A Conversation with Juliet Mitchell

TAMAR GARB and MIGNON NIXON

Mignon Nixon: The occasion for this conversation is the publication of Siblings: Sex and Violence (2003), which comes fast on the heels of your groundbreaking study of hysteria, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relations on the Human Condition in 2000. In both books you argue that psychoanalysis is trapped in a vertical paradigm that privileges intergenerational relations—parents and children—at the expense of lateral, intragenerational relationships which find their origin in siblings. What galva- nized your thinking about siblings? And how has this turn to the horizontal, lateral dimension of experience affected your thinking about feminism? Juliet Mitchell: Freud says the Oedipus complex opens out onto a social family complex. At no point do I want to say that there is not a crucial intergenerational relationship. Of course there is. This is not an attempt to displace that in any sense. It is an attempt to say that at certain points there is an interaction between the intergenerational and the lateral. This idea came from my clinical work as a psychoanalyst, from being stuck while trying to understand something about hysteria. It also came very specifically through the question of the male hysteric. But you ask about feminism, so perhaps I should backtrack and talk about my relationship to feminism. Nixon: In 1974, you published Psychoanalysis and Feminism, the first major study to consider second-wave feminism and psychoanalysis together. Maybe you could start by telling us what brought you to write that book. Mitchell: I had a gender-privileged educational background. My schooling was very gender-egalitarian. Then I got into a privileged university, which gave pedestal treatment to its few women. In our family, my mother was the breadwinner—which was tough for her in the very inegalitarian postwar years. It was only after university that I felt the full impact of the discrimina- tion feminism protested against. In the early sixties, I was on the editorial board of the New Left Review. We decided to divide up what we saw as the tasks confronting postcolonial Marxism. I said I would take the subject of women. And the other editors objected that it was not a subject. I thought,

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“Well, wait a minute, it’s both a nonsubject and a subject.” At that point, I thought it was very interesting that it wasn’t seen as a subject. Tamar Garb: Did you immediately know it was a subject? Or did it take you a while to work it out? Did you accept their edict? Mitchell: No, no, no. I didn’t accept the edict at all, but I was interested in where it came from. I thought it was part of the problem to see it as a nonsubject. Of course pragmatically, there were women. As a natural category, and as an ideo- logical category in all the trappings of the feminine mystique, there were women. But politically there wasn’t a category “subject: woman”; there was only “object: woman.” For example, at that time, there was no category on the census except a daughter or a wife. There was an absent category. There had been feminism in history, of course, in which women constituted themselves as subjects. At the start of the seventies, people began to try to account for the absence of women as subjects, to explain it, both historically and theoretically. I wanted to ﬁnd women politically. After an aborted book on the position of women in England, I wrote “Women: The Longest Revolution” in 1966, which used Althusser’s schema to examine the structures within which women were located: reproduction, sexuality, child care, interacting with the world of work. I’ve begun to think that perhaps everything I do is because of something missing in what I’ve just done. So after “The Longest Revolution,” I felt I hadn’t considered how sexual difference was internalized so that, even when we didn’t think about it, it is always there. With that problem in mind I started reading psychoanalysis and concluded Woman’s Estate (1971) with a discussion of psychoanalysis and ideology, then eventually wrote Psychoanalysis and Feminism. After the book, I felt I needed access to the material on which the theory was built, and I trained as a clinical psychoanalyst. Psychoanalysis is about how one experiences gender in an internalized way, and that helped explain something that seemed very important to me— that gender was completely accepted, beyond question, in a sense. It was this natural assumption that made it invisible—a nonsubject. At the start of second- wave feminism, most feminists saw Freud as the arch-patriarch. It was de rigeur for a feminist book to attack him. As I read Freud, I came to think, what we need to look at is the unconscious. The message of Psychoanalysis and Feminism was “don’t let’s throw the baby out with the bathwater.” I was also very involved in thinking about radical anthropology at that time. In Siblings, I am still looking at kinship and trying to understand it. We haven’t actually got a kinship analysis of the gendering of complex societies. Nixon: Your work on siblings also arises from, or continues, your study of the history of hysteria. The title of the book you published in 2000, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relations on the Human Condition, already announces the importance you ascribe to sibling and peer relationships in the cultural expression of hysteria—in contrast with Freud’s theory of hysteria as a repressed Oedipal desire, centering on the parent-

