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If Juliet Mitchell needs an introduction to readers of this journal we are all in serious trouble, but we do offer a few perfunctory items anyway, for the sake of good form. Mitchell is a distinguished psychoanalyst, scholar, feminist, and author, including of Women: The Longest Revolution, Women's Estate, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Mad Men and Medusas, Fratriarchy: Sibling Tragedy and The Law of the Mother and other works. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Cambridge. The interview was recorded in Montpelier last year for a forthcoming documentary on the 1960s as reflected upon today by an international cast of activists at the time. Because the bulk of any interview for film tends to wind up “on the cutting room floor” (if there were such things anymore) we all agreed to allow a full edited transcript to appear in this journal. We at Free Associations are most grateful to Prof. Mitchell for sharing her time, experiences, and insights.
KJ: We're dealing with the events and fall-out of the 1960s but first where were you and what were you up to in the 1950s? How did that preceding decade affect you?
JM: I was constituted by the Fifties. The 1956 invasion of Suez – and the whole dilemma of the Communist Party and Russia – very much changed me. I had always been very close to my mother. She had had to become a social scientist, but she always wanted to – and did – write novels. She had always wanted to be a literary person and she very much wanted me to fulfill what she was not allowed to be. My first job was in English Literature at the University of Leeds. I was 21 in 1962, and I was an assistant lecturer. I was then in a relationship with the man who became my first husband, Perry Anderson. We very much started the New Left at that point. I had hoped Perry would come North to Leeds because I was very close to Edward Thompson – E. P Thompson – and his wife. I liked the North. I came from North London but was born in New Zealand by accident of World War II.