“Thou Shalt not Kill”: The Work of Juliet Mitchell on Siblings and the Horizontal Axis1

Over the past several years we have become familiar with Juliet Mitchell's extensive psychoanalytic work on the subject of siblings. Now we have the good fortune of receiving a new contribution from that line of work for publication in this journal. In her most recent paper Mitchell brings to bear her impressive intellectual powers on the question of war, so critical for our collective survival. In so doing she reawakens our awareness of the deep emotional origins of organized violence, much as it must have been awakened when first discussed by Freud almost one hundred years ago during the Great War and so easily and conveniently ignored.

Writing on war in 1915 and speculating about the development of conscience in human prehistory, Freud stated,

Reaction-formations against certain instincts take the deceptive form of a change in their content, as though egoism had changed into altruism, or cruelty into pity. These reaction-formations are facilitated by the circumstance that some instinctual impulses make their appearance almost from the first in pairs of opposites—a very remarkable phenomenon, and one strange to the lay public, which is termed “ambivalence of feeling.” The most easily observed and comprehensible instance of this is the fact that intense love and intense hatred are so often to be found together in the same person. Psycho-analysis adds that the two opposed feelings not infrequently have the same person for their object, (p. 281)

1. Parts of this paper were read at the Annual Symposium of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, Quebec English Branch, 1 December 2012.

Page 160

The first and most important prohibition made by the awakening conscience was: “Thou shalt not kill.” It was acquired in relation to dead people who were loved, as a reaction against the satisfaction of the hatred hidden behind the grief for them; and it was gradually extended to strangers who were not loved, and finally even to enemies, (p. 295)

By re-examining the social function of war in the