ABSTRACT
I can’t, of course, summarize a seven-hundred page book (Kristeva 2008), in which a woman who represents me – Sylvia Leclerc, psychoanalyst, psychotherapist and literary critic – encounters the work of this Spanish mystic at a critical moment in her life and becomes so profoundly invested in the experience that she decides to write a ‘total novel’ on the saint. What is a ‘total novel’? It means a text that distances itself from the current literary trend for ‘ctional autobiography’ (‘autofiction’) and rediscovers the metaphysical and philosophical ambition of the novels of the French Encylopaedists in the 18th century (I am thinking of Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau). Sylvia Leclercq, alias Julia Kristeva, recounts the life of the saint, quoting at length passages from the writings of this extraordinary woman – for Teresa was a considerable and prolic writer. The narrator does this while writing about her own passions as a woman of the twenty-rst century, and her culture as a Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalyst.
