THE CONTEMPORARY CONTRIBUTION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
Alain Braconnier: Your latest book, Hatred and Forgiveness,1 scans and completes the four main themes that you have developed in depth since the beginning of your psychoanalytic work: the role of language, narrative, and writing; the question of the feminine that Freud and even his women psychoanalyst successors have left uncompleted; the questioning brought up by the religious and the phenomenon of belief, and last, the contemporary contribution of psychoanalysis. Could you establish a personal guideline for our readers to understand the connections that led you to concentrate successively and at the same time on these different research themes?
Julia Kristeva: Freud’s ambition was originally and fundamentally therapeutic: his theoretical genius and his vast Jewish culture that endorsed the ideas of the Aufklärung often make us forget that. Confronting our delirium as speaking beings, he discovered that desire was the carrier wave, and that in this amorous intersubjectivity which would become transference, language was the best vehicle and the optimal (the only?) means enabling each of us to infinitely reconstruct our fragile and ever-threatened identities. If I summarize here both the Freudian pessimism and his therapeutic commitment, it is also to outline the scope as well as the limits of his approach, of our approach.
First the scope: psychoanalysis is a clinical practice, a limited field, a “frame” accompanied by theories, but it is also intrinsically dependent on conditions of existence, on analysands and on analysts. This does not mean that only “outside the frame” interests us and is understood in transference and countertransference, but also that the psychic “facts” that concern us are immediately social, historical, and political “data.” This also goes for the adjustment of desire/love, need to believe/illusion, and even the boundaries of male/female sexual difference. Psychoanalytic “collected data” are certainly universals, but they are also economies or mobile structures, malleable in human history: Freud never ceased to deal with them in his archeology of civilization. And we must recognize that we are finding it difficult to pursue and update this perspective.
Now the limits: in Moses and Monotheism, Freud considered that “the first individual in the history of humanity”2 was Amenhotep IV, this eighteenth-dynasty pharaoh3 who imposed monotheism on his people at the very time Moses would have lived. Freud thus admitted that the psychoanalytic subject sprang from the monotheistic subject: moreover, the presages of Freudian discovery are rooted in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, with the father’s structuring role implied in the prohibition of incest. A being at the crossroads (remember that Oedipus killed his father at a crossroads in the shape of γ, the Greek gamma, bifurcation between desire and murder), lover of his mother, Jocasta, and murderer of his father, Laius, Oedipus must nevertheless recognize these crimes to free Thebes from the plague. In conducting his investigation, in questioning himself, in thinking, the man of desire and murder “psychologizes,” or better, subjectivizes the fate inflicted by the gods, and only at this price can he become a divided tragic subject that is, at the same time, subject of desire and subject of knowledge. Indeed, his desire to know the truth by uttering it can only be fulfilled at the cost of renouncing his desire, of guilt, and of punishment: these are all necessary for the acceptance of the truth along with paternal and/or city authority. It is understandable that the Greek myth, as modulated in Sophocles’s obviously binding, and even outright legislating, text could seduce Freud, concerned with recognizing jouissance with its delights and its risks, symbolized by both prohibition and knowledge together. Because “jouissance is prohibited to him who speaks as such,” “it can only be said between the lines for anyone who is subject to the Law, because the Law is founded on this very prohibition,” Lacan said later.4
The founder of psychoanalysis thus drew his conception of tragic subjectivation, which constitutes the speaking subject as subject of the Law, and at the same time the ethics of psychoanalysis with its active pessimism, upon which the analytic experience is based. It is imperative to remember this, because the “new maladies of the soul” that now reveal the foundations of this subjectivation—which often remain irreducible to it—highlight the difficulties if not the impossibilities of individuation in some regressive states. They evoke human experiences of another kind, which challenge the legitimacy of the analytical frame, putting into question the universality of the Oedipus complex itself. Does not, for example, Aeschylus’s Oresteia point to a very different “subjectivity,” rebellious to paternal law and, in a sort of throwback to mythical matriarchy, requiring the fantasy of matricide as a liberating psychic condition? This is what Melanie Klein suggested. Similarly, can Euripides and his Bacchae and as well as the Pentheus/Dionysus duel, which offers at least two directions in the maternal traversal, be dismissed: the mère-version of Pentheus and the Dionysian sublimation, including the “double birth” that prefigures the Christic resurrection? The list of Freud’s “forgottens” is longer still, and they have given rise to innovations in modern clinical practice, in early mother-child relations as well as in psychosis or autism. And there is great temptation to shake Freudian topographies themselves in favor of a “third way” or, in a less “parricide” style, to get to the oedipal problematic with psychic fragmentation models and borderline cases.
