Mignon Nixon

On the Couch

OCTOBER 113, Summer 2005, pp. 39–76.

Posing the Phallus

Why was the phallus posed (as a question, as an object, for a picture)? Why, between the mid-1950s and the late 1960s, was the phallus posed so often and so insistently: by Jasper Johns in 1955, with the inclusion of a green penis among the bodily fragments ranged in the shuttered compartments of his Target with Plaster Casts; by Yayoi Kusama, beginning in 1961, with her Accumulations, articles of furniture and clothing covered with dense fields of fabric-stuffed phalli; by Eva Hesse in the mid-1960s, with such works as Ingeminate, a pair of tubular balloons, twinned phalli, bound and stiffened with cord and connected by a length of rubber hose; by Louise Bourgeois in the late 1960s, with Fillette, a two-foot-long latex phallus hung from a hook (and, in 1982, tucked snugly under the artists arm in a photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe)? These parodies of the phallus (for parodies they are) had potential political effects: made literal, the phallus might be undermined as a patriarchal symbol. Indeed, rendered literal enough, it might be turned into an explicitly counterpatriarchal object, or rather part-object. For to parody the phallus by posing it was, in these and many other instances, also to propose it as part-object. This phallus-as-part-object-or target of the drives, as desublimated, literal body part-was, to be sure, a proposition of its time. In the New York of the 1950s

A conversation with Juliet Mitchell

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 galvanized 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 discrimination 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,

Women, Art, and Power After Linda Nochlin

A brief remembrance of art-historian Linda Nochlin that celebrates her creative vigilance in attending to the nexus of women, art, and power in an era of ongoing political regression.

Death Work in Venice: In memoriam Khadija Saye

Mignon Nixon reflects on the Manchester Arena bombing, London Bridge and Borough Market attack, and Grenfell Tower fire in London, as well as the 2017 Venice Biennial, via J-B Pontaliss writings on the psychoanalytic notion of death-work. Nixon argues that the defining problem of Christina Macels exhibition Viva Art Viva in Venice, an exhibition so insistently art- and artist-positive—“designed with artists, by artists, and for artists” as the press release notes—is that its aesthetics of redemption is predicated on a negation of life, and thereby a negation of art.

Afrotropes: A Conversation with Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson

Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson speak with several October editors about afrotropes, recurrent visual forms that have emerged within and become central to the formation of African diasporic culture and identity. Copeland and Thompson argue that ultimately such forms are transformed and deformed in response to the specific social, political, and institutional conditions that inform the experiences of black people as well as changing perceptions of blackness.

“Why Freud?” asked the Shrew: Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Post-Partum Document, and the History Group

Tracing the parallel development of Juliet Mitchells Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), and Mary Kellys epic conceptual art work, Post-Partum Document (1973–1979) to the History Group, a feminist reading group in London, I ask what these influential works offer to thinking on sexual and gender politics today. Closely connected to this question, I explore what the turn to the problem of war by both Mitchell and Kelly in more recent times might reveal about the usefulness of psychoanalytic feminism to war discourse.