Introduction to Julia Kristeva

In 2011 Julia Kristeva presented a paper, “Reliance, ou l’erotisme maternel,” at the seventy-first Congres des Psychanalystes de Langue Française. In October 2013 she presented an English translation of that paper at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. That translation, which appears in this issue of JAPA, was prepared by Rachel Boué Widawsky, a former student (and later a colleague) of Kristeva at Université Denis Diderot (Paris VII), and Perry Zurn, a doctoral candidate in French philosophy at DePaul University. ¹

As Anglo-American psychoanalysis has increasingly turned its attention to the study of the earliest developmental period—the one called “preoedipal”—our emphasis has been predominantly on the child’s experience of the mother. But what of the mother’s subjective experience of these momentous events—conceiving, carrying, giving birth to (separating from) and caring for her child? Kristeva’s essay is an attempt to rescue the subjectivity of the mother as a subject for psychoanalytic inquiry by directing our attention to the mother’s bodily responses to these most common experiences in a woman’s life.

Kristeva’s exploration of the mother’s body is rooted in her grounding in Freud’s writing but also incorporates her extensive reading of post-Freudian theorists—Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, André Green, Jean Laplanche, and others—with whom she has critically engaged in her own writing. She also brings to her exploration of maternal eroticism insights from her work across the many disciplines in which she is a scholar: linguistics, philosophy, literature, and religion. As a consequence, some aspects of her approach to her topic, including her conceptual vocabulary, may be unfamiliar to some JAPA readers. For example, terms such as the semiotic and ab-ject(ion) were coined by Kristeva in the course of earlier studies and now are brought to bear on this topic. In light of this intertextuality in her writing, we have asked one of the translators, Rachel Widawsky (a CORST candidate at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis), to provide a brief synopsis of some of Kristeva’s major writings. Not meant to be exhaustive, Widawsky’s overview focuses on concepts and terminology relevant to the present paper but perhaps unfamiliar to many readers.

For those who would like to see and hear Kristeva speak on “La reliance maternelle,” we encourage them to go to JAPA Online, where they will find an eleven-minute film, with accompanying English translation by Perry Zurn.

The questions that Kristeva’s essay poses for us are provocative. Has the mother’s body been denatured by object relations theories, turned into a holding/containing environment or sublimated (raised) to a place of reverie? Has postmodernism’s attack on essences led us to reconceptualize the mother’s biological body as merely a location for gender construction and cultural inscription? Kristeva’s paper invites us to wonder what has happened to the mother’s disappeared sexual body. Does Kristeva’s claim that the early mother-child dyad is also oedipal—”Orestes before Oedipus”—make us uncomfortable? Has the mother’s eroticism been too hot to handle?

At the end of her essay Kristeva makes clear that she feels more is at stake than clinical theories within our field. As befits her role as a public intellectual, her larger mission is to bring psychoanalytic insights to bear on popular conceptions in our culture, in this case those that may misrepresent the full complexity of a woman’s subjectivity.

We have asked two prominent American psychoanalytic scholars to give us their responses to the issues and questions that arose for them on reading Kristeva’s essay. Rosemary Balsam is a prominent contributor to a post-Freudian conceptualization of female psychology, with particular interest in the undertheorized pregnant body (2012, 2013). Mitchell Wilson has been actively engaged in bringing to American audiences key concepts from other psychoanalytic traditions, most notably from Lacanian and contemporary British authors (2006, 2013). Drawing from their own work, these American psychoanalysts help us enter into conversation with Kristeva’s stimulating ideas.