast, she argues, it is only adults – via what he terms ʻseductionʼ. attention to kinship and ideology which can explain Either way, it can be argued that while the child how and why women and men are positioned differ- is imbued with unconscious sexual desires through its ently in ʻpatriarchalʼ kinship structures.7 Despite her interactions with the seductive and desired attention clinical training in psychoanalytic object-relations and and ministration of adult others, there is no primordial the Independent School, which followed her theoreti- sexual binarism in the unconscious. Indeed, this is cal schooling in Freud and Lacan, Mitchell seems to precisely why gendered and sexual identifications are remain, by and large, faithful to the claim she made so confusing, and so chronically in danger of col- in the early 1980s, following Lacan (and along with lapsing under the weight of their own contradictions. Jacqueline Rose), that ʻthe strengthʼ which psycho- From this perspective, the psychoanalytic message analysis brings to feminism resides in its claim that the and goal of treatment is not so much the achieve- category ʻwomenʼ is an empty one: women are ʻdefined ment of an appropriate gendered or sexual identity, exactly as – and only as – their difference from menʼ. as the ability ʻto tolerate the ambiguity and insta- There is no positive content to be given to women, bility of gender categoriesʼ.11 Here, the acceptance or to femininity. Only from here, Mitchell suggested of gender ambiguity and instability signals mental then, can we begin to think psychoanalytically, can health. These more recent psychoanalytic trajectories we begin to see ʻhow gender is constructed and how rethinking gender and sexual difference often express sexual differences are livedʼ.8 the Foucauldian and Derridean influences authorizing Mitchell is well aware that any such emphasis on queer theoryʼs account of the inevitable instability and structural determinants, like kinship, and the ineluct- fluidity of identities and desire, with Judith Butler and able hold of the classic Oedipal narrative, is pre- Eve Sedgwick still its reigning – if at times reluctant cisely not the direction taken by those – non-Lacanian – theoreticians.12 – feminist clinicians who have been most engaged in Mitchell obviously knows, as well as Freud, Lacan critically using psychoanalysis as a tool for reworking or any other reflective clinician, that ʻmasculinityʼ notions of gender. I am thinking, in particular, of the and ʻfemininityʼ have no clear or certain content. New York analysts (not one of whom is mentioned She is all too aware of what the Lacanian Mous- in Mitchellʼs latest book) such as Jessica Benjamin, tafa Safouan sums up as ʻsimply the state of affairs Muriel Dimen, Virginia Goldner and Arlene Harris, confirmed by all analysisʼ: ʻthat the energy with which who in 1996 helped found the journal Gender and the subject declares himself [sic] man or woman is Psychoanalysis, relaunched this year as Studies in proportional to that with which the reverse is stated in Radical Philosophy 103 (September/October 2000) 13 the unconscious.ʼ13 Indeed, Mitchell would add, that is of infancy, is the man or woman who has been unable the whole point of psychoanalysis: to understand how to find his or her place within a future