Gathers writings by the Viennese psychoanalyst concerning infant analysis, Oedipal conflicts, anxiety situations, symbol formation, and envy.

This worthy successor to Juliet Mitchell's pathbreaking Psychoanalysis and Feminism is both a defense of the long-dismissed diagnosis of hysteria as a centerpiece of the human condition and a plea for a new understanding of the influence of sibling and peer relationships.In Mad Men and Medusas Mitchell traces the history of hysteria, arguing that we need to reclaim hysteria to understand how distress and trauma express themselves in different societies and different times. Mitchell convincingly demonstrates that although hysteria may have disappeared as a disease, it is still a critical...

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 ascent: 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'.
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