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child relationship. Before we explore that crucial move, perhaps you could tell us about your earlier interest in hysteria. When did hysteria first become an important question for you, and why? Mitchell: Around the time I finished Psychoanalysis and Feminism, an interest was emerging in women hysterics as protofeminists. Freud’s Dora case was filmed, produced in the theater, analyzed over and over. The interest was huge. The question being asked was, What was the female hysteric’s relation to feminism? So I began to wonder, What happened to the male hysteric? In psychoanalytic terms, hysteria is understood as a malnegotiation of the Oedipus complex. Therefore, hysteria itself has to be a universal: not only must the Oedipus complex be a universal, but hysteria has to be a universal. And if hysteria is universal, it’s important to ask what made it into a universal at the point of the transition from the pre-psychoanalytic writings of Freud to the establishment of psychoanalysis. How do you bring hysteria into universalism from being a particular category? Nixon: So how did Freud arrive at the theory that hysteria was universal? What made him realize that there were male hysterics? Mitchell: As we see in his pre-psychoanalytic writings, Freud was thinking of hysteria as a particular category—i.e., of abused people, as in the recovered-memory movement of recent decades. If, as he first hypothesized, hysteria had been confined to one population—women who had been abused by their fathers— then it would be a specific category rather than a universal. However, Freud has a case (which has been extracted from his letters to Fliess) of an hysterical man whom he was treating at the turning point of his move toward psychoanalysis. Freud got very entangled with this patient, regarding both the patient and himself as male hysterics. Afterward, he refers to his own petite hys- térie, not just Dora’s. With the male hysteric, we’re into the universal, and from that universal of hysteria, we get the universal of the Oedipus complex. The question of how you bring hysteria into universalism from being a particular category was an important one for feminism because, at the time, we were searching for a universalist paradigm. Later on, this was attacked by decon- struction and postmodernism, but at that time feminists were asking, Where is the origin of women’s oppression? Why does this oppression exist cross- culturally and transhistorically? So the same question in a sense was addressed to psychoanalysis: What is the universal of the psyche? The Oedipus complex is universal, whereas child abuse, though very common, is not universal. Nixon: What then prompted you to take up the question of hysteria again, in a broader cultural perspective, with Mad Men and Medusas? Mitchell: There were two questions. First, what happened to male hysteria? Early in the twentieth century, about ten years after the beginning of psychoanalysis, the male hysteric gradually began to disappear from the literature. This had interested me for a long time. The other question was simply, What happened to hysteria? By the early 1980s, hysteria had vanished. The DSM [Diagnostic

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and Statistical Manual] had renamed it histrionic personality disorder, and although the characteristics of histrionic personality disorder would be the same as those in hysteria, in that transition to a behavioral disorder, you lost the symptom. And if you’ve lost the symptom, you’ve lost psychic conflict, because a symptom is always conflictual. And if you’ve lost psychic conflict, you’ve lost the dynamic unconscious, so you’ve lost the universal again. You have instead a specific population of histrionic personality disorders, as we see, for example, in the repressed memory movement and elsewhere. You and I aren’t going to have a histrionic personality disorder, somebody else is, so to speak. So we’ve lost the actual terrain in which we could all be hysterics. In psychoanalysis, hysteria was no longer a diagnosis. Of course, psychoanalysis doesn’t diagnose psychiatrically in any case, but it has to specify areas of mental disorder. And hysteria was out as a diagnostic category in psychoanalysis as it was in psychiatric literature. So we have a prevalence and again an absence, an absence in the theory but an unacknowledged presence in the empirical work. Garb: You knew to call it hysteria, always? Mitchell: Yes, and I talked with colleagues about it. There was a good paper by Eric Brenman called “Hysteria” in 1985, in which he records the same experience, talking with colleagues who said, “We don’t use it as a category, but we know what you mean, and we do use it when we’re thinking about our patients.” Because of my concern with the male hysteric, I was, like other people, drawn to consider the distinction between hysteria and the so-called traumatic neuroses of war. To be reductive about it, I suppose it was predom- inantly the experience of trauma in hysteria that began to interest me. The experience might not be actual trauma; it might not be an earthquake or abuse. It might be a screen memory of something traumatic. A screen memory is your narrative history of what mattered in your life. So if there was a traumatic element—something that was experienced as traumatic but not a trauma limited to a specific population, as in the case of abuse—I began to realize this hysterical material was not just about desire and its permutations. The terrain was certainly Oedipal. And there we have got the trauma of the father’s law of castration. There’s some interesting work in Freud’s Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926) to think about. But with my patients and with my colleagues we hadn’t been thinking psychoanalytically about trauma in relation to siblings. In their analysis, my patients were touching on this, and I was not picking up on it. I never analyzed being a big sister or being a little brother in the transference. It was incidental in a sense. It was occasional. The way one interpreted siblings was, “Every other patient in the waiting room is preferred to you, or every other patient is going to see me during the vaca- tion, or I’m going off with my actual children and not you, who are just my surrogate children.” The direction was from parent to child. Which of course happens. As I say, the interaction, the interpenetration of the horizontal and

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Shellburne Thurber. Buenos Aires: Green plush analyst’s chair with antimacassar. 1999. Courtesy the artist.