My exploration of the aesthetic experiences of modernity (literature and visual arts) in the area of psychosis, as well as the experience I have had of a totalitarian regime repressing individuals’ creative possibilities by threatening them with excessive automatization in a paranoid-schizoid political and cultural context, have convinced me that psychoanalytic listening has to accept new psychic configurations that require new interpretative attitudes to carry out treatment, before and along with the Oedipus complex. The crisis of “monotonotheism,” despite outbreaks of “returns to faith” and other spiritual revivals, the mixture of fundamentalism and nihilism generated by globalization, the rise of “new maladies of the soul” (addiction, psychosomatoses, melancholic schizophrenia, vandalism, morbid perversions masking severe depression in the manic exaltation of jouir unto death, etc.), all these symptoms that dominate the postmodern era most obviously require that the oedipal subject’s antecedents as well as its failures be reconsidered (desire-guilt-working through-sublimation).
I am convinced, however, that the “topographies of splitting” between true and false self that are necessary in psychoanalytic actuality, the nonmentalization or the primitive unconscious outside representation based on originary phantasms, and affective more than cognitive projective identification phenomena do not have a specific autonomy but have to do with symptoms or subjective pathologies that can be understood and treated only in the context of oedipal neurotic integration. It is not to reduce them to this approach but to remember, lucidly, that the analyst must take this approach if she/he does not want to be complicit in what Freud called the “plague”: the plague of more or less occult complacency, with regression, fragmentation, and madness.
Thus, attentive to preoedipal bonds in borderline patients or in the treatment of children and adolescents, I have begun to rethink the “object relation.” Faced with problems of separation between “subject” and “object,” and without postulating a similarity with the paranoid-schizoid split, I argue that the mother and the infans constitute themselves in the early existence of the baby as “ab-jects.”5 Neither subjects nor objects but poles of attraction and rejection, they begin the subsequent separation in the oedipal triangle, except that in the modality of subjectivation in question, logically and chronologically prior to the Oedipus complex, the interaction of “abjects” is based on the “direct and immediate” “primal identification” with the father of individual prehistory and is materialized in the preverbal exchanges that I call “semiotic” (the drives via the sensorial pathway, and prelanguage expressed in intensities, rhythms, and intonations). At the dividing line of primal repression, the “abject” and “abjection” enable analysts to refine their listening, by inscribing the negative transference in translinguistic, “semiotic” communication. It also enables analysts to closely follow their analysands, in the position of the ab-ject mother (desired and detested as in a female representation in paintings of Picasso or de Kooning) as well as in that of the “father of individual prehistory,”6 pole of “primary identification” and not yet of “oedipal taboo.” You see that this type of listening, temporary or intermittent in the long process of treatment, works around the Oedipus complex rather than dismisses it and, in my opinion, provides the intrapsychic conditions for a reconstruction of the analysand as subject of desire and thus of creativity, integrating him into transference/countertransference from his preoedipal latencies. For, as of the “archaic” stage of his unmet needs, the analysand is listened to and interpreted in the ambivalence of the early objectal link in the process of constitution and rejection. In my Powers of Horror, I proposed a psychoanalytical approach to these early modalities of subjectivation, which have also been “treated” throughout history as defilement purification rituals in various religions (Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism) or whose sublimatory failures have been noted, as in Celine’s anti-Semitic ravings, for example.
Alain Braconnier: How have you succeeded in going beyond those who sometimes pitted Freud’s and Lacan’s contributions against each other in a caricatural way? Is it your initial training as a linguist?
