Psychoanalytic Transference: Julia Kristeva’s Struggle for Maternal Identification

By examining Alice Jardine’s intellectual biography of Julia Kristeva’s life and work, this dissertation engages in intertextual, interpretative, and textually based research, bringing together Jardine’s biography with Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theories and later autobiographical reflections. Kristeva’s own learning to do away with maternal desire is represented unconsciously yet powerfully by Jardine, who, I establish, takes the position as her good-enough biographer. Chapters are structured around six personal moments in Kristeva’s life that I have chosen from Jardine’s text: the mother and grandmother, father and symbolic fathers, and son and son-substitutes. My dissertation highlights the importance of these moments since they are connected to motherhood and substitutes, creativity and loss, as Kristeva moves in and out of time to mark her own difference and authority between primary and symbolic relations. My understanding of Jardine’s narrative suggests that Kristeva is composed of her own textual theories and childhood stories. I argue that Kristeva has lived her life through her psychoanalytic concepts, rebuilding her transitional objects and defense mechanism of projective identification with the maternal while sublimating the loss of her primary relations in symbolic relationships.

Since the unconscious fragments of the personal erupt into a poetic revolution, I read Jardine’s biography to understand Kristeva’s practice of writing what she is living at any given moment as representing the energy charges and the psychical marks of the unconscious rhythmic space. As a method, my goal is to play with dynamic approaches to psychoanalysis by weaving together a technique representing a wave of Kristeva’s personal experiences as part of her theoretical writing. This way of approaching life and work is critical for me to move from the description of events in Kristeva’s life toward psychoanalytical levels of reflection about her works through her theories to demonstrate how Kristeva manifested her own subjectivity. Refusing to distinguish between the personal and the textual, life and theory, my investigation reads for the entirety of Kristeva’s subjectivity, where living and loving take the risk of thinking, as part of distancing from primary relations.