Julia Kristeva’s Psychoanalytic Work

Julia Kristeva is, after Simone de Beauvoir, arguably the most prominent French female intellectual of the twentieth century. As such, in 2004 she was the first recipient of the Holberg Prize, the humanities equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Kristeva presents herself as a European citizen of French nationality, Bulgarian by birth and American by adoption, having taught at U.S. universities since the mid-seventies.

Her cosmopolitan self-identification mirrors the history of postwar Europe. She moved to Paris from Bulgaria at the age of eighteen with a background in Russian literature and German philosophy. Over the course of her career she developed a unique and profound way of thinking by connecting linguistics, literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. In each of these fields, she has questioned established assumptions while grounding contemporary theories within the broader context of the Western cultural heritage. As the eminent French literary critic Roland Barthes wrote of her in 1970, “she changes the order of things” by always linking new theories or approaches to tradition (quoted in Moi 1986, p. 1).

However, her interdisciplinary thinking is no mere eclectism but an extensive exploration of the human mind that requires us to travel among disciplines and beyond frontiers. In her acceptance speech for the Holberg Prize (Kristeva 2004) she said, “the key to my nomadism, and my questioning of established forms of knowledge, is none other than psychoanalysis itself, understood as a journey in which the psychic identity itself is reconstituted.”

If the first thread of her trajectory is, as Kristeva says, a journey among disciplines, it is led by an insatiable search for an empathic understanding of the human psyche and a relentless concern to safeguard a place for the subject in the human sciences. Whether Kristeva writes on language, philosophy, art, or literature, psychoanalysis is always the underpinning and the inspiration of her thought. ¹

For example, in Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), one of her major works on language, Kristeva introduces into the structural linguistic model— signifier/signified—the subject’s nonreferential bodily drives (affects, emotions, sensations, and the like). She calls these nonsymbolized components of language the semiotic. For her the semiotic is a disruptive force in language. She deciphers it in modern literature and hears it in her patient’s narratives through tonality, rhythms, contradictions, meaninglessness, disruption, and silence.

But this formulation of the semiotic is not simply a linguistic addendum to structuralist linguistics; rather, it is an endeavor to rethink the Freudian model of how the biological and the psychical articulate. In this regard, Kristeva does not subscribe to the Lacanian axiom that the unconscious is structured like a language.

For Kristeva, the semiotic is not simply part of the signifying process; it is also a component of the identity and construction of the self. The semiotic is a representation of vocal and kinetic sensations from the preoedipal primary process. The paradigm of this concept is maternal holding and motherhood, the subject of the paper to follow. She writes in Desire in Language that “the semiotic with its maternal ties seems to be the farthest we can reach when we try to imagine and understand the frontiers between nature, or ‘physis’, and meaning” (Kristeva 1980a, quoted in Fletcher 2004, p. 43). For Kristeva the mother is the incarnation of the semiotic, which she calls Khora, a Greek concept from Plato signifying the preexistent status of things. For Kristeva the mother has this pre-organizing value, this presymbolic function. The mother represents something heterogeneous that can never be fully tamed because she is the source and the aim of the drives, because she is the foundation of the object relation, and because she is at the junction of the physical and the psychological.

On the one hand, the maternal presence represents, as in Winnicott’s good-enough mother, the holding, nurturing environment. On the other hand, the mother is also the first agent of seduction, a phonic and kinetic envelope, and a transmitter of unconscious fantasies to the infant. In a letter to Fliess dated December 6, 1896, Freud wrote that the mother is “the prehistoric, unforgettable other person who is never equalled by anyone later” (p. 180). Although Freud, as we know, did not pursue the theoretical implications of this insightful observation, he nevertheless acknowleged, in “Three Essays on Sexuality,” the encounter with unconscious maternal sexuality. The mother, Freud (1905) says, “strokes [the infant], kisses him, rocks him and quite clearly treats him as a complete sexual object. A mother would probably be horrified if she were made aware that all of her marks of affection were rousing her child’s sexual drive and preparing for its later intensity. . . . She is only fulfilling her task in teaching the child to love” (p. 223).

The mother’s unconscious sexuality (her desire for the father) is for Kristeva, and for many other French analysts, fundamental to the infant’s self-development. In her review of the role of motherhood through the cult of the Virgin Mary, ² as in her study of Madonnas in art history, ³ Kristeva brings to the foreground the sexual ambivalence of the maternal role. She explores all these issues in the paper presented here.

In addition to elaborating the erotic component of the maternal role, Kristeva has explored the hidden fantasies of violence and destruction linked to the preoedipal mother, a topic Melanie Klein was the first to address. In an essay on Klein (Kristeva 2000), ⁴ in which she presents a critical review of Klein’s major concepts, she supports Klein’s position that depression, which follows the paranoïd-schizoïd position, is a precursor of the ego’s structure and of the activity that will repair, in Klein’s formulation, the bits to which the loved object has been reduced. Here Kristeva adds her own concept, that of the abject. ⁵ What does this concept mean? It is the absent object, the lost destroyed object, proposed as a precondition to the development of mental activity. For the self and the object to be represented, the mother must be lost, separated from. Reviewing, after Klein, Aeschylus’s Oresteia, which presents the maternal version of Oedipus’s murder, Kristeva contends that matricide stands at the origin of our capacity to think. Hence the subtitle of her book on Klein: Matricide as Pain and Creativity.

