Juliet Mitchell (1940-) is a British Psychoanalyst and socialist feminist, who was a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge and Professor of Psychoanalysis and Gender Studies at Cambridge University. In 2010, she's appointed to be the Director of the Expanded Doctoral School in Psychoanalytic Studies at Psychoanalysis Unit of University College London (UCL). She is a retired registrant of the British Psychoanalytic Council.
Mitchell was born in New Zealand in 1940, and moved to England in 1944. She attended St. Anne's College, Oxford, where she received a degree in English, 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 influential journal, New Left Review.[1]
Mitchell is best known for her book Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Freud, Reich, Laing and Women (1974). In it, she tried to reconcile psychoanalysis and feminism at a time when many considered them incompatible. A substantial part of the thesis of the book is that Marxism may provide a model within which non-Patriarchal structures for rearing children could occur. The lack of the 'family romance' would remove the Oedipus Complex from a child's development, thus liberating women from the consequences of Penis Envy and the feeling of being castrated which Mitchell contends is the root cause of women's acceptance that they are inferior.
According to Mitchell, children are socialized into appropriate gender roles. Therefore, women grow to be equally socialized into becoming the caretakers of their households.