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the vertical is always there. But one didn’t analyze siblings in any systematic way, or with one’s own countertransference. One didn’t think of oneself or the patient as sister or brother. Except occasionally when it was very, very obvious. And when it’s very obvious, what you’ve got is the overt. You haven’t got the latent content behind it. You’ve only got the manifest content if your patient says to you, “Oh God, you’re just like my big sister.” Your big sister might in that case be standing for the mother, or somebody else. Listening for latent contents of sibling dynamics, too, was all-important. Garb: I’m interested in how you came to that realization. Was it a sudden insight, or was it a slow, systematic buildup, an accretion of cases where a picture begins to emerge? Mitchell: In the sibling case, it came as a sudden revelation as the Oedipus complex moved aside. It had been like a rock. I had been looking at hysteria through all the aspects of the Oedipus complex—considering the theories of Freud, Lacan, object relations, relational work—and suddenly this rock moved aside to reveal these dancing children. So I went back and looked at my own case histories, my own patients, and then decided to look at the classical ones. And there was Dora with Otto, her brother. The ﬁrst onset of Dora’s hysteria is as childhood hysteria. There are very interesting articles on childhood hysteria suggesting that it is normative to have hysteria in childhood. But if it’s normative to have a childhood hysteria, that must nevertheless tell you something. If all children have a hysterical episode—if they all stop eating, or go in for excessive self-dramatization, or experience a terrible sense of nonexis- tence—if these are the behavioral aspects of hysteria that occur regularly in childhood, and then normally pass, we should look at them in this way. Look at Little Hans. There is an obvious case. Look at the Wolf Man and his sister. The small boy goes mad in relation to his sister’s sexual stories. The Wolf Man and his sister are having sexual relations. That sister is there. There is something going on with these siblings. Garb: You make a case in Siblings for the word “trauma” in relation to hysteria. You categorize it differently from the Oedipus crisis, or the moment of castration anxiety. So there is a distinction set up between trauma on the one hand and castration anxiety on the other. Or are they both traumas? Mitchell: I think the castration complex involves trauma. The possibility of not having the phallus, realized in a woman, is traumatic. And I think people do have delusional reactions to seeing the phallus that are akin to a delusional response to trauma. I do think there is a traumatic aspect there. There’s a narcissistic investment in the phallus, so the danger is to the subject identi- ﬁed with the phallus. But I think it’s different with a sibling. The response to the appearance of a sibling is earlier and relates to an earlier representation of the body-ego. Lacan would call it an “imaginary,” as opposed to “symbolic” relation. But in fact, both the phallic and its sibling-subject body-ego are Imaginary—it is in resolving them that the Symbolic enters the picture. The

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sibling relation doesn’t relate to the phallus. We could say that acknowledg- ing the sibling as both the same and other ends the mirror phase. Twins show us how difﬁcult this is—and how necessary. Nixon: How would you describe the attitude of psychoanalysis to siblings? Has it ignored siblings, missed them, repressed them? Mitchell: Well, it’s impossible to miss siblings. There have been attempts to look at siblings. But they don’t have any staying power. And I think they don’t have any staying power because they’re subsidiary. They’re not an autonomous area within the theory—there isn’t a theory of siblings, a theory of a horizontal axis. As I have said, Lacan makes them a part of the Imaginary world. Freud makes them a continuation into the social “after” the Oedipus complex. I’m being speculative here, but another element, which we haven’t brought in yet but which interests me very much, is the death drive. In psychoanalysis, there is such opposition to the hypothesis of a death drive that death itself vanishes. The problem of death goes in different directions, for instance into aggression, and it isn’t sustained. And I think you need siblings for thinking about death, and death for thinking about siblings. I had already made the death drive a major part of my thinking about hysteria. So even before I got to siblings, there was the death drive waiting. As an example, take the little boy’s game of representing his mother’s coming and going with the cotton reel—the fort/da game. This records a primary utterance. I suggest that the sibling organizes this early phonemic experience. I wanted to look at that chain along the line of the death drive rather than the line of sexual difference, although of course sexual difference comes in, too. Nixon: Maybe we could turn to the question of the relationship between sex and violence, because that’s the subtitle of the book: Siblings: Sex and Violence. Mitchell: They made me take out “gender.” Nixon: Why? Mitchell: It’s a “boo” word for publishers at the moment. Ten years ago, they would put the word “gender” in if you were writing about an oak tree, and now it’s taken out if you are writing about gender. Nixon: So it was to have been . . . Mitchell: Siblings: Gender, Sex, and Violence. Nixon: “Gender” was ﬁrst. Garb: But should we dwell on the violence question? Can you tell us a little about how you understand violence in this psychoanalytic sense? What is violence composed of? Mitchell: Killing or being killed. Garb: It’s about survival and staking your own space? Mitchell: Yes, the instinct to survive. It might mean that you have to kill to survive. Which is what war is. Nixon: In Mad Men and Medusas, you argue that one of the effects of the disappear- ance of hysteria as a universal category was the loss of the dimension of

