(1996).
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 77:1259-1262
New Maladies of the Soul. : By Julia Kristeva. Translated by Ross Guberman. New York:
Columbia University Press. 1995. Pp. 242.
Review by:
Donna Bassin
In New Maladies of the Soul, Julia Kristeva, an eminent French literary critic and psychoanalyst, offers her
observations of the unwholesome condition of the contemporary human subject and the possibility of remedy
through a restored, embodied psychic life. The maladies of which Kristeva speaks—which appear manifestly in
the narcissisms, false personalities, borderline states and psychosomatic conditions of contemporary patients—
are, according to her, the options available to the subject, given the diminished space and the deficiency of
psychic representation to symbolise unbearable traumas and affects and to escape from its experience of
self-division. In Kristeva's theory of pathogenesis such patients ‘share a common denominator—the inability to
represent’ (p. 9). The sick, immaterial soul, lacking ways to contain, experience and integrate thought, action
and emotion, has no recourse but to make meaning through representations in the body and through thoughtless
activity (something that is easily available in our technological society). The words of Kristeva's borderline
patients are empty and do not signify. Meaning is lost in the gap between drives—the abject archaic mother—
and symbols—the law of the father. Meaning in language and through language goes behind the descriptions,
categorisations, and definitions of oedipal language; if it is to be restored to the speaking subject, the body,
mother and the pre-oedipal must be infused within it via the structure of the imaginary.
Motivated by both an ethics of care for her suffering patients and her ongoing attempt to recuperate the
mother-child relationship in psychoanalytic theory and practice, Kristeva's patient is not only the suffering
individual but psychoanalysis itself. Pursuing the moral therapeutic tradition of Freud's assignment of a new
value to the soul, Kristeva endeavours in this collection of essays to put the maternal heartbeat back into the
depleted body ego of psychoanalysis. Kristeva offers a challenge for psychoanalysis to open itself up again: to
break down from its position of the one who is presumed to know. Psychic coherence in our theory and
interpretative activity she sees as a symptom of the analyst, comparable to the dead rhetoric of some
contemporary patients, which in an attempt to smooth over the essential crisis of divide has prevented an
authentic look at the individual subject who comes to our couches. Kristeva's wish for a transformed
psychoanalytic practice requires that the analyst and psychoanalysis relinquish the handholds of a reified
psychiatric classification as well as rigid theoretical organisers. Following in the surrealist position, the analyst
needs to speak of madness on its own terms. Analysands and their analysts must be dislocated from the
provisions of the certainty of former truths and awakened to their imaginations.
To understand Kristeva's language requires an appreciation of the interpretive community and intellectual
traditions of Lacan and Bakhtin in which Kristeva was shaped and from which she differentiated herself. It also
requires an understanding of Kristeva's remedy: a new conceptualisation of the origins and realisation of
subjectivity. For her, subjectivity has its beginnings in the maternal function rather than the paternal function.
Kristeva's challenge to
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traditional psychoanalytic theory reveals her emphasis on the paternal function as a masculinist fantasy that
drastically underdetermines the maternal function. Her critique of the classical father-centred modes of reality
lay bare a fuller appreciation of the psychic strategies of recuperation present in illusion as well as the
irrepressible need to live closer to the maternal container. Although loss turns into imagination, it is not about
renunciation, but rather permission for and acceptance of a longing for reunion while knowing its fictive
construction.
However, equally critical of certain aspects of feminist theory and of those who want to elevate a maternal
imaginary, Kristeva advocates a continual struggle at the borderline between the paternal order and the maternal
imaginary. Kristeva's attempt to illustrate a dialogic mind has certain similarities with Loewald's (1980)
critique of the exclusive and polarised reliance on either the father, the demands of reality, or the mother,
wishes for unity.
To appreciate Kristeva's oeuvre one must read her on her own terms. Even those well versed in French
literary and psychoanalytic theory may suffer without the benefit of knowing the evolution of her thinking and an
understanding of her melding of Lacan's psycho analytic and semiological terminology. Kristeva's therapeutic
action must be seen in the light of her modifications of Lacan's symbolic order and specifically of her
contributions of the function of the semiotic, or the life force, of the preoedipal. The semiotic—a prediscursive
dimension of language (such as colour, tone, rhythm or gesture)—is seen as the more direct expression of the
drives associated with contact with the maternal body before the paternal order of the symbolic. In Kristeva's
organisation, the maternal expresses its presence through a symbolic embodied by the semiotic, or rather a
dialectic oscillation of the semiotic and the symbolic. For her, all productive signification is driven by a
dialogic oscillation between semiotic drive force and symbolic states. Language, and thus the subject, reflects
the essential interaction of two mutually modifying modalities of signifying processes.
Referred to as both a dutiful and rebellious daughter of Lacan, Kristeva, as she describes it throughout the
first part of the book (‘The Clinic’), departs from Lacan's clinical practice in her therapeutic action. In Lacan's
schema, the necessary catastrophic cleavage of the mother-child dyad by the law of the father buries the memory
of the relationship to the archaic mother in the unconscious and propels the child into the symbolic. By barring a
return to the mother, the father brings the child to language and to the logic of substitution. The desire to re-
establish this relationship with the other can never be satisfied and is replaced by a chain of representations.
Clinical practice based on Lacan's theory of the symbolic order requires the practitioner to follow the endless
chain of displaced signifiers in an attempt to recover meaning. In contrast, according to Kristeva's many clinical
accounts in these essays, psychoanalytic remedy demands reading the non-representable through representation
rather than uncovering repressed meanings through the chain of displaced signifiers.
