The Embodied Mother

Abstract

J ulia 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. 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