The Embodied Mother

Julia Kristeva is one of the very few psychoanalytic writers who regard the female essence as a central given in any viable theory of mind, not an add-on or “special” topic that can then be set aside to get on with the real work of analyzing the mind of the subject. ¹ Females (and thus, using this term as meaning specifically the biologically sexed body, and thus implicitly the sexed bodies also of males, or in-betweens) are central to life, and the life of the mind. This truth was born into Freud’s original creation of psychoanalysis. Beyond Freud, I myself distinguish sex from gender, the former being biological and the latter being a fluid mentalized concept. Judith Butler (1993), say, believes that they are indistinguishable, and that the body’s actual biological sex is entirely animated by sociocultural construction or linguistic interpretation. In psychoanalysis I do believe that we are searching for the freedom to examine a maximal fluidity of human behavior and psychic capacity, but while recognizing the limits of our physicality—which can of course be radically altered, but only by external physical means. The work of the imagination, however, is boundless and far outranges anyone’s biological body.

We have strayed far from the centrality of libido in many of our newer theories. Not so Kristeva. She uses “motherhood” here to set ablaze its eroticism, and she complains (as do I) about modern theory’s preoccupation with the individual’s object relations, a focus so exclusive that often the body is forgotten (Balsam 2012). In her work Kristeva characteristically maintains a dialogue with Freud. She has broken the bonds of allegiance to her teacher, Lacan, if only by the sheer volume of words she has poured forth into her passion for expressing the intensity of female experience qua female. This is challenging to his theoretical dictum “la femme n’existe pas.” ²

In addition to her knowledge of psychoanalysis, Kristeva is proficient in many European languages and has expertise in linguistics, literary theory and criticism, religion, and politico-cultural analysis, as well as philosophy, art, and history. Thus, her sensibility on the topic of “maternal eroticism” is far too worldly, unbounded, and intellectually and emotionally appetitive to confine itself to the abiding psychoanalytic apology (frequently implicit and, likely, still unconsciously phallocentric) for women’s experience and their bodies.

Kristeva sings a hymn to the loving ferocity of life. Her mind refuses neat compartmentalizations. Reading her texts is not always easy, for her style can be turgid, obscure, gnomic, and, above all, privately, leapingly associative. She has said that she is not attempting, however, to create a special new “female” language to express things female ³ (the écriture feminine suggested by French feminist critics such as Cixous [1975] or Irigaray [1974], in protest of phallocentrism). The music of Kristeva’s language, even in translation from the French—and I believe Rachel Widawsky and Perry Zurn have done a beautiful job of aiding its communication into English here—the rhythm, flow, eddy, and plunge of her pen’s output is compelling. ⁴ Kristeva is an excited and excitable writer who gets into my brain and under my skin, and makes me feel both “understood” but at the same time frustrated and wanting more. ⁵ In tonality it is not unlike what apparently Lacan aimed for, as described by Bailly (2009): “Lacan’s mode of communication was effective for his audience because it employed the device of ‘realization’: just as in analysis, an individual has to arrive at a realization by him/herself, and that realization has a force far greater than if it was received as ‘information’ from another party. Lacan led his audience, sometimes by provocation, sometimes by fuzziness, to think along a certain path till they reached of their own accord the conclusion he wished to bring them to” (p. 16).

In many of Kristeva’s writings, as in this current paper, maternality has been an elemental aspect of femaleness: the archaic mother, the mother of sorrows, the Virgin, the mother of horror; the mother of jouissance, the mother of black depression; the mother of courage (mothers of the handicapped); the childless would-be and would-not-be mother. Whatever the outcome of inhabiting that female body, she seems to acknowledge, having a child or not will preoccupy a woman unconsciously, if not consciously. It is invaluable that she centers on the power and experience of woman herself, as influencing the duo, more than on the baby.

