Juliet Mitchell is a British psychoanalyst and socialist feminist whose work delves deeply into the intersection of psychoanalysis, feminism, and politics. Through her writing, she explores how gender roles and social structures are shaped by unconscious forces and historical contexts. Her approach combines profound theoretical insight with a critical examination of social injustices. Mitchell offers penetrating observations into the psychological and societal mechanisms that mold our lives and relationships.
In Fratriarchy, Juliet Mitchell expands her ground-breaking theories on the sibling trauma and the Law of the Mother. Writing as a psychoanalytic practitioner, she shows what happens from the ground up when we use feminist questions to probe the psycho-social world and its lateral relations.
Combining the energy of the early seventies feminist liberation movement, with the perceptive analyses of the trained theorist, Women's Estate is one of the most influential socialist feminist statements of its time.
Siblings and all the lateral relationships that follow from them are clearly important and their interaction is widely observed, particularly in creative literature. Yet in the social, psychological and political sciences, there is no theoretical paradigm through which we might understand them. In the Western world our thought is completely dominated by a vertical model, by patterns of descent or mother or father to child, or child to parent. Yet our ideals are ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ or the ‘sisterhood’ of feminism; our ethnic wars are the violence of ‘fratricide’.When we grow up, siblings feature prominently in sex, violence and the construction of gender differences but they are absent from our theories. This book examines the reasons for this omission and begins the search for a new paradigm based on siblings and lateral relationships.This book will be essential reading for those studying sociology, psychoanalysis and gender studies. It will also appeal to a wide general readership.