Psychoanalysis and Feminism

Mitchell reads Freud not as an enemy of women but as the analyst of how they come to occupy the place a male-dominated order assigns them. Writing against the feminist consensus of her moment, which treated psychoanalysis as an apology for male power, she works through Freud, and later Lacan, Levi-Strauss and Reich, to show that the unconscious is where the rules of kinship and sexual difference are installed and handed on.

For a clinician the value lies in how she treats femininity, the Oedipus complex and castration as an account of a process rather than a verdict on nature. Gender arrives through identification, prohibition and the child's entry into a symbolic order already in place; it is formed in the psyche, not given at birth. That offers a frame for thinking about how patriarchal arrangements are reproduced in a patient's inner world, and for holding gender and identification as questions in the room.