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 inter- generational 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 com- plex. 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 clini- cal 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 back- track 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, OCTOBER 113 Summer 2005, pp. 9–26. © 2005 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0162287054769959 by guest on 24 September 2021 10 OCTOBER “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 psy- choanalysis 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 his- tory 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- Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0162287054769959 by guest on 24 September 2021 A Conversation with Juliet Mitchell 11 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 univer- salism 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 psycho- analysis. 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 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/0162287054769959 by guest on 24 September 2021 12 OCTOBER 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.