Psychoanalytic Purviews: Juliet Mitchell and the Lateral Axis: Twenty-First-Century Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Edited by Robbie Duschinsky and Susan Walker. New York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2015,  vi + 291 pp., $105.00.

Juliet Mitchell, a trained psychoanalyst and retired professor of English literature at Cambridge, is also a feminist theorist, activist, and self-described Marxist. She is perhaps best known for her 1974 book Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing, and Women, reissued in 2000 as Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis. In that book she attempted to reconcile psychoanalysis and feminism at a time when many considered them incompatible. Claiming that the inferior status the oedipal crisis confers on girls is not an inevitable prescription, but rather a description, she defended Freud from second-wave feminists.

In Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming the Effects of Sibling Relations on the Human Condition (2000), Mitchell highlighted the psychic significance of lateral sibling relationships through an analysis of the effects of siblings on presentations of hysteria. In Siblings: Sex and Violence (2003), she argued that the centrality accorded the vertical axis (parent-child, the oedipal) by psychoanalysis had led to missed opportunities in treatments for exploring the effects of sibling relationships. Implicit in her project is the idea that the sibling complex plays as crucial a role in psychic lives as the oedipus complex. But this revision poses a problem for psychoanalysts. Is it possible—or even desirable or necessary? In a 2014 interview that concludes the collection under review here—Juliet Mitchell and the Lateral Axis—Mitchell finds “what is staggering is the combined presence of siblings in psychoanalysis and also the absence of its implications. That's why I turned to the question—what is it that is making people miss the implications of this at the same time as working with it? Why have we missed it?” (p. 256).