Julia Kristeva: My training as a linguist would have been insufficient if I had not added semiology: Saussure, Benveniste, Greimas, Barthes. I was lucky, very young, to participate in this opening of the studies of meaning through the “language” object of linguists toward translinguistic “signifying practices”: literature first, but also the image, with painting and film, and also music, gesture, etc. This period and these studies, now too easily forgotten or discredited, and which have also often locked themselves in an archly technical esotericism, appeared to me and still appear to me as the pinnacle of contemporary thought. I considered meaning as a dynamic process, a signifying process that mobilizes—along with language—other means of signification. Beyond structuralism, I helped bring the subject of the enunciation in history to the fore: my work on Bakhtin, the body and the carnivalesque discourse, was pathbreaking in this respect. But it was also necessary to question linguistics in the light of phenomenology, which is what I tried to do in my thesis on the Revolution in Poetic Language: Mallarmé and Lautrémont.7 Through a detour toward Husserl’s transcendental Ego, I wanted to escape Chomsky’s Cartesianism, which tended to lock language in grammar and introduce two parameters in studies of meaning that semiology ignores: “matter” (hylé) and the “other.” I then proceeded to a rehabilitation of drive and desire in the interpretation of poetic enunciation. I understood by “revolution” first the return of repressed instincts, and only then its impact of surprise, even mutation, in the tired code of normative social exchanges. Thus revisited, “language” or rather the “language system” of linguists was no longer my objective: it was to interpret the text, writing, with their subject in crisis and reconstruction in a specific biographical and historical context. Freud and Lacan had no more reason to be in opposition: they participated in this refoundation naturally.
Alain Braconnier: Considering contemporary work on language and its avatars and your own work in this area, what do you think of Lacan’s famous and still partially enigmatic formula: “the unconscious is structured like a language,” emphasizing as I think you do “like”?
Julia Kristeva: My work as a semiologist and literary theorist was prepared and accompanied by a very empirical and concrete “in the field” investigation. Even before starting my own analysis, I devoted myself to the meticulous observation of the two edges of language: language acquisition by children (recordings and analyses of echolalia, then first phonemes, morphemes, syntax, etc. at the nursery at Censier), and speech disorders, even of language ability itself, in psychoses (at La Borde Hospital). In Lacan’s formulation, I put the emphasis on “like.” Lacan himself spoke of “lalangue,” alluding to “lallation,” to echolalia, pre- or translanguage. The speaking being is subjected to the influence of the family linguistic code, and every mother tongue imprints itself on the organization of the “own,” including one’s own body. The unconscious of my Russian or English patients is not the same when they talk to me in English, French, or Russian. Yet Freud’s position, for whom the unconscious is constitutive of drives, is so complex that we have to support it with new data and with semiotics and biology: the unconscious is not only language. Affects, drives, sensations-perceptions, these entities of signifyingness are irreducible to language, of which they make up the heterogeneous double. On this level, I agreed with André Green’s positions, and I developed the language/drive heterogeneity in the Revolution of Poetic Language. In my analytic practice, I understand these entities as heterogeneous facets of subjectivation: at certain moments of the treatment, I note them in their own carnal, perceptive specificity—pleasurable, painful, and hallucinatory. I draw the analysand’s attention to these bodily “experiences”; I name them in metaphors, figures, and stories, so as to interpret their unconscious impact in transference/countertransference. Necessarily and inevitably, I use language to open the inter- and intrapsychic space to what is not “of language,” to the unconscious heterogeneous experience of language. I knew a very erudite person who liked to say that “the unconscious is structured like a language” and admitted in this context to being proud of having done an “analysis based on the superego”! There is no reason to be proud of a language impasse.
Alain Braconnier: Can you remind us of the distinction you make between the “symbolic” and the “semiotic,” from a psychoanalytic point of view?
