James Donnelly, DSW, LCSW

“… that the self, nevertheless, does not put up with being abandoned.”

The image of the black sun, taken from the poem TheDisinherited by Gerad de Nerval, holds for Kristeva both the burning intensity  and the dark obscurity shrouding the face of major depression. It represents for her the paradox of suffering and inaccessibility that threatens to engulf both the therapist and client. The image itself represents, I believe, the central kernel of hope around which her exploration into the heart of depression revolves: that a semiotic image and sound may allow us to reach and touch the speechless center of depression.

Julia Kristeva brings so much to bear on this journey that it often is hard to keep up with her. Psychoanalytic theory and meta-psychology, linguistics, art history and criticism, philosophy and literature all run in and out of her attempts at articulating both the experience of the deeply depressed and her understanding of causes, structure as well as pathways to therapeutic connection. Anyone wanting to join her in this journey needs be prepared to sit with her and wrestle with her leaps of insight through this rich variety of reference. One walks away a bit dazed but imbued with a richness and sensibility that continues to articulate within … long after the book is put down.

It is the fractured experience of separation, dislocated from the child’s concomitant experience of differentiation which can, and in some cases does, mortally wound the growing child’s ability to truly enter the world of language, speech and meaning. In Kristeva’s presentation, the budding person’s capacity – within a fairly stable and available holding environment – to actually experience and work through the pain and sadness of a growing awareness of a separate self. activates the capacity for meaningful relations. Without this trial, the child’s ability to symbolize in language and connect words with affective meaning is wounded or lost. This, according to Kristeva, accounts for the severely depressed person’s incapacity to experience meaningful speech. A chronic sense of isolation haunts the striving to experience a meaningful self-object differentiation,

In that developmental tragedy, before the child’s ability to create an object, there is the denial of loss -maintained by the child’s inarticulate attachment to its own experience of sadness. The depressed mood becomes the attached object that prevents the child’s fall into complete fragmentation or psychosis. The denied lost mother is kept as a buried treasure within a crypt of a depressed mood. Within the inverted negative of this world, the desire for death is the desire for fusion with the lost mother. The attraction of this lost, objectless mother, is identified by Kristeva as the attraction of “the Thing” (das Ding). It is a concept used also by Lacan and described by her as “the real,  that does not lend itself to signification.” To me is a feeling of the real that is inarticulately sensed through its absence. It is “an insistence without presence.”

Kristeva goes on to examine and connect the reality of this ‘mood as object’ to the reality of the semiotic aspects of the unconscious. It is within this connection that she struggles towards a sense of hope and the possibility of contact through the depressed mood. There is a pre linguistic structure of meaning alive within the semiotic aspects of mental life. Unless the infant actually dies from abandonment, as in marasmus, the reality of the semiotic holds the hope and possibility for a connection to a sense of meaning that can be touched and verbalized … i.e. brought into the realm of language and, consequently, meaningful connection to an other. What preserves the semiotic is what she calls “the imaginary father” or the “father in individual prehistory.” This seems to be the reality of the infant’s experience that is beyond the exclusive dyadic relation with the mother, or more specifically the mother’s body.  It seems to me to be akin to Winnicott’s environmental mother or holding environment. Through finding ways to establish a mutual resonance via the semiotic – i.e. motion, rhythm, sound, connection to the language of the unconscious in either art or psychoanalysis – a path can be found to meaningful connection through language.

Beyond this extensive psychoanalytic exploration of depression, Kristeva includes in the second half of the book four essays on the artists Holbein, Nerval, Dostoyevsky and Duras. Through these essays, she explores the existential aspects of the realities of grief, struggles with loss of faith and artistic fascination with the existential pull of ‘the Thing’ in the face of the mishaps to meaning posed by the events of the last two centuries. Particularly her discussion of Dostoyevesky is profoundly moving and reveals the influence of Hannah Arendt in exploring the reality and power of forgiveness.

For thoughts and comments, please send to: jdonnellydsw@gmail.com

©  2011 James Donnelly, DSW.LCSW

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South Garden Press, New York