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violence. You say that when hysteria migrates into the feminine and remains there—when “hysteria becomes woman,” as I think you put it—then our sense of the role of violence in hysteria is lost. Because violence is culturally gendered masculine. In Siblings, you extend this argument to suggest that violence is a universal feature of that relationship. Mitchell: I think it is normative, or normal even, for displaced siblings to feel violent toward the person who displaces them. So you get that oscillation between an extension of your narcissistic love for a friend and your violence toward a person who has displaced you. I use the technical concept of “reversal into the opposite.” The ability to reverse into the opposite feelings of love and hatred can be seen vividly in children. Freud said hate is older than love. You need to hate. I think it’s very important that we’ve all had the experience of hating our actual sibling, or our putative sibling, or our substitute sibling, the person who stands in our place. Donald Winnicott, in his silent dialogue, or disagreement, with Melanie Klein, claimed, “one thing I know is that the hatred of the mother has to come first”—before hatred of the baby sibling. Jocasta’s and Laius’s filicide. I’ve always wondered where that hatred came from. Did it descend from the skies? Was it a kind of Kristevan abjec- tion? Is there something sui generis about parturition that makes hate? That doesn’t quite work analytically for me. But if we’ve all had siblings that we’ve hated, then we’re going to see our child in a hating way. Garb: How does that conversion happen? Mitchell: From hate to love? I think it’s a reversal into the opposite. It’s a real switch. Garb: Is there a catalyst? Mitchell: No. Reversal into the opposite is just that. I don’t think there is a catalyst. Garb: It can veer back and forth. It is never fixed. Mitchell: Right. There is that line by Wilfred Owen, “I am the enemy you killed, my friend” [Strange Meeting, 1918]. He kills the German soldier, his enemy, but he is actually his brother, his friend, too. The awful thing is that the other is only a reflection of Owen himself. You are like your sibling. A twin is a reflection of the self. There is a wonderful study of twins by Anna Freud’s partner, Dorothy Burlingham. The twin calls himself “Other-one Burt,” calls himself, that is, by the other twin’s name. As I was saying earlier, I think there is a mirror phase that is independent of the Lacanian Imaginary—in which the mother refers the child to the mirror—and which is also different from Winnicott’s idea that the mother mirrors the true self to the child, mirrors the baby to itself. I think it is important to consider the experience of the baby looking at an older child. The baby becomes ecstatic watching a toddler. It is really, really entranced by that toddler or even by a child in the latency period. Watching the contained movement of the older child, it feels coordinated in the other child’s still excitable, but nevertheless controlled, movements. I see that as a crucial mirroring, too. Again, it has to do with the body of the body-ego. Nixon: So there is a mirroring from which the mother is absent, and in this mirroring,

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the sibling, or the sibling surrogate, plays the role of facilitating the baby’s development of a self-image. If psychoanalytic descriptions of child development do not pay enough attention to this dynamic, what about parents? How aware are parents of sibling violence, for example? Mitchell: I think as parents we don’t want to see sibling violence. When I speak to groups about this, afterward someone will say, “My God, I was the youngest of six, and you’re just reminding me of how my parents always thought that I was safe on the street if I was out with my older siblings. Little did they know that I was being tortured and was in terror of my life the moment they shut the front door.” This is always there. Torture is there. Garb: Often semi-repressed, though. There must be cases where the parents don’t see any signs, or the signs aren’t there at all. Where has that energy gone? Mitchell: It could be inhibited. It could be sublimated for some reason, into achievement, for example. It could also be that the parents turn a blind eye. Garb: So is it a universal rule that it is there? Mitchell: Yes. As Winnicott says, you must have access to hate. Garb: There’s damage done if it’s sublimated or repressed. Mitchell: But the hate could be expressed toward another child. For example, somebody who has a handicapped sibling might be overly frightened that their violence might actually kill the child. There is a short story called “The Mother” by Elizabeth David to which I like to refer. The eldest child in a Mumbai slum family is proud that she has looked after all her younger sisters and brothers. The story beautifully reﬂects how interwoven with her caring is her wish for a child’s life herself—she threatens to throw her crying baby under a bus if he doesn’t stop, and then feels terror, when he isn’t breathing normally, that she has killed him. It’s not that every child does something violent, but every child has moments of wanting to throw his or her baby brother under a bus. Garb: Perhaps we could talk now about the imbrication of sex and violence. When incest or rape enters into the equation, that’s the space in which the erotic and the violent come together. Could you talk a little bit about the intersec- tions between violence and sex? Mitchell: Sibling sex is the most prevalent form of abuse in England. Garb: Male to female? Mitchell: Older sibling to younger, usually older brother to younger sibling. I gave a talk two or three years ago and referred to this at the Institute of Psychoanalysis. A colleague said that most adolescent patients had had sex with their siblings. Melanie Klein even thinks it might be benign and helpful in situa- tions of deprivation. Garb: Do you always see it as a manifestation of violence expressed through domination? Mitchell: No. I think it could be a babes-in-the-wood situation. In Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1998), the siblings have a sexual relationship that is com- forting. If you sleep next to somebody, if you’re cuddling up to somebody for

