ABSTRACT
The Maternal Prior to the actual mother/father/child family dynamic, Kristeva sees a pre Oedipal triad, maternal/imaginary father/infant. In the Oedipal myth, the child must relinquish their wish for parricide and incest, leave the mother and choose the father’s society. In what she terms ‘Oedipus prime’ (Kristeva, 1996a: 200), Kristeva follows both a Freudian and Kleinian dialectic: she maintains the dyadic unity mother/child that the presence of the father is going to separate. However, where Freud envisioned the triangulation with the actual figures of the mother, the father and the child, Kristeva’s model slides towards a more Kleinian approach. Instead of relying on actual people, the subject is positioned in a more phantasmatic triangulation. With Klein, part objects (the breast, the penis) replaced the actual parents in an attempt to represent infant reality in a world without fully formed symbols. Early in her work (Kristeva, 1974a) Kristeva distinguishes ‘two registers: the register of the symbolic and the register of the semiotic’ (Guberman, 1996: 21). The symbolic would refer to the logic of language (grammar, syntax, etc.) while the semiotic would recall the early efforts of the infant towards the organisation of echolalic, vocalic, visual information into language. The semiotic utterances of the infant:
[…] presuppose that the possibility of language exists either as a genetic program that allows the child to speak one day, so that the echolalias are stages before this possibility of speech, or as a social environment - the child is already in an environment where the parents speak, his desire to speak already exists in the discourse of the parents, and so the echolalias appear in this environment. In short, there is an already there of language. (Guberman, 1996: 21)
Whether biological or cultural, a pre-existing linguistic ability preceding the child’s capacity for linguistic mastery is thus posited. While Melanie Klein was interested in the presence of early verbal and non-verbal productions, or phantasies, deciphered in child play, the focus is now on the co-presence symbol/semiotic in the speaking subject. While patient material, supporting both theorists’ interpretative work is different, play for Klein and language for Kristeva, both come to a similar conclusion: children and adults alike present to the analyst material pertaining to a difficulty over the separation from the mother or the maternal. Klein’s quintessential example is probably the case of Little Dick and his desire and aggression vis-à-vis the maternal. Kristeva for her part puts forward the increasingly fragmented discourse of contemporary individuals as the marker of an
archaism that the subject so expresses. Contemporary illnesses, the ‘new maladies of the soul’ are a failure of the paternal function, not solely on the Oedipal front but more crucially on a pre-Oedipal maternal level. These ‘new maladies’ (borderline, false-self, etc) are the marker of a ‘shattered narcissism’ (Kristeva, 1998c: 11) that is interpreted at once as the new figure of the modern time subject and as a symptom of the subject’s crisis:
[I]t may be more interesting today to insist on the originality of the narcissistic figure, and the quite singular place it holds, first in the history of Western subjectivity and second, considering its morbidity, in examining the critical symptom of this subjectivity. (Kristeva, 1983: 134)
In her more recent work, Kristeva has tended to abandon a specifically psychoanalytic vocabulary in favour of a lexicon more palatable to the layperson and to discuss parental categories in terms of their functions. The spirit of her entire oeuvre is testimony to this effort to construct the maternal function as that which carries within itself an early form of paternal function, and to understand what enables the subject to move from maternal to paternal sites. The Paternal as Maternal Desire Returning to the earlier presupposition of ‘an already there of language’ (Guberman, 1996: 21), language acquisition can only happen within a dynamic of parental desire for the child to become a speaking/social subject. In most cases, the child complies with these pre-set parental/social requirements. In this sense, parental functions act as a kind of program, with the parents themselves responding to a generational program drawn under the terms ‘society’ or ‘culture’. To be a member of the social sphere is to be a speaking subject. It may be, as some suggest, that the ability to symbolise is inherent to the human genetic make up, but this genetic disposition requires a second, cultural trigger in order to form a social subject. The case of humans who have developed away from human company is well documented.1 These children show more than a remarkable adaptation to another species’ environment; records illustrate the extent to which these human beings develop the metabolism, emotions, sensory responses and even physique of their adoptive species.2 The success of their reinsertion into society remains mitigated by the length of separation from human society and of animal
1 Based on the work of Lucien Malson (1972), William D. Wylie’s The Basic Human
Being: The Wild Child (on line) gives a comprehensive list of cases of wild children and their limitations to adaptation to human society.
