Ideologies of the Super-Ego: Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Revisited

Abstract

Judith Butler: It is a daunting task to be here today, to have been invited to address the continuing challenges of Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism. It is, as you know, a formidable and broad-ranging work whose influence on feminist theory, psychoanalysis, theories of sexual difference, ideology, and kinship, is simply immeasurable. The simple but overwhelming fact is that there was never a book like this book and there has never been one since. Under such circumstances I had then to consider what use I might be on this occasion, how I might take up a more narrow set of challenges, and so I re-read the text along with the quite perspicacious introduction its author offered a decade ago. The introduction was as interesting as the book itself, since it suggested something about the reception of this most important text, including some lamentations about the direction that feminist scholarly work had taken, but also some strong suggestions about what might be some better directions. Let me begin, then, by reviewing that introduction so that we might know better what the author wants of us, and then let me see whether I can try to meet some of these challenges in ways that, I hope, will prove productive for further thinking on matters of kinship, ideology, and the changing tasks of psychoanalysis.

This chapter and the next presents a dialogue between Judith Butler and Juliet Mitchell. In May 2009 Butler addressed a symposium held at the Centre for Gender Studies to honour Mitchell’s retirement from Cambridge University with a paper titled “Ideologies of the Superego.” Parts of this address were later published in an article for the journal differences (Butler 2013); this chapter presents Butler’s full address. In the next chapter, Mitchell offers a reply to Butler’s account of psychoanalysis and the oppression of women. We hope that, in presenting these texts here, they preserve some of the excitement of the symposium as fundamental concepts of psychoanalytic and feminist theory were discussed and reconceived.