Kristeva’s use of instinct theory is close to Hans Loewald’s development of Freud’s ideas. ⁶ For example, Loewald holds that instinct “is a force within or of the psychic apparatus; a force which represents stimuli originating in the body in a . . . (psychical) form. . . . [Instincts] act as dynamic forces of the mind and not upon it from the outside. . . . [Thus] mental . . . representatives of a lower order can be re-represented—not necessarily in the form of ideas—on higher mental levels. This is implied when . . . Freud speaks of thing presentations and word presentations and of the hypercathexis of the former by the latter (1915, p. 201)” (Loewald 1971, p. 117). Kristeva similarly weaves together body and mind. Like Loewald, she holds mother and baby, their bodies and psyches, in one cradle. This is where the mutuality of erotics springs to life. “It is a ‘gap’ between me and the world, subject and object, an intervening space [entre-deux]. Neither ‘I’ nor ‘you,’ but ‘behind us’ and ‘beyond the object,’ moving from one ‘in the direction of the other,’ it is an ‘affective attachment’ that the subject experiences as a ‘primary affect, prior to any repression’ (Lacan . . .)” (pp. 73–74). Kristeva hypothesizes that “the maternal eroticism inhabits this split” (p. 74), which is a kind of crossroads between the “thing” aspect of what is abject, needs to be extruded, and the dawning of the separated object and identity, where erotics marks a triumph over the split—a Lacanian paternal metaphor, “a ‘psychic revolution’ of materiality (Freud’s idea, more biological and social)” (p. 74).

In a 2005 piece that is more conventionally lucid than her customary writing, Kristeva says: “After Freud and with Lacan, psychoanalysis has largely been preoccupied with the ‘paternal function’—its need, its failures, its substitutes and so on and so forth. Philosophers and psychoanalysts seem less inspired by the ‘maternal function’, perhaps because it is not a function but more precisely, a passion. The term ‘a good enough mother’, coined by Winnicott, who took this theme further than Freud, nevertheless runs the risk of playing down the passionate violence of the maternal experience” (Kristeva 2005). For me, bodily “function” is enmeshed with passion (Loewald 1960, 1971). As Kristeva actually seems to assume, in spite of distancing herself from the idea of “function,” that “the maternal” encodes the physical use of the body in conception, pregnancy, and birthing, she thus logically situates herself fundamentally in the anatomical and physiological equipment’s “function”—with all its mentalized elements alight and its physical and emotional participation in both tenderness and violence. (For example, the hormone oxytocin flows to afford bonding and tenderness, while, for example, the vagina may be ripped open violently as the baby’s head appears.) Emotions are integral to every aspect of corporal functionality. I applaud Kristeva’s ownership of maternal “passion” in the fullest sense of this word. Since her first publications, she has been writing about it one way or another.

I believe that it is new here for Kristeva specifically to use the word “eroticism” together with “maternal.” It is a particular variety of her more generically familiar use of the word “passion.” A previous mention of eroticism, for example, occurs in her depiction of the Virgin Mother, where “orality . . . is displayed in the area of the breast, while the spasm at the slipping away of eroticism is translated into tears . . .” (Kristeva 1983, p. 249). But in this present development of the psychic integration of motherhood, erotics does not slip away. She connects this up with another recent concept, that of “reliance.” This is Kristeva’s way of keeping the mother’s eroticism still closely knit into mutual dependency in the service of her procreation and her vibrant, interactively communicative, sexually stimulating care of the infant. These ideas are in tune with aspects of Deutsch (1944, 1945), Loewald (1960), Laplanche (2007), Stein (2008), ⁷ and Hilferding—so long ago, in her presentation to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1911 (see Balsam 2003). How strange it is that the woman’s power in this state of inhabiting femaleness, often transformative in many ways that abide long after the birth of a child and early caregiving, is largely ignored in our field! It is rarely mentioned in psychoanalytic texts, unless a woman patient is talking of being pregnant in-the-moment. Kristeva recovers this state for our rapt attention. In a textual repetition of an ever deepening phrase, she declares active procreation a “State of Emergency” in large capital letters, in a heading (p. 72). Two pages later, the phrase expands to “a state of emergency in life.” By page 77 it thunders into italics for emphasis: a “fabulous investment in the state of emergency in life; it is linked [relié] to a cathexis on physical and psychical survival, on the care of the living and the concern for transmission.” This crescendo echoes Kristeva’s exquisite sensitivity to the semiotics (more below) of the pregnant woman.

Perhaps the general erasure of these states of being, as manifest in our literature, reflects an out-of-touchness with this special human tonality that Kristeva detects in communication and calls “the semiotic”—a level of linguistic code deeply embedded in the brain and mind, preverbal and embodied from the acoustic rhythms of mother-child interactions from within the body and surrounding the cradle. We are often deaf to this music and to Kristeva’s intuition of this quality of translated imagery in our language. She believes that these sound patterns become part of the communicativeness of humans, and inform and transform more integrated and sophisticated sounds and meanings. (Signification, in contrast to semiotics, essentially carries the meanings that are transmitted by way of these sounds and ascribed to environmental referents.) Listen to an analytic writer who is tuned in to the topic, if in a more modestly poetic way than Kristeva. And not that Marion Milner is claiming—as do Kristeva and a few other theory builders—any commonality of this experience beyond the personally unique: “when the pains of labour were beginning, I had at first been rather frightened, but then had plunged deliberately into a lower darker level of awareness, dimly feeling myself part of a dark swirling current, sinking down into my body, with half thoughts of dark earth and bursting seeds, the bark of trees, the strains of rising sap. I had gone to sleep thinking of the hot smell of mud by the river where cows have trodden, muddy water seeping into each hoof-mark, and the smell of trampled reeds. With the next spasm of pain had come the smell of wet charlock fields, deep lanes in chalk country, wet fields and beeches on the downs blown with a wet wind. . . . imagined smells . . . became absorbing, whereas at ordinary times I found the memory of smells very hard to recall” (Milner 1937, pp. 18–19).