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comfort, and you have this need for love and identiﬁcation that the twins she describes have for each other, then it may easily become a sexual thing. I don’t think it’s always a relationship of violence or domination. But I think there’s a potentiality for it to become so through reversal. To my mind, the conditions of hate-love reversal make sibling incest precarious, probably dangerous. Garb: Do you think vengeance is at stake there, then? Mitchell: I think you’d have to take each case on its own merits. In Mad Men and Medusas, I look at Iago and jealousy. It’s all played out on a lateral level. Iago deludes himself that Othello has had an affair with Emilia, Iago’s wife. So he is going to make Othello jealous. There are a lot of “siblings” around there. They’re all lateral relations. Who are you most jealous of? You’re most jealous of your sibling. You’re certainly envious if your sibling has a piece of chocolate that is bigger than yours. It’s just the name of the game to be jealous. I want to use “jealousy” rather than “envy” here, though envy can of course come in. It’s mentioned somewhere that Joan Riviere started with jealousy and that Klein turned her study of jealousy into a study of envy. I don’t think the baby post utero is particularly jealous, but I think by the time the sibling comes along, it is jealousy that we’re talking about. I was talking to some therapists recently in a church hall, and the vicar asked me if we could talk of jealousy rather than of hatred. “Could we change it to jealousy?” he asked. And I said, “Actually, I’d much rather hate than be jealous. Jealousy is much more corrod- ing.” There’s an energy to hatred which I think is very important. There is a survival aspect to hatred in itself. You’ve almost got to hate the person you kill if it’s a matter of killing or being killed. Nixon: So the Oedipal passions of violence—the wish to kill the father or the mother—are equally present in sibling relationships? Mitchell: We hate our mothers, no doubt, as babies. When we say, “I hate you because you won’t let me stay up late,” that is hate, a sort of purity of hate. But I think you hate your sibling, too. Nixon: I’m interested in how those axes might be coordinated. Does one deﬂect from the other? Let’s say, for example, you hate your mother for not letting you stay up late, so you form common cause in that moment with your sibling, but then you hate your sibling for some other offense, and that sends you back to the parents. Sibling relationships, as you point out, are volatile; the movement from love to hate can take place in the blink of an eye. With the parent, at least post-Oedipally, the passions are more settled, less mobile. So is it the fast-changing quality of passion in the sibling relation that makes it so hard to maintain, or so easy to lose? Mitchell: So that we lose it in the theory as well? Certainly with the parent, the hatred goes, doesn’t it? But I think it can also go with the sibling. Perhaps it’s gone somewhere else, but it seems to remain accessible with the sibling. So you can turn it into ethnic war. When you need hatred, you can access it again. It’s right there just below the surface. I think we’re probably looking at

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a kind of continuation of the paranoid-schizoid position. We all go in for normative splitting, normative paranoia, and these processes may sometimes look so pathological that we don’t see them as psychic processes on a continuum but as abnormal processes, as negative processes. But of course they’re terribly prevalent in our everyday life. You can easily access this hatred at another level. Garb: What about the way in which sibling relations are managed by the mother? Can you explore a little how your conception of the mother differs from classic psychoanalytic theory of the law of the father, and what the implications of the shift from the law of the father to what you call “the law of the mother” might be? Mitchell: It was of course polemical to call it “the law of the mother.” It was just saying, “Wait a minute, isn’t there something amiss with the exclusivity of the law of the father in terms of kinship positions that are assumed?” For example, why is the mother’s brother always equated to the father? Why isn’t he seen as the mother’s brother in a lateral position? In families, you’ve got two sets of laterality. You’ve got child siblings and adult siblings. Garb: Two gangs. Mitchell: Yes, two gangs, and two relationships: the bad and the good—warfare and care and protection—and the two possibilities on horizontal axes along the wife-husband-sibling line and on the children-sibling line. The mother will be looked after by the brother, and the brother will help her look after the children. So you’ve got two lines. You asked me at the beginning for evidence of being trapped in the vertical. One way that we’re trapped in the vertical is that we can’t think of the mother’s brother as the mother’s brother. The mind instantly makes him a substitute father. That’s an instance of it. The brother is moved to the vertical, becomes the uncle, and is acting as a father. So what is the mother’s role? The mother is always negotiating between the children. That’s what I wanted to call “the law of the mother.” It’s actually a double law. There are two aspects to it. The child, when a sibling comes along, wants to be in one of two places. The child feels banished and wants to be either the baby that has replaced it—wants itself back as the baby—or wants to be the mother that has had the baby. It hunts between those two positions, which again are the positions the hysteric hunts between: a parthenogenic mother—“I’m going to have a baby from myself,” which would be an hysterical birth, or couvade, the hysteric’s fantasy—and the fantasy of being a baby. So imagine, here I am, a toddler. Baby sister is born. I want to be that baby sister, because that’s me, so I put on nappies again. Or I want to be the mother and produce that baby. Those are the two positions. The mother’s task is to say, “Well, you can help me and be like me, but of course you can’t actually yet have a baby, and babies don’t come from ourselves.” Castration doesn’t really address how we know we can’t have a baby. There has to be some prohibition, a law against a child having a baby. It’s not just realistic. We have the same problem when the phallus shifts into the realistic. In both