Julia Kristeva: As a counterpoint to structuralism, which sees meaning as a structure, and as of the Revolution of Poetic Language, I suggested that there was a signifying process in language, a dynamic process of subjectivation/desubjectivation, which is constituted in the interaction of two signifying modalities (or modes). The semiotic is a first encoding of drives under the influence of the mother tongue, in rhythms, melodies, and intensities, then in echolalia of pseudoconsonants and pseudovowels; prior to the mirror stage and translinguistic rather than prelinguistic, the semiotic incorporates (as Racamier would have said) the mother-infans coexcitation. The semiotic carries the interactive, affective, and sensory meaning without signification. This comes about with the constitution of the “predicative thesis” (in Husserl’s meaning) and the mastery of syntax, which already carries the “narrative envelopes” and begins tracking the speaking subject in the Oedipus complex.8 I call this second signifying modality the symbolic. The semiotic/symbolic distinction allowed me to analyze the polyphony of poetic language that precisely attaches to the explicit “message” in a text (poetry or prose) a whole undecidable polyphony that we receive as “musicality” of a “style.” But this distinction also identifies important strata of subjectivation in what are commonly diagnosed as psychotic speech disorders.
For example, I recently had the opportunity to make a “patient interview” at Sainte-Anne. The patient was schizophrenic, a runaway, capable of self-mutilation, and had made a serious suicide attempt by jumping out of a window. Very quickly, B “introduced himself” by introducing his mother. He spoke as if he was in “place” of his mother, constantly referring to her, telling a dramatic story that I knew was his own but that he appropriated and formulated as his mother’s: SHE scarified HER own body, SHE attempted suicide, SHE complained about being “the black sheep” of the family in her childhood, SHE demanded that her son “monitor” her, which B confessed he could not “digest” because invisible forces he could not oppose “directed” him. He also tried to interpret his state of fusion with the “black sheep” emphasizing his father’s absence, his sibling conflicts, and his mother’s intrusiveness. I heard a cold and set speech, like a reduplication of words from different therapists who had explained his “case” to him since childhood, echoing also the “shrink” readings he had done. B was a philosophy student. I also heard he spoke French as if it were a second language: was he Belgian, Swiss, or was it a kind of flight, an attempt to break the maternal “monitoring” to “throw himself out the window” of the hold of the abject? B had spent one year studying in England. At a particularly intense moment of our conversation, he referred to himself by an English nickname. I decided to continue our conversation in English. And it was a renaissance. B brightened, his hitherto impassive face became expressive and smiling, he found the courage to entrust me with his conflicts with his brother and his teachers and his desire to “vent his malaise,” and to write a thesis on the “absolute good.” Clearly, he regretted the end of the meeting and asked if we could see each other again.
A psychoanalyst who “plays dead” has no place in treating a melancholic schizophrenic. The long and perhaps impossible separation with the maternal abject frozen into a psychotizing alter ego cannot take place without restoring a “semiotic communion” between the two psyches: that of the patient and that of the analyst. In the meeting with B, it was the only way of “digesting” the “overbearing” mother who parasitized him and with whom he mixed himself up in the guise of a “black sheep”; a bête-noire with whom he could not think together but that he could only stubbornly flee or destroy by destroying himself.
English, the foreign language, was his way of “distancing” himself from the “black sheep” that she was and he was: a playground finally at hand—with me, escaping from the mother tongue—that had become available to his thinking process in our own duo. A translanguage of hope in which he could allow himself to relearn to speak and think with another mother, to provoke me, to work out his projects of “absolute good” and even to suggest how difficult the reparative hope was: his smile implied that he might have told me about the “ridiculousness” of this repair, if the interview had been longer. Paradoxically, but in fact necessarily, it was a foreign language that enabled him to remake an unnamable and no less transitive, transitional semiotic link—by which he felt he existed, able to discuss, contradict, think, and laugh. Was it because “it” had happened but had been foreclosed by the injury of a hyperaggressive oedipal complex brought about by his parents’ divorce? Or because “it” had not occurred in the mother tongue of the early mother-son link, and that the foreign language, English, gave him the opportunity of a “graft” of narcissistic reassurance, the only way from which B could meet me without catastrophic anxiety but in reinventing strategies of “imaginary matricide,” starting with the most innocuous and perfidious: irony, laughter, seduction. With the foreign language offering B a solid semiotic base, he almost found the narcissistic flexibility of the neurotic.