My own Irish American patient’s account (“the mother as a speaking being” [Kristeva, p. 72]) also joins in this commonality of Kristeva’s semiotic—rhythms of the body within the imagery drawn from earth and sea, verbally rendered in resonance also with the mother’s internalized mother’s voice: “my patient gave birth that night while in a drugged haze, reliving in a slightly stuporous state the lives of the fishermen in their curraghs, going to sea herself in that storm, feeling the disequilibrium of crashing with the waves, and letting go as the surf trailed up the granite chips of the shore, letting the forces of nature take her over and trusting to her curragh bark. And through it . . . she heard her mother Maggie’s voice when the heavy fishing net was finally recovered and the powerful tide went out over the sand: “Och now sure, sure we’re all right, after all” (Balsam 2013b, p. 467).

Kristeva is well known for three concepts, two of which are particularly relevant here. Besides semiotics, there is “the abject.” ⁸ Kristeva uses the term to designate a universal human fascination with states of horror and all things disgusting, leading her to locate this interest necessarily in the mother’s body (a situation that I insist be also considered biologically “functional,” to keep a basic attunement with Kristeva’s own apt and earthy sensibility, which is an integral part of her brilliant psychoanalytic expressive theorizing). Here she has quoted Lou Andreas-Salomé’s vision and plea to keep Freud and Rilke grounded in the origins of eros: “sexuality . . . is ‘what ruptures the limits of our ego’ . . . ‘reestablishes . . . contact with our original, fleshly existence’ (Andreas-Salomé 1931, p. 97), and reconnects us to our own ‘materiality,’ rather than ‘distinguishing’ us from it” (Kristeva, p. 70). Kristeva reminds us that Andreas-Salomé enjoins us to “reach out into space . . . and into our very bodies with confidence” (p. 70). She notes, but does not bother to argue with, the disappearance in modern psychoanalysis of any interest in such relational elements—she simply asserts for psychoanalysis elements of Freud’s early originality that she has brought forward into new levels of integration that grasp the significance of the female body, qua female, in the foundational implications of the psyche.

The field of psychoanalysis following Freud and following his death has, of course, been the scene of a pitched battle for the primacy of the oedipus complex, as that myth’s understanding carried the core values of patriarchy (e.g., Rudnytsky 1987: Makari 2008). Analysts centrally interested in the female, and in maternal essences (e.g., Jung, Hilferding, Horney, Klein, and Rank), were extruded from the system for many, many years. A few writers in the last century were able to see mothers and their subjectivity as distinct from the commonly studied “mother-and-baby” unit. Helene Deutsch (1944, 1945) did in her clinical studies, although the flagrant biological essentialism in her proposed metapsychology of “female” narcissism and masochism left much to be desired. There are still, though, but a handful of writers who actually see females qua female as central to the mind’s work. In Argentina the late Marie Langer (1951) also did, by stressing “sexuality” alongside “motherhood” in her thinking. In the anglophone world, the late Denora Pines (1993) did, as also Joan Raphael-Leff (1993) ⁹ of the British middle group. I would like to ally myself with this list. The general topic of sex and gender (which also keeps central and illuminates female mental life) is represented mostly by North Americans such as Nancy Chodorow and Adrienne Harris. Melanie Klein’s work now has been rehabilitated in the United States and throughout the psychoanalytic world, and thus also her once controversial attitude of theoretical equality regarding sexed bodies. Unfortunately, however, her current followers are not these days much interested in sex or gender per se. Horney’s work continues to develop, and in more general directions; Bowlby’s inheritors, the attachment theorists, never particularly interested in sexuality, have only very lately noted the precipitous general falling off of interest in sexuality in psychoanalysis, and have begun to pay attention (Fonagy 2008). The relational school, influenced heavily by postmodernism, has contributed most of all to an awareness of sex and gender in the U.S. (see the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality, founded in 2000), but some of their feminist deconstructive efforts to delete bias, alas, involve radically overthrowing biological dichotomies (as they are perceived as indistinguishable from problematic psychological dichotomies), for which, after Foucault, they blame medical science. These efforts have inadvertently created a new problem of neglect of the material body as a functioning entity. Biology has been treated as a contaminant of psychology in the postmodern era, inadvertently driving a repetition once more of the old Cartesian dichotomy between mind and body. ¹⁰ Kristeva, postmodern poststructuralist thinker though she is, does not seem to bother with this fight but, refreshingly, moves effortlessly straight from Freud’s sense of biological instinct as representable in the mind, to dwell in the lived moment of the psyche’s occupation of the body.

