Some Thoughts on the Feminine: Discussion of Summer Telio's ‘A Kristevan Birth in Analysis’

This discussion explores Summer Telio's Kristevan presentation of her analytic case material using a post-Freudian French psychoanalytic perspective. It emphasizes the distinction between the feminine and maternal, based on works by Schaeffer, Fain, Aisenstein, Roussillon, and Chasseguet-Smirgel. The distinction is built upon Fain's thesis that the woman does not disappear in the mother and that the censorship of the lover has a calming effect on her. However, the maternal and feminine are always at risk of dissolving into sameness, as the female body signifies sexual difference and the unsettling awareness of the other is a constant threat to the ego's anality. Tolerating this anxiety requires constant psychic work. The analyst's emerging pregnancy and countertransference associations push the treatment forward, challenging patriarchy and the ego clenching defenses and the harsh primitive phallic maternal superego. The calming, containing maternal functioning facilitates the feminine to propel the analytic work forward, but this requires the analyst's capacity to be passive, wait, receive, and bind in libidinal representational activity.