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I was moved by and extend my sincerest thanks to you and your colleagues who were so willing to contribute to the February issue of JAPA, which offered me, above all, the intellectual joy of reading your texts.
Bonnie Litowitz's introduction surely does justice to my work, including the research I have undertaken in diverse disciplines at the risk of solitude and existential questioning. It is indeed gratifying and stimulating to read a text so precise and free of prejudice coming from another psychoanalytic “family” in the Babel of our current multi-school and multinational theory. I should note at the outset that my recent work on “reliance” is meant to be provocative, recalling the “attacks on essence” (I'll return to this) and the novelty that my approach to the “mother's disappeared sexual body” represents. All of this is to say that before my trip to Israel this spring (to receive the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Haifa), where I presented the same reflections before an audience of Israeli psychoanalysts, I took the liberty of sending them Litowitz's text as the “summary” my Israeli colleagues are were asking me for on this occasion!
Rachel Widawsky's text is, to my mind, the most complexly detailed presentation of the diversity that constitutes my psychoanalytic thought. It is absolutely necessary to emphasize that my interdisciplinarity is not “mere eclecticism,” but “a journey among disciplines” (p. 61) and an innovative synthesis (in all modesty!). Widawsky demonstrates this with her reading of my notion of the “semiotic”: not a simple “addendum to structural linguistics” but “an endeavor to rethink the Freudian model of how the biological and the psychical articulate” (p. 62). Her reading, which moves from the Platonic Khora, passing through “the mother's unconscious sexuality” and the Kleinian perspective of my notion of the “abject” as “precondition to the development of mental activity” (p. 63), is a journey accomplished with an ex