Alain Braconnier: In your latest book, you write: “We do not know much about femininity as a product of the feminine imaginary alone,” indeed referring to the rarity of women painters. What can you tell us about this feminine imaginary that, perhaps paradoxically, so intrigued Freud?
Julia Kristeva: I will respond to the part of your question concerning the ever-persistent enigma of the “feminine.” I maintain, along with others, and in my own way, that the complexity of the “feminine” cannot be grasped without considering the two oedipal complexes that structure the female subject.9
I call “Oedipus Prime” the initial mother-daughter coexcitation, in which the prelinguistic sensorial experience is decisive: effraction and passivation of the hollow body, including the vagina, by the maternal other; aggression and oral, anal, vaginal, and clitoral possession of the other; and last, repression of excitability and compensation by a psychic and sensorial overinvestment of the maternal object, which prematurely creates a psychic introjection, and which will develop in the form of this “mysterious” interiority of the woman, dependent on the object, in “communicating vessels” with it, fascinating and consuming. Although the maternal object at the outset transmits the link to the father, this early dependence on the mother is essential and different in girls compared to boys, because her female genitor erects her less as a phallic prosthesis (which the boy is) than she projects on her own narcissistic fantasies and sadomasochistic and depressive latencies, resonating with the little girl’s orificial and sensorial jouissances. In other words, the sensorial reality of the object, the actual presence of the mother (and, later on, of the lover) are required—by the little girl—as compensation for the effraction of the hollow body and the psychic introjection constantly at work. You see, I do not think there is an early, preobjectal, and serene “being,” prior to any “drive-based happening” in the early mother-child relationship, with either the girl or the boy. Winnicott’s “distilled” and “pure feminine” may be a countertransference fantasy. Moreover, even the philosopher most attentive to the “serenity of the being”—Heidegger—does not think of it as devoid of “negative” but inevitably “embedded” in “nothingness,” when he is not insisting on the “malignancy of the being.”
As for “Oedipus 2,” it exposes the little girl to what I call the complexity of the “phallic meeting”: identification with the paternal taboos, integration of the law, social codes, construction of the superego; and simultaneously substitution of the maternal object by the father as erotic object. Phallicization and objectal receptivity (rather than passivity) constitute the woman from here on as a subject of phallic law for certain, but as intrinsically “foreign” to the phallic order of the law, because she is indebted to Oedipus Prime, from the “Mino-Mycenaean” continent according to Freud, meaning to the “semiotic” sensorial imprint. This unconscious attraction of the primal maternal controls the “more accentuated psychic bisexuality” in the woman, with its two symptoms: depressive latency, on one hand, and hysterical dissatisfaction, on the other (which Hegel feared, or welcomed, when he saw in the feminine “the eternal irony of the community”). Femininity developed as an attempt to close this constitutive dissociation of the feminine between Oedipus Prime and Oedipus 2, with the implicit “I know but still”: seduction, masquerade, erection of the body of the girl (when it is not the androgen) as phallus that masks castration, cunning, artifice, and even “false selves” that get the hysterical taken for a borderline case. So many traps into which modern clinical practice seems to be falling, forgetting hysteria in favor of “borderline cases.” Motherhood can be the opportunity for a real encounter with the other that Oedipus Prime and Oedipus 2 prepare and which will be the child conferring to the woman the incarnate fantasy (as in Kleinian fantasies) of finally existing. Fleeting certainty, however, as multiple pregnancies are called for to maintain it, when the lack of desire and object does not ravage the matron, who collapses, a tired and depressed housewife. The psychic work of working through and sublimation can be proposed as one possible way out of this complex process that specifies the subject-woman and destines women to be the most numerous, and even the best, analysands and analysts. It is not sure, however, that these particularities of feminine psychosexuality prepare the feminine imaginary to excel in painting. This requires an investment of the gaze more than of the invisible, of the outside more than of the inside, of aggression more than of repair. There would have to be a strong phallic identity, such as that of Artemisia Gentileschi or Georgia O’Keefe, and that the evolution of psychic female bisexuality like Louise Bourgeois’s expresses itself in “forms” of modern art so that a specifically feminine and necessarily evolutive imaginary can be discerned or not.
