Taking a novel approach that adapts Freud’s theory of the Primal Crime, this book examines a wealth of ethnographic data on the Gimi of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, focusing on women’s lives, myths, and rituals. Women’s and men’s separate myths and rites may be ‘read’ as a cycle of blame about which sex caused the ills of human existence and is still at fault. However, the author demonstrates that in public rites of exchange in which both sexes participate, men appropriate and subvert women’s usages as a ritual strategy to ‘undo’ motherhood and confiscate children at puberty. In doing so, she reveals how Gimi women both rebel against the male-dominated social order and express understanding of why they also acquiesce. The result of decades of fieldwork, writing and reflection, this book offers an analysis of Gimi women’s complex understanding of their situation and presents a nuanced picture of women in a society dominated by men. It represents an important contribution to New Guinea ethnography that will appeal to students and scholars of psychoanalysis, gender studies, and cultural, social and psychoanalytic anthropology.

In Fratriarchy, Juliet Mitchell expands her ground-breaking theories on the sibling trauma and the Law of the Mother. Writing as a psychoanalytic practitioner, she shows what happens from the ground up when we use feminist questions to probe the psycho-social world and its lateral relations. In this pivotal text, Mitchell argues that the mother’s prohibition of her toddler attacking a new or expected sibling is a rite of passage from infancy to childhood: this is a foundational force structuring our later lateral relationships and social practices. Throughout the volume, Mitchell chooses the term 'Fratriarchy' to show that, as well as the up-down axis of fathers and sons, there is also the side-to-side interaction of sisters and brothers and their social heirs. Making use both critically and affirmatively of Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Bion, Pontalis and others, Fratriarchy indicates how the collective social world matches the individual family world examined by established psychoanalysis. Decades on from Mitchell’s work on psychoanalysis and feminism which argued that feminism needed psychoanalysis to understand the position of women, Fratriarchy now asks psychoanalysis to take on board the developing practices and theories of global feminism. This volume will be essential reading for analysts, psychotherapists, psychologists and anyone who wants to re-think the ubiquity of unconscious processes. It will also interest students and teachers of social theory, psychoanalysis, group analysis, gender studies and feminism.