Kristeva in this paper tackles the erotics of maternal existence by startling us. How taboo the notion of a mother driven by erotic aims is, she says (p. 69)—as taboo as childhood sexuality once was! We thus are drawn right back to our familiarity with Freud’s earliest struggles in fin de siècle Western society. We can now imagine the massive resistance we are up against with this topic. We can see that for Kristeva the common erasure and exclusion of fecund femaleness of the woman’s body comes as no surprise. The theory of abjection explains it. The abject concerns disgusting and horrific materials—what is rejected by or disturbs social reason. Kristeva coined the word to conjure up an existence somewhere between an object and a subject, representing unmentionable elements of the self that are vigorously to be kept subliminal (Kristeva 1980). Kristeva writes that the abject is situated outside the symbolic order of civilization. Being forced to face it is therefore an inherently traumatic experience. She invokes the repulsion in confronting filth, waste, or a corpse: “the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses” (p. 2). “It is death infecting life. Abject” (p. 4). Thus the sense of the abject complements, for her, the existence of the superego, the representative of culture, of the symbolic order, as in Kristeva’s aphorism, “To each ego its object, to each superego its abject” (1980, p. 2).

It becomes clearer, if we delve into Kristeva, how the body of pregnancy and birthing and mothering, with all its erotic ties to the infant, is vital. But it is simultaneously problematic for its evocation of powerful elements of the abject. She might suggest that the mission to bring this forward into consciousness could retraumatize the subject and the listener, and create further neglect and ignorance of the experience of maternal embodiment, which seems to have come about over the years of psychoanalysis. Consider that in 1911 the first female admitted to the Vienna Psychoanalytic society, Margarete Hilferding, ¹¹ stated to a highly resistant male audience that “it is by way of the physical involvement between mother and child that love is called forth” and that “certain changes in the mother’s sexual life are brought on through the child” (Nunberg and Federn 1974, p. 114). There “exist between mother and child certain sexual relationships which must be capable of further development” (p. 115). Hilferding suggests that fetal movements awaken the mother’s love and pleasure, and that these may be sexual. The loss of bodily pleasure because of the baby’s birth may cause aversion to set in: “It can be said that the infant’s sexual sensations must lend a correlate in corresponding sensations in the mother” (p. 115). Hilferding generalizes: “If we assume an oedipal complex in the child, it lends its origin in sexual excitation by way of the mother, the prerequisite for which is an equally erotic feeling on the mother’s part” (p. 115; see Balsam 2013a). None of these elements was easily assimilated into the theories of our field.

Kristeva brings no comfort about the project of helping our profession (re)member the female body! (Balsam 2013b). We must abject the maternal, Kristeva says, the object which has created us, in order to construct an identity. The power of Kristeva’s present thesis that includes eroticism is that it lifts us beyond “abjection” to incorporate a maturely honed aspect of female sexuality into theory and experience, driving the mother though her experience of the creation of life in her belly to her emergent identity that encompasses the live baby. The abject proceeds from “Thing” status—together with its abjected placental parasitic invasion of the female body—into a semiotic universe of life out of death, to the “one” within the “One.” Kristeva creates in words the drama of potentially deadly forces pulled forward into life. The separation of birth is also the propulsion of a life. This is reminiscent too of Sabina Spielrein ¹² (Balsam in press), another early member of the Vienna Society, whose first lecture before it, in 1911, was heavily influenced by and attuned to Jung. Titled “On Transformation,” it was a shortened version of her long paper “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being” (Nunberg and Federn 1974). This was the paper that referred to a death desire, which Freud later cited in his work on the death instinct. Kristeva writes: “The child ‘loses’ me (‘kills’ me) in order to leave me. . . . From my perspective, in order to separate from the child and re-become an ‘I,’ I leave him. . . . I abject the Thing into which we were fused. . . . In order for . . . biopsychical negativity to ensure the creation of links, maternal eroticism lets the death drive loose in the vital process, all while binding [reliant] the two together: the maternal transforms the abjects (which the death drive has re-rejected into the not-yet space of mother-child) into objects of care, into survival, and into life” (p. 76).

