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PCAS 20(2):112-130 (2015) • DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.3

Interview with Juliet Mitchell - Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Then and now

Authors: Wendy Hollway, Juliet Mitchell, Julie Walsh

Wendy Hollway

1 0000000096069301 grid.10837.3d Department of Psychology Open University Walton HallMK7 6AAMilton Keynes

About the Authors Wendy Hollway is interested in psycho-social approaches to subjectivity and identity change, pursued through empirical research practice, notably through ESRC funding which supported a study on becoming mothers. Methodologically, the work aims to translate a psychoanalytically informed epistemology of knowing into research practice. Two books illustrate this: Doing Qualitative Research Differently: Free Association, Narrative and the Interview Method, 2013, with Tony Jefferson, (London: Sage) and Knowing Mothers: Researching Maternal Identity Change, 2015 (London: Palgrave). Juliet Mitchell is Fellow of the British Academy and Fellow of the British and International Psychoanalytical Societies. She is currently an Emeritus Leverhulme Fellow writing a book on siblings, social life and Shakespeare. She is also the Founder Director of the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Cambridge and of the Ph.D programme in Theoretical Psychoanalysis at UCL Psychoanalysis Unit. Her work in psychoanalysis and gender has led to numerous publications, including, among many others, ‘Women: The Longest Revolution’ (1966); Women’s Estate (1972); Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974); Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Sibling Relationship for the Human Condition (2000); and Siblings: Sex and Violence (2003). Julie Walsh is an Institute of Advanced Study Global Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick. She works across the fields of psychoanalysis, social theory and psychosocial studies, and is currently finishing her clinical training at the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Julie has published and presented on Freudian psychoanalysis, ethics in clinical writing, and the topics of narcissism and shame. Her book Narcissism and Its Discontents is published with the Palgrave series ‘Studies in the Psychosocial’.

Abstract

Wendy Hollway and Julie Walsh met with Juliet Mitchell to discuss her seminal text, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, forty years after its publication.

Note

As part of our planning, the interviewers decided that the interview transcript could be changed by any one of the three participants during editing. The transcript has provided the foundation of what follows, which we felt free to develop and edit in the interests of coherence, depth, interest and clarity. This approach reflects the idea that a fleeting interview has no privileged claim to truth within a longer sequence of thought and dialogue. However, we wish readers to know this, so that they are not misled as to the status of the following material.

Wendy Hollway: The theme of this special section is Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Then and Now. You have looked back at the book already on some occasions, for example writing the new introduction for the 2000 edition. There have also been the twentieth anniversary occasions. To make it fresh, we could think about the links through the idea of ‘afterwardsness’.

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To start, how would you now look at its central themes, for example, at what it is that seals, internalises women into their gendered positions?

Julie Walsh: You’ve written about this in terms of women being ‘the ascribed repositories of human conservatism’ whereby a ‘drive for change’ is always accompanied by a ‘drive to stay put’.

Wendy Hollway: Or as a form of ‘undertow’: where progress encounters the forces that pull us back into regress.

Undertow and Oppression in Context

Juliet Mitchell: In terms of the undertow what is crucial is that the context for women has changed. I started thinking about psychoanalysis and women in the context of feminism at the end of the sixties: