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"Psychoanalysis expresses itself either directly in the first person or else as depersonalization and loss; it is either rapture or pain" (p. 2).
For Julia Kristeva stories about psychoanalysis are tales of love. While "the object of psychoanalysis is simply the linguistic exchange," the exchange is "between two subjects in a situation of transference and countertransference" (p. 1). The playing out of this not very revolutionary idea in Kristeva's work is, nevertheless, on the Parisian scene, a return to Freud. As Kernberg notes in an elegant and concise introduction, Kristeva and André Green reestablish affect within current Lacanian thought. Kristeva writes:
This mobilization of two people's minds and bodies by the sole agency of the words that pass between them sheds light on Freud's famous remark, in The Future of an Illusion, that the foundation of the cure is "Our God Logos." It also recalls the words of the Gospels: "In the beginning was the Word" (John 1:1) and "God is love" (1 John 4:8) [p. 3].
Analytic discourse … involves transferential, that is, amorous, language … Hence it cannot be understood in terms of a linguistic model that divides verbal signs into "signifier" and "signified." Analytic language works with signs that encompass representations of at least three types: representations of words (close to the linguistic signifier), representations of things (close to the linguistic signified), and representations of affects (labile psychic traces subject to the primary processes of displacement and condensation, which I have called semiotic as opposed to the symbolic representations inherent in, or derivative of, the system of language) [p. 4].
This is the minimal conceptual framework for going "beyond the theater of linguistic representations to make room for pre- or translinguistic