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cases, we need a symbolic law. You’ve got to symbolize the absence of the possibility of having a baby. The mother will do that for you. The mother will also say, “Okay, you were the baby like that baby, but now you’re the little girl who is two and a half, and you have a sister. And you never know, there might be another baby after this one.” So the mother introduces what I call “seriality.” It’s important that we have not only pairing illustrations. The most common contemporary type in the West is a two-child family, so we are accustomed to twos. But it’s this seriality that, it seems to me, is so incredibly important. Postmodernism attacks the binary. I say that in this ﬁeld there is a binary thinking, there’s a binary about sexual difference. But seriality shows we also need other modes of thinking. The postmodern assault on the binary neglects the fact that seriality is already in place along the horizontal axis. Nixon: In both of these books, in different ways, you address the cultural condition of postmodernism. In Mad Men and Medusas, you point to the way in which hysteria is creatively mobilized by some postmodernist practices, through performativity in particular. And in Siblings, through the model of seriality, you suggest that postmodernism activates a lateral dimension of social experience, which is obscured in modernism by the vertical axis of the Oedipal. In both books you help us rethink postmodernism by concentrating on relations between sibling-peers. But I’m intrigued by your use of the term “seriality.” How did you settle on this term? Where does it come from? Mitchell: I suppose somewhere in the back of my mind was Sartre’s distinction between series and nexus, and series within groups. I’m still going to have to work on what I mean by “series,” but I mean something that is not binary, that is serial in the quite simple sense of one after another, sequential. As a short- hand: it is where replication becomes symbolized into seriality. “The new baby was going to be me, but it isn’t”—that sets the process in motion. Garb: I think it’s also important to emphasize that seriality is different from repetition. Mitchell: Repetition is a response to trauma. As with replication, seriality is the symbolization of the repetition of trauma. That’s the movement. In my schema—of course I’m being schematic, and of course it’s much more serious for some than others—somebody comes along who you think is you. You’ve been looking forward to it, but this person replaces you, displaces you. You then have a traumatic reaction, which means that the psychic protective shield has been broken into; there’s too much excitation. You feel in chaos, you feel fragmented, and you don’t feel that you’re anybody. You feel annihilated. Then, you begin to recover. But you begin to recover by knowing that a bit of you is the same as a sibling. After all, both of you are at least in the same kin relationship to the mother. But you’ve also got something that’s different. That’s what the mother does; she says, “I love you both as much as each other because you are both my beloved children. But you are big, he is little, he’s a boy, and you’re a girl.” You’re the same in relation to the kinship situation, and you’re different

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Thurber. Cambridge, Mass.: Ofﬁce with Harvard chair and ochre-colored fabric couch. 2000. Courtesy the artist.

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in relation to individuation. That seemed to me to be like a series. So seriality is a way of theorizing what happens to the compulsive repetition that we know happens after trauma. People traumatically, compulsively repeat something. They may be repeating something that is a compulsive repetition of sibling trauma. But if you can symbolize that repetition or replication into seriality, if you can stop the compulsive repetition by symbolizing repetition into seriality, then you’re not just going around in a huis clos. Garb: Seriality has to do with something that is not identical but is related. Mitchell: That’s right. Even more than related; it is the same but different. Take the example of a bus queue. This goes back to Sartre, or Laing’s rewriting of Sartre’s idea: you’ve all got the same object, which is the bus, and you’re all the same—humans in a bus queue—but each one of you is different. Garb: This is very productive for aesthetics. Seriality has become a sort of buzzword in thinking about transformations of objects in the sixties, and you offer a very productive way of thinking about the implications of units that recur but are not identical. Often seriality and repetition are used interchangeably in aes- thetic theories. Mitchell: They certainly shouldn’t be. Garb: What you are pointing to is a way of distinguishing between them. Mitchell: It’s probably like Monet’s Haystacks. Garb: Precisely. Monet’s Haystacks are a series and not a repetition. Mitchell: What he was doing was to look at the same thing again and again and again in the sun and the light and the wind. Each time it’s different, though it’s also the same. Garb: And it has to do with time, with temporality. Mitchell: Absolutely. And so does birth, sibling birth. It has to do with what comes after you or before you. The knowledge of the past (and hence of present and future) starts with the transformation of the perpetual present of repetition (seen so clearly in the compulsion to repeat) into the temporality of seriality. Nixon: How does gender intersect with this account of seriality? The shift from sexual difference to gender is a deﬁning movement in postmodernism, and it is also a central problematic in Siblings. Mitchell: That takes me to performativity and my disagreement with Judith Butler. I think gender has always been with us, and gender transformation has always been with us, and it is cross-culturally always with us. Men have parthenogenic fantasies of giving birth, and they have hysterical fantasies. When siblings are sex partners, the relationship is not primarily a reproductive one. It’s a sexual play. That’s why people like Klein could think it was benign. The twins in Roy’s The God of Small Things are not worried about having babies. So there’s a sexual play that is not primarily reproductive. It does not confuse generations as does parental incest. Now, in relation to its interaction, it’s parthenogenic intra- generationally—laterally and horizontally. I call it gender because I think it’s sex without a dominance of the reproductive drive. This sexual play—playing