In another book, The Powers of Horror (1980b), Kristeva provides a much broader definition of the concept of abjection. The abject is, she writes, “radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses” (p. 2): “The Abject preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body to be” (p. 10).

But the abject is not limited to the lost object; it is also a prelinguistic experience close to fear. Kristeva compares the abject to the “phobic object that shows up at the place of a non-object state and assumes all the mishaps of drives” (p. 35). When the abject recurs in our life as repulsion and/or fascination, it represents the threat that meaning is breaking down, that identity and order are disturbed. From her clinical experience Kristeva applies the concept of abjection to borderline or psychotic states, where the abject takes the form of hallucinations or obsessions. ⁶

In her elaboration of the semiotic theory of language, which incorporates the abject, the nonsymbolized, Kristeva stresses that access to language is linked to separation and therefore to mourning—hence her theory of depression and melancholia, developed in Black Sun (Kristeva 1987). Based on her clinical observations and on literary examples, she claims that the depressed narcissist neither mourns the object nor confronts his concealed hatred of it, as Freud would have it. In her view, the depressed narcissist defends against the process of separation, for Kristeva the precondition of access to language. As a result, the discourse of the depressed or the melancholic is a complaint about lack of meaning, about the emptiness of the signifier.

Kristeva’s theories of the semiotic, the abject, matricide, and melancholia express her efforts to incorporate into psychic activity what André Green (1993) has called “the work of the negative.” Central to what the negative includes is the rejection of whatever is intolerable for the ego, even while being part of its development. The negative is the incorporation of absence and loss in our psychic structure, components at the core of our first experience of love, both maternal and paternal.

In Tales of Love (1983), Kristeva addresses the paternal forms of love and rewrites Freud’s oedipal model. The patriarchal authority and fear of castration that underlie superego formation in the Freudian model are, according to Kristeva, insufficient explanations for understanding deficiencies of the paternal function in a postmodern world. She observes, in delinquent acts that defy responsibility and guilt, a failure of identification with the paternal function. She considers this dissociation an impediment to being in touch with one’s inner life and communicating about it. Such “new maladies of the soul” (Kristeva 1990) are for her the result of a deficient paternal function.

To remedy this deficiency, Kristeva proposes a model she calls the “imaginary father,” a combination of the postoedipal symbolic father and the presymbolic one from our individual prehistory. The function of this imaginary paternal figure is to support new forms of identification and new object relations different from that with the forbidding oedipal father. This imaginary father is an idealized figure, founder of the Law, that Kristeva recognizes, after Freud, in the foundation of monotheist religions. I will return to this point below.

Between her insights on the maternal figure and her revision of the paternal one, Kristeva pushes the Freudian model forward and adapts it to the needs of patients in today’s world. With her clinical expertise and acute sense of contemporary sources of discontent, she listens to her patients’ expressions of pain and to their unconscious formulations. For her the listening dimension of the psychoanalytic dialogue is what defines psychoanalysis, not only as a psychology but, essentially and technically, as a hermeneutic between affects and drives and their representations, manifest in the transferential dialogue. Thus, the psychoanalytic dyad is the tangible expression of a calling for a listener, a receiver, as much as for an object, like the child afraid of the dark that Freud (1905) mentions in a note to Three Essays: “Auntie, speak to me, I’m frightened because it’s so dark.” “What good would that do?” answers the aunt; “You can’t see me.” “That doesn’t matter,” answers the child; “If anyone speaks, it gets light” (p. 224).

In her clinical practice, Kristeva values interpretation as an offering given to the patient to decipher his or her conflicts through transference. For her the analyst is engaged in providing the patient a structure that will enable him to create meaning, to use the symbolic world to prop up his affects. She argues, in New Maladies of the Soul, that the modern subject suffers from the incapacity to represent: “analysts come up with new classification systems that take into account wounded ‘narcissisms,’ ‘false personalities,’ ‘borderline states’ and ‘psychosomatic conditions.’ Whatever their differences, all these symptomatologies share a common denominator—the inability to represent” (Kristeva 1990, p. 9). Raising the question of the aim of psychoanalytic treatment at the end of Tales of Love, Kristeva argues that with the contemporary patient psychoanalysis must foster the capacity to feel and signify, without necessarily healing the narcissistic void, lest an overly rigid self-concept result that might become a false self. The risk in normative healing of the patient is for Kristeva an ethical question. Her concern for respecting the subject as a producer of meaning, pathological or not, is at the root of her emphasis on the ethics of psychoanalysis.

The other component of that ethics, which she calls heretical ethics, or the Herethic, is an ethics of love understood as preoedipal maternal love (unconditional but doomed to separation) and as the imaginary father we believe in beyond the object of our oedipal, incestuous, and murderous wishes. As I have noted, Kristeva relates this universal need for idealization to the foundation of religious belief, a theme she explores, from an atheist perspective, in This Incredible Need to Believe (2006). In a continuation of Freud’s study of the psychological origin of religion (1930), Kristeva links certain psychoanalytic ideas to the Judeo-Christian representation, or nonrepresentation, of the father, as being both absent and sublimated. She first developed these ideas in a short pamphlet, In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith (Kristeva 1985).

On this sensitive question, I end my review of Kristeva’s psychoanalytic works. I have focused on what seems most relevant to the paper that follows and what might place it for the reader within the larger body of her work.