Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

unconscious. He also offers a ‘prophetic’ function of declaring new ways and future paths
for psychoanalysis to take (Symington 2007: 345f.).
Psychoanalysis - a maternal and mystical natural religion 250
Kristeva has been regarded as an non-conformist, an outsider, someone who crosses
boundaries, a ‘metaphysical rebel’ (Elliott 2003). Born in Bulgaria, her father’s work as an
accountant for the Orthodox Church in a Communist society meant Kristeva was denied the
educational privileges of others and eventually she escaped to Paris in the 1960s. Through
her doctoral studies with Barthes she became part of a post-structural intellectual movement
drawing on the work of Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida. Kristeva turned to
psychoanalysis in the 1970s exploring ‘the only continent we have never left: internal
experience’ (Kristeva quoted in McAfee 2004: 8). 251 The result was a unique form of
subjectivity and engagement of analytic insight where Kristeva adopts an ecumenical view
of the unconscious combining Freud, Klein, Lacan, Winnicott and Green, 252 with an
appreciation of religious history, female mysticism, theological reflection, and feminist
thought. Kristeva summarizes her work though the word ‘love’ and a paradoxical capacity
to embrace atheistic sacredness and the mystical. 253 Kristeva relates almost exclusively to
the Christian theological tradition as it engages with a desire for unity and ‘fusion with an
omnipotent father figure’ (Bradley 2008: 280) expressed as God. Kristeva rejects Freud’s
view that religion is based on illusion and psychoanalysis on reason, arguing that both are
250
Although there is later chapter on mysticism, to locate Kristeva in that context would be too limiting,
however she defies easy categorization and is therefore included in the broader context of natural religion.
251
More biographical details of this development can be found in the Gubermans interview with Kristeva
(Guberman and Guberman 1996) summarized in Capps (Capps 2001: 305).
252
Kristeva also refers to Abraham, Jacobson, Gillespie, Glover, MacDougall, Heinmann, Deutsch, Balint,
Segal and Mahler.
253
There is something untranslatable about Kristeva’s work and a vital experience it contains.
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