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games with each other—that’s what I think gender is, as opposed to sexual difference, which does involve an identification with the mother or the father post-Oedipally, post-castration complex. In addition to sexual difference, there is this lateral sexuality which is not reproductive, not primarily anyway. So I think what Judith Butler is describing has always been there. In sexual difference, to be one is not to be the other; to be feminine means not to be masculine. This condition of difference is not there in the gender of siblings—this is why transgendering has become in a sense so easy to think about—it is already there in the condition of gender, but not in the condition of sexual difference. In the seventies, I had an exchange with Robert Stoller when I reviewed his book The Transsexual Experiment (1975). Stoller was arguing that the transsexual was not psychotic because he does know how to symbolize sexual difference. Stoller’s example was a boy named John who wanted to be a girl. John acknowledged that there were boys and girls, saying he knew they were different, “like snowflakes.” I argued, “No, John’s saying these two things are different, just like siblings are different from each other, but they are not sexually differentiated into two categories in which one is the meaning of the other—two completely interdependent categories that have no meaning outside a reference to each other’s terms, a binary.” Different, but the same as well. They’re snowflakes. Garb: If gender is in the register of seriality, then there are many more subject positions than just male and female. There are multiple possibilities for subject positions. Mitchell: Absolutely. And for subject-to-subject relations. Garb: Subject-to-subject, but not defined as male-female. So after one has gone through the whole Oedipal thing, and one has made one’s identification, and is in the orbit of sexual difference, after one takes up one’s position, interwoven with that identification are the residual gender relations of childhood. Mitchell: Yes. Or take it to work. Mignon asked me about the social effects. Most work on social segregation in the labor force tells us that one of the reasons why women still receive lower pay than men despite all the equal pay acts (despite all these laws, women’s pay rarely exceeds 80 percent of men’s, or the job becomes feminized, debased) is that you’ve got gender segregation before you get to work. You’ve got gender segregation of girls and boys as pairing, not as binary. So girls play with girls in the playground. Boys play with boys in the playground. It’s one of the ways in which the mother differentiates for the child, tells the child what it means to be a little girl or a little boy. But it’s as a pairing relationship, not as a sexually differentiated relationship. That could be a pairing within the same-sex seriality, but they’re already segregated into a position within seriality. And it’s a nonreproductive one. Women like to work with women, and men like to work with men, and men like to fight with men, and women like to knit with women. There are already gender relationships which use gender difference as a pairing within the seriality.

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Garb: What about when gender difference becomes same-sex and libidinal? Mitchell: Certainly. Why not? That has always already been in place. Garb: So your theory destroys the normative? Mitchell: That’s right. It says homosexuality (same-sex love) has always already been in place. You don’t have to read homosexuality off the Oedipal. You might—homosexuality might be more Oedipally determined—but it could also be a development of same-sex relationships: brother to brother, sister to sister, within that lateral. But it won’t be reproductive. Garb: Does that mean that you see reproductive sexuality as an instant in the development of sexuality, or a moment within the formation of the subject? Mitchell: I still see it as Oedipal, as castration, with an identification following on. That’s one mode of sexuality. Gender is another mode of sexuality. Garb: What about menopausal women? Because of course there is a moment of nonreproductive sexuality which takes one back to a pre-Oedipal, “gender” definition of potential sexuality. Mitchell: The postmenopausal woman is sexual. She will not be reproductive, but that doesn’t mean sexuality has ended. There is lateral sexuality. My husband is an anthropologist and has worked with the Lodagaa in northern Ghana. There, when a woman reached menopause, she was called a man. It didn’t mean she didn’t exist as a person. The postmenopausal woman had a subject position, but it wasn’t a reproductive one. Through gender, at last there’s a space for the sexuality of postmenopausal women. But everybody’s always known that there’s sexuality postmenopausally. We’ve only seen it as not there because we’ve always read sexuality as leading to reproduction, in a religious way almost. And so has psychoanalysis. This takes us back to Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality [1901–05], which is actually still a very revolutionary book. Garb: Let’s go back now to the mother and the place of the mother in relation to this new conceptualization of her role in socialization. Would you say that this is the first really feminist account of the mother? Mitchell: I think it puts the mother as subject, whereas in earlier accounts the mother was collapsed into the feminine, as the petit a, the object. Femininity is an object status, but the mother is not. There has always been the phallic mother, but what about the subject-mother? There is subject motherhood in this. Because she’s a lawgiver. She’s in the place of the law. Nixon: Could you talk a little more about the distinction you draw between subject/object and subject/subject relationships? If I understand correctly, you argue that subject/subject relationships become possible along the axis of gender, the lateral, whereas along the vertical axis of sexual difference, relationships are more subject/object. Other psychoanalytic theorists, drawing on object-relations theory—I’m thinking of Jessica Benjamin in particular—have called for a theorization of intersubjectivity. My sense is that your notion of subject/subject relations is different. Mitchell: We’re in an area where it is quite important to tease out differences. I’m