To understand the gist of Kristeva's therapeutic action, which she both describes and performs, is to locate
the source of the malady in the break between the body of the maternal (semiotic) and the law of the father
(symbolic). The connective tissue that bridges this gap is both a psychic structure and a vehicle for
psychoanalytic cure. For Kristeva it is mother's love or Freud's father of pre-history (who is not concretely a
father or male), sitting between the archaic mother and the law of the father (rather than the stern law of the
father), that is the incentive to give up demands on mother's body and replace it with desires in language. This
imaginary loving third other offers a fantasy of reunion with the maternal body, which assuages the actual
separation.
As a practitioner for the well soul, Kristeva attempts to describe her clinical stance as occupying this
imaginary position of the third term. Keflecting on Freud's observations on transference love, Kristeva attempts
to restore love as a developmental impetus. Although loss is still the founding moment of subjectivity, Kristeva
suggests that it is love in the transference-countertransference—alternatively referred to as the maternal function
or imagination—that endows her patients with the necessary support
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of fictive illusions that cover the gap. By helping the patient reconcile herself to the loss of union, Kristeva
echoes in part Winnicott's appreciation of teaching the patient how to play.
In her first essay, ‘The Soul and the Image’, Kristeva discusses a case, one of false self-organisation, with
somatic and obsessional symptoms, that is illustrative of her theory of cure. Realising that it was not enough to
examine her patient's defensive obsessional speech, she allowed a certain perverse acting out, the display to her
of the patient's paintings. The patient's wordless and formless images (seen as the site of his fantasies and of his
violent aggression) were given meaning through Kristeva's fantasies about what they meant. Unconcerned
whether the meaning was hers or her patient's (‘the analyst must give in to the countertransference’), Kristeva, in
her Bahktin-influenced therapeutics, in which the differentiation between analyst and analysand temporarily
disappear, replaced the patient's mother. In contrast to the mother who had accepted her son's art without
reacting to it, she provided the loving transferential imaginary necessary for the patient to develop a relationship
between his drive-driven imagery and meaningful words. Disagreeing with Freud's formulation that for the
obsessional the trauma is deprived of its affective contents, Kristeva suggests that the psychic representations of
affect are dissociated from their verbal representation and are transplanted on to other semiotic phenomena. The
voice, gaze, and acts are powerful and deadly, producing a symbolic monstrosity, in which doing is confused
with meaning. By endowing this patient's real language, the act, with communicative function, Kristeva argues, a
path emerges that endows her patients with a greater capacity for signification.
Her clinical interest in the borderline states of the subject brings Kristeva, in the loosely organised second
section of her book, ‘History’, to examine sites where semiotic expression is more visible and transgressive
than it is in most conventional symbolic representational systems. Her plea for a measure of the imaginary in
treatment and its practical effectiveness for a fully realised psychic as an ‘open structure’, a structure in which
identity can usefully break down, is illustrated in her analysis of religious practices, biblical text, art,
avantgarde writings and adolescent mental states. Here, the semiotic used to overcome separation from the
mother calls attention to its own repressed condition. Although certain aesthetic and religious practices are
described as an opportunity for discharging the drive force without undue violence to the self or others,
discharge through art and religion is not enough. While analysis also creates fictions that can be lived it is
mindful, through the practice of interpretation, of its own constructed nature. Not an advocate of the progressive
development of modernism, Kristeva sees a web of possibility in a potentially open structure of the mind. She
looks for a place where utterance both refers to something or someone and is also performative of itself.
Kristeva's system, which takes little from Anglo-American theorists, except for Winnicott and Klein,
bypasses the current debates on the mutative effects of currants and cake (referring to Strachey's 1934 analogy:
‘cake cannot be made of nothing but currants’, p. 158) with a different look at the borderline's frantic efforts at
solution and pseudomastery. As a poet-psychoanalyst addressing the different domains of development to which
the therapist must respond, Kristeva's clinical descriptions will not satisfy those looking for a detailed
understanding of the specifics of her cure, especially for those reading outside her own theory. Her evolving
clinical practice still lacks the detailed theoretical specificity regarding the development of a subjective self
and intersubjective relatedness. Still, Kristeva's ability to tune in to the tumultuous noise of the patient's silence
that rides alongside the patient's verbal productions is powerful.
For Kristeva, the psyche is a work in progress, all analytic knowledge is provisional and the status of
analytic discourse is closer to narrative constructed fiction than reconstructed scientific truth. For the Anglo-
American psychoanalytic practitioner who is willing and wants to be provocatively disturbed, I recommend
Oliver's Reading Kristeva as an entry to Kristeva's organisation. Oliver's overview is a thorough and critical
analysis of Kristeva's concepts.
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To read Julia Kristeva, let alone to review her work, is to struggle with the same dilemma her subject faces
in struggling from teetering into simplistic rational formulations or utter madness. Her thoughts, and thus her
writing, homologous to her epistemology, insist on the resistance of a false pursuit for summaries or conclusions
that lock up any one position. In fact, to read Kristeva as I imagine she writes and wishes to be understood is to
maintain a tension between the theoretical mastery of her weaving and the creative possibilities of her
unravelling. For better or worse, Kristeva's poetic semiotic style opens her to myriad interpretations, perhaps
the better for her patients to see themselves in but trying for a reader who might wish to pin her down. Her
writing is difficult but very suggestive and generative. Despite the frustrations of reading her the experience is
well worth the effort.
References
Loewald, H. (1980). 'Ego and reality'. Papers on Psychoanalysis, New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.
Oliver, K. (1993). Reading Kristeva. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana Univ. Press.
Strachey, J. (1934). The nature of the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis.Int. J. Psychoanal. 15:127-159. [→]
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Article Citation [Who Cited This?]
Bassin, D. (1996). New Maladies of the Soul. . Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 77:1259-1262
Copyright © 2017, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of PEPWEB GENERIC.
