Juliet Mitchell
British psychoanalyst and author
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Through Psychoanalysis, English literature and Sigmund Freud
Early life and education
Juliet Mitchell was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, and moved to England in 1944, staying with her grandparents in the Midlands. She attended St Anne's College, Oxford, where she received a degree in English in 1962, as well as doing postgraduate work. She taught English literature from 1962 to 1970 at Leeds University and Reading University. Throughout the 1960s, Mitchell was active in leftist politics, and was on the editorial committee of the journal New Left Review.
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Career
"Women: The Longest Revolution"
Mitchell's article "Women: The Longest Revolution", in New Left Review (1966), was an original synthesis of Simone de Beauvoir, Frederich Engels, Viola Klein, Betty Friedan and other analysts of women's oppression.
The Cambridge University Centre for Gender Studies
Mitchell is a fellow professor of Psychoanalysis at Jesus College, Cambridge, and founded the Centre for Gender Studies at Cambridge University. In 2010, she was appointed director of the Expanded Doctoral School in Psychoanalytic Studies at the Psychoanalysis Unit of University College London (UCL).
Psychoanalysis and Feminism
Mitchell is best known for her book Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud, Reich, Laing and Women (1974), in which she tried to reconcile psychoanalysis and feminism at a time when many considered them incompatible. Peter Gay considered it "the most rewarding and responsible contribution" to the feminist debate on Freud, both acknowledging and rising beyond Freud's male chauvinism in its analysis. Mitchell saw Freud's asymmetrical view of masculinity and femininity as reflecting the realities of patriarchal culture, and sought to use his critique of femininity to critique patriarchy itself.
By insisting on the utility of Freud (particularly in a Lacanian reading) for feminism, she opened the way for further critical work on psychoanalysis and gender. She was an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University from 1993 to 1999.