I recommend watching the short film written by Kristeva to accompany the online French text of “Reliance” (Kristeva 2011). The opening scene shows the actual birth of a baby. We are immediately situated in maternalization of the semiotic Khora—a word in ancient Greek that for her means the earliest stage of psychosexual development of the senses, and that encodes the mother as she is (and has been) possessed by the fetus. Kristeva (2006) has said of herself, in an interview with John Sutherland of The Guardian, “I belong to the tendency, or school, in French philosophy which developed in the 60s, in which conceptual work is deeply involved with the personal and in which notions, or ideas, are sutured by style. There is a lot of imagination, rhetorical figures, subjective expressions and so on that often bother the so-called Anglo-Saxon reader because they consider this French ‘stuff’—theory—to be somehow indigestible.” Nowhere may this be more likely to be the response of some readers than the following excerpt from an essay in her Tales of Love (1983). It is called “Stabat Mater,” and I like it very much—even if I do value Anglo-Saxon clarity of writing! I believe it brings the erotic, maternal, semiotic archaic music into the “speaking mother’s” birthing experience—ultimate jouissance. Running down the margins of this essay is a seamless, breathless prose poem, printed in boldface, that is reminiscent for me of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Joyce’s Ulysess. The reader may be aware that the “Stabat Mater” is a thirteeenth-century Latin hymn to the Virgin, “Stabat Mater Dolorosa”: the Mother of Sorrows stands by her dying son mourning. Remember that Kristeva grew up in Bulgaria in the Greek Orthodox Church and she says her early experience of masses were formative in her theorizing “the semiotic.” Here are two verses:

Kristeva (1983) asserts in her essay that the mother “stands,” by which I think she means the woman is stalwart and unwavering in her task of birthing, in her triumphant, joyful, painful, and joyfully painful entry to motherhood. She says of the Virgin Mother, “This . . . [consecrated] motherhood is the fantasy that is nurtured by the adult, man or woman, of a lost territory: . . . it involves . . . an idealization of primary narcissism” (p. 245).

The prose poem alongside the essay shows how very personal her “semiotic” communication is, how it sweeps the reader into the physically mental process and struggle of the experience of bringing life into the world. To conclude, I want to leave you with Kristeva’s own words: Nothing is directly said in the following excerpt about “eroticism” or “reliance,” but the following phrases, printed boldface in the original, are integral to the basis of this aspect of maternality:

Scent of milk, dewed greenery, acid and clear, recall of wind, air, seaweed . . . it slides under the skin . . . detaches skin from bones, inflates me like an ozone balloon, and I hover with feet planted firmly on the ground . . . to carry him, sure, stable, ineradicable, while he dances in my neck, flutters with my hair . . . slips on the breast, swingles, silver blossom of my belly and finally flies away on my navel in his dream carried by my hands. My son . . .

. . . . smiles in the blackness of dreams, at night, opaque joy that roots me in her bed, my mother’s, and projects him, a son, a butterfly soaking up dew from her hand, there, nearby in the night. Alone: she, I, and he.

. . . Forgetfulness . . . Like the fog the devours the park, wolfs down the branches, erases the green . . . and mists up my eyes.

Who calls this pleasure jouissance? It is the pleasure of the damned. . . motherhood destines us to demented jouissance, that is answered, by chance, by the nursling’s laughter in the sunny waters of the ocean. . . . it is a music from which so-called civility tears away suddenly through violence. . . .

Let a body venture at last out of its shelter, take a chance with meaning under a veil of words. WORD FLESH [pp. 235–263].

One can hear the yearning tonalities of the later, explicitly theorized eroticism, and at times fierce longing and possession of the erotics of the child and with the mother’s mother in this poem that accompanies Kristeva’s text on the cult of the Virgin Mother. The eroticism of Kristeva’s “reliance” had yet to break forth in its fullness, as it does in the paper under discussion, emerging to be expressed, for her, within the moral ethic of “une héréthique de l’amour” (Kristeva 1977).

Kristeva is outstanding among writers in her attention to the sweeping power of femaleness—Sutherland (2006) quotes her expressing her desire (proven successful) to be “synthetic”—and her forceful focus on the embodied mother and full-bodied motherhood, a focus nowhere duplicated in our field. It behooves us to learn—as we are able—from her work.