ABSTRACT
Mitchell addresses the psychological body via the sibling trauma and the law of the mother. Her thesis has an inner and an outer framework. The inner framework is the “lateral body” of the bisexual social subject. The outer framework is her ongoing argument that psychoanalysis, like most of the social sciences, has privileged the vertical axis of human parent and child to the neglect of the horizontal axis of lateral relations. Mitchell reasons that Freud always described the traumatic effects and theoretical importance of the next sibling’s birth. She argues, however, this only made him more emphatic about the dominance of the Oedipus/castration complex and the Law of the Father on the vertical axis. Looking laterally along a horizontal axis, the mother intervenes between siblings to prohibit the expression of any desire for murder and also (perhaps less emphatically) incest. This “The Law of the Mother” precedes The Law of the Father (Lacan/Freud), coming in response to the trauma of the arrival of a younger sibling. The mother’s prohibition operates only on the horizontal axis between her children. She argues that if we see that the vertical and the horizontal axes, with their similar desires and prohibitions being distinct ways of handling the fact that we are all “born under one law but to another bound”, then we can realize that there is room for both.