Alain Braconnier: You have written three books on feminine genius. What meaning do you give to this notion of genius and especially feminine genius? What determined your choice of Colette, Hannah Arendt, and Melanie Klein?
Julia Kristeva: I distinguish, on one hand, the “originary meeting of the genii” celebrated by the Greeks and Romans (imagining a daimon or a genius, a divine spirit that presides over each person’s birth) and then crystallized in the Jewish chosenness and the ecceitas or Christian singularity, that psychoanalysis finally considers as a specific creativity of each subject; and, on the other hand, its displacement or metonymy secularized in the genius of “great men” that held sway from resurgent Humanism up to Romanticism. The uncertainties of secularization nowadays reopen this recurring problem in a new form. The ruins of the onto-theological continent too quickly declared gone appear less and less as “dead letters” and more and more as laboratories of living cells, whose exploration would clarify current aporias and impasses. Neither sacred destiny nor divinity’s romantic return to reality, are we reduced to being only trivialized numbers or digitalized “differents”?
Facing the trivialization of discourse, the collapse of authority, the technical specialization of knowledge that makes it impossible to communicate its excellence, and the surge of greedy needs of satisfaction-seduction-cancellation, the word genius remains a hyperbole that awakens our capacity for surprise, that ultimate thought-provoker. So I go back to the word genius but try to delete its romantic inflation. And, temporarily putting aside the idea of “great men” that Hegel dwelled on (I will return to it), I take up its archeology and its meaning before its resurgent fetishization. In the three volumes of Female Genius—Arendt, Klein, Colette—I understand “genius” as the loving singularity that Christianity discovered and that has since had unforeseeable developments, both in what is called the history of arts and letters and in the Freudian discovery of the unconscious. Still invisible—but nonetheless in effect—the Freudian discovery of the unconscious, reread by Lacan, in my view, makes it possible to rethink the work of the signifying process through love in the singularity of the human adventure. It thus opens a new page in the “philosophy of immanence” (going back, with Y. Yovel, to Spinoza10), which suggests another way of looking at the old questions of singularity and genius that are pertinent to our conversation today. Is not the goal of treatment, precisely, to reveal the analysand’s specific singularity, thus promoting the creativity that seems to be the best criterion for the end of an analysis?
The three volumes of Feminine Genius are inscribed as part of the foregoing and are to be read also as a response to massifying feminism. What is it? Eliminating the question of being to replace it by the security of belonging (“being part of ”), women have been “massified” as the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, the Third World, etc. were once massified. Against this massive myth of “all women” gathered in the “community of women,” I looked into their singularity (l’ecceitas according to Duns Scotus), and I analyzed it concretely in Arendt, Klein, and Colette.11 I seized the provocative term “genius” to demonstrate that I am a “Scotus” “feminist.” In the life and work of these three women, I first identify some specific traits of female psychosexuality in general. Not nearly as narcissistic as it is said, and even far less narcissistic than a man, a woman from the start constructs herself in relation to others: to live is to live of and for the other, including and especially when it is impossible and traumatizing. Rarely locked into the obsessional palaces of pure thought, thinking for a woman is inseparable from carnal sensoriality. The metaphysical body/soul dichotomy is unbearable for these three women geniuses: they dispense thought as physical bliss, and eros is for them inseparable from agapè. Their time is haunted by the worry of finitude, without it being a race to death, and yet it subsides in the miracle of birth, of flowering. “To be reborn … never beyond my powers”:12 this exorbitant exclamation by Colette evokes not only women’s capacity for adaptation but also the psychosomatic flexibility of the mature woman after having passed through the pitfalls of phallic claims and envy. It is especially the specific realization of these common features in Arendt, Klein, and Colette that interested me to invite my women readers not to be “like” but to seek to be incomparable. Incommensurable genius can exist only when taking the risks that each one is capable of taking, by putting into question his or her thinking, language, time, and whatever identity (sexual, national, ethnic, professional, religious, philosophical) is harbored there.