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saying that if you’ve got brothers or sisters, you are in subject/subject relationships with them. This is something that is independent of the Oedipus complex. Nixon: So in all lateral relations, there is a subject/subject relation? Mitchell: No. Subject/subject might be the basis of friendship. But you might also tend to stand object/object, which would be the case for two strangers. So you can be a stranger to me, and I can be a stranger to you. I can be a friend of yours, and you can be a friend of mine. When we’re friends, we’re two subjects. When we’re strangers, we’re two objects. Then, we’re othering the other, putting everything into “other” positions. Or we can move into same- subject positions. Then we’re friends together. Nixon: Let’s return to Winnicott since your article “Theory as an Object” focuses on his work.* Winnicott is associated with object-relations theory in psychoanalysis, which has become an increasingly important theoretical ﬁeld for the humani- ties, one that is sometimes invoked in connection with a current critical term, “relational.” But these terms—intersubjective and relational—seem far more positive, even idealizing, than what you describe in Siblings— Mitchell: I’m going to interrupt you here. If you are always looking at interrelation- ality, you’re looking at what Winnicott calls “relating.” And we’re not always relating, we’ve also got to “use.” The movement between relating and using is the movement toward the ability to symbolize. We’re talking about a world in which, yes, we can relate as subjects, but actually, if we’re subject-to-subject, we need to be able to use the other in a subject position. That’s why I’m interested in Winnicott’s notion of the use of an object. The baby who, in Winnicott’s terms, has used the mother has been able to create the mother as something in the external world. Sibling relationships symbolize a later version of that same thing. If you kill the sibling, and the sibling survives, then you have created the sibling as other than yourself, an other who is the same and different. You use each other, and that’s friendship. Now, you can regress to relating, as you might do at a football match. But if on the other hand you are going to be a team of people helping to produce an art object— Garb: Can using become exploiting? Mitchell: No. “Using” for Winnicott is a very positive term, a very, very positive term. Go back to the baby who can use the mother. The baby who has used the mother has been really angry that the breast hasn’t come when it wanted it, and has bitten the nipple and violently destroyed the mother in fantasy. Then, in Klein’s terms, the baby would become paranoid because the mother might retaliate. But in Winnicott’s terms, the mother comes back having survived the baby’s anger. After the mother has survived, the baby has an image of the mother that belongs to the external world, an image of the mother as other. Now the baby has moved toward a recognition that the mother has survived and exists independent of its destruction. In “Theory as an Object,” I’m saying * Juliet Mitchell, “Theory as an Object,” this issue, pp. 27–38.

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that Winnicott didn’t take that analysis as far as he should have, which is to the sibling. This is the same thing at a later level. You’re not the baby, you’re a toddler. You hate the sibling, you destroy the sibling, you try to kill the sibling. You might try to push the baby off the bed. But either Mother stops you or you don’t go far enough, and the baby survives. And then you know that there’s another “you” in the external world, another you who is not going to be quite you because this baby is externally itself, but you also know that there is a you that is external to the baby or your older sibling, so you can use each other as two subject positions. And relating would be a regression. Nixon: So the crucial thing is to be able to use the other? Mitchell: Yes. Like we’re using each other now. We pick up on each other’s ideas. I use your ideas, you use mine, and something grows between us. You could say that’s exploitation, or you could say it’s using. You can do the same with me as I with you. We could do the same to each other—it is this potential equality which, if realized, stops it being exploitation. The generational imbalance, the baby’s absolute dependence, and, in this context, the absolute, superior powers of the mother stop the baby’s use of the mother from being exploitative. Of course people can use others in exploitative ways and do so all the time—but this use, which is about allowing the other to exist in the outside world, is reciprocal. If I don’t use you in this way, I can’t be used—i.e., made external to you—either. Garb: It’s about reciprocity. Mitchell: Actually, I want to backtrack because I think we might be making a wrong turn. I want to return to something important that Mignon said a while back that we passed over because I interrupted her. We were talking about intersubjectivity and relationality, and Mignon asked if there was something idealizing about their use. I think we are moving into idealization again here. “Use” becomes a possibility because by surviving destruction, the object is constituted for the subject as what it already is—something external. Then the subject can conceive it is, which implies that the subject, too, is external. This isn’t really reciprocity, but neither is it exploitation or equality. It’s use, because you are two subject positions that negotiate the use of the other. Or it could be three subject positions, or four subject positions. That is why I got interested in groups and why I started training with groups. Nixon: Is that the direction your work is taking now, toward thinking about groups? Mitchell: Yes, it is. I think it’s very interesting that Klein told Wilfred Bion to stop work- ing with groups because it would take him away from psychoanalysis. But I don’t think it needs to if you bring siblings in. All you need in psychoanalysis is sex, the unconscious, and death. If you have them, you’ve got psychoanalysis!

—London, June 19, 2004

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