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Fifty years ago, Juliet Mitchell published her monumental Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Mitchell, 1974). In it, she provided a new vision of how sexuality and gender could be understood from contemporary psychoanalysis and explored the state of oppression of women in all cultures and its relation to the death drive. Many feminists of the time did not hesitate to attack Freud's work for its use of concepts such as “penis envy,” which seemed to show the oppression of women as something that was the result of their nature, inexorable and largely unmodifiable. Juliet Mitchell brought about a change in the critical attitude of feminism towards Freud and psychoanalysis. From then on, some psychoanalytical concepts came to enrich feminist theory in a permanent way.
The author considers her book Fratriarchy as a sort of sequel to that text. Once again, she addresses a psychoanalytical vision of gender and sexuality, as well as including a profound reflection on the death drive and the secular and current oppression of women. To this end, Juliet Mitchell is accompanied on her journey by three classic authors, from whom she provides a different reading. From Winnicott she takes the multiple references in his work on sibling relationships, highlighting how he did not decide to explore in depth this phenomenon that was before his eyes every day in his clinic. Winnicott does not seem to take a horizontal view of sibling relationships and does not delve into the impact that the birth of new siblings unleashes on those who are displaced from their pre-eminent position in the family structure. His reading of this is always vertical, without departing from patriarchal canons and from the consideration of the Oedipus as the only axis for understanding child development. From Bion she chooses almost his only work, brief but very valuable, on groups and uses his seminal concepts on the basic assumptions to show how the group and by extension everything social constitutes a different psyc