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In New Maladies of the Soul, Julia Kristeva, an eminent French literary critic and psychoanalyst, offers her observations of the unwholesome condition of the contemporary human subject and the possibility of remedy through a restored, embodied psychic life. The maladies of which Kristeva speaks—which appear manifestly in the narcissisms, false personalities, borderline states and psychosomatic conditions of contemporary patients—are, according to her, the options available to the subject, given the diminished space and the deficiency of psychic representation to symbolise unbearable traumas and affects and to escape from its experience of self-division. In Kristeva's theory of pathogenesis such patients ‘share a common denominator—the inability to represent’ (p. 9). The sick, immaterial soul, lacking ways to contain, experience and integrate thought, action and emotion, has no recourse but to make meaning through representations in the body and through thoughtless activity (something that is easily available in our technological society). The words of Kristeva's borderline patients are empty and do not signify. Meaning is lost in the gap between drives—the abject archaic mother—and symbols—the law of the father. Meaning in language and through language goes behind the descriptions, categorisations, and definitions of oedipal language; if it is to be restored to the speaking subject, the body, mother and the pre-oedipal must be infused within it via the structure of the imaginary.
Motivated by both an ethics of care for her suffering patients and her ongoing attempt to recuperate the mother-child relationship in psychoanalytic theory and practice, Kristeva's patient is not only the suffering individual but psychoanalysis itself. Pursuing the moral therapeutic tradition of Freud's assignment of a new value to the soul, Kristeva endeavours in this collection of essays to put the maternal heartbeat back into the depleted body ego of psychoanalysis. Kristeva offers a chal