Alain Braconnier: About religion now, you seem to follow a path similar to the one Freud generally took, starting with the question of drive and individual neurosis and then leading him, through his research, to the malaises in civilization. Would you agree with my reading of your chapter on this subject in your latest book?
Julia Kristeva: Absolutely. And I recently picked up on this problematic at a symposium with psychoanalysts from Columbia University and the IPA (International Psychoanalytical Association) on “The Dead Father.”13 The creation of a Standing Interdisciplinary Forum: Psychoanalysis, Belief and Religious Conflicts was then envisaged in Jerusalem by the Psychoanalytical Society of Israel and the Department of Psychoanalysis at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, with psychoanalysts, historians of religion, philosophers, writers, artists, biologists, and physicists, and perhaps one day, theologians, around the questioning that psychoanalysis has brought to the fore. Certain believers, and not the least of them, have begun to think that hermeneutics and psychoanalysis can elucidate the subject of “God” and would be of interest. Along with Freud, we dare say that “god” is analyzable. It is beginning to take hold.
Alain Braconnier: Who are the great figures in psychoanalysis who have influenced you the most?
Julia Kristeva: After Freud, Melanie Klein, Winnicott, and Lacan, of course. And I learned a great deal from my supervision with André Green.
Alain Braconnier: Psychoanalysis has been strongly criticized recently. What would you say to its critics to defend it? What do you think is the future of psychoanalysis?
Julia Kristeva: Discussions begun with neurobiologists, such as those we had started to conduct in the seminar at the Salpêtrière Hospital with Daniel Widlöcher and Pierre Fédida and in the Centre du Vivant at the University of Paris-7, Denis Diderot. Active and public interpretations on “social issues”: parentality, assisted human reproduction, motherhood and the modern woman, and religions. And, in particular, not to get bogged down in discussions with malicious and revisionist detractors but to highlight our advances.
Alain Braconnier: Are you interested in pursuing here the current discussions on the respective place of psychoanalysis and what is called psychoanalytic psychotherapy?
Julia Kristeva: Article 52 of the law on the use of the professional title of psychotherapist requires theoretical and practical training in clinical psychopathology. I approved, and I argued before the decision-making bodies, the Paris Psychoanalytical Society proposal to amend the legislation, particularly in the formulation of the specific content of university master’s degrees. This formulation must necessarily distinguish psychoanalysis as an approach distinct from systemic, cognitive-behavioral and integrative psychotherapies. It corresponds to the need to uphold the place of psychoanalysis in the university, taking into account the different psychotherapies that respond to the social demand, and the need to reserve rigorous psychoanalytic clinical training for the psychoanalytic societies.
Alain Braconnier: Your book Black Sun, which you published in 1987, provided essential insights into depression. Has your view on this topic evolved?
Julia Kristeva: I have not changed my theoretical position on the problem, and I have nothing to add, neither to my clinical observations nor to my analysis of the depression/sublimation relation. However, I will probably develop the depressive background of certain perversions, notably in life-threatening acting out that threaten unconscious, rejected or repressed masculine or feminine homosexuality.
Alain Braconnier: At the request of the president of the Republic, you have written a report on disability and issued a letter to citizens with disabilities.14 Could you tell us what brought about this commitment and what conclusions you draw from this report?
Julia Kristeva: The word of a psychoanalyst, wife, and mother proved necessary when the “republican worksite” concerning the exclusion of disabled people had to address the need to “change public opinion’s view” of considering these men and women not as “deprived objects” but as subjects capable of creativity, whatever their limitations, and therefore as political subjects in their own right. After this first phase of my involvement as president of the National Disability Council, I gave up the actual presidency, but I still try to develop a less political and more analytical discourse on the creativity, specifically, of the vulnerable subject, at the intersection of biology and sense, especially in the field of psychoses and sensorimotor disorders. Besides, this approach to disability goes back to many aspects of my early theoretical and semiotic work. It will take everyone—parents, government, and public opinion—considerable time and effort before we can draw conclusions about a subject as complex as that of “disabilities,” a subject that, beyond the narcissistic and castrating ordeal, puts us squarely in front of our anxieties in facing death and the limits of the species.15