ABSTRACT
Kristeva’s chapter details the effects on the body of transformations of parentality. Kristeva defines the body as the psychosomatic construction that is formed as the speaking subject emerges in the relationship with the parental, where the parental is sexual difference, the third between the mother and the father. As analysts, Kristeva argues, we cannot speak of the body clinically without a theory of parentality in the evolving structure of the contemporary family. In our secular world, and with the help of technology and lawmakers, differences between sexes seem obliterated, heterosexuality extremely fragile, and the imperative to develop a new discourse of parentality becomes an emergency. Who is a mother and who is a father in our postmodern world where the Third is a disseminated One of incommensurable singularities? We need to develop a discourse of parentality in a case-to case basis today without losing the necessity of sexual difference, which Freud conceptualized as the cornerstone of our psyches.
