Tamar Garb

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,

Modernity and Modernism: French Painting in the Nineteenth Century@@@Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century@@@Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art between the Wars@@@Modernism in Dispute: Art since the Forties

Modern practices of art and modernity, Nigel Blake and Francis Franscina impressionism, modernism and originality, Charles Harrison gender and representation, Tamar Garb.