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This book, subtitled Madness: Matricide as pain and creativity, is the second volume of a trilogy on female genius, the first being on Hannah Arendt and the last on Colette. Kristeva, psychoanalyst and literary theorist, is a professor of linguistics at the University of Paris VII.
As a cultural historian, Kristeva understands the place of psychoanalytic thought in other disciplines which gives this work a greater breadth of reference and allusion than belongs to many works on psychoanalytic theory and technique. What marks this volume as the product of Kristeva's mind is: 1) the focus on ‘female genius’ as involving both ‘the desire for knowledge’ and an ‘affinity for the archaic’; 2) the setting up of a dialogue between the ideas of Freud, Klein and Lacan; and 3) the contextualizing of Klein's ideas within some facets of contemporary culture.
The book opens with a quote from Alix Strachey: ‘She's a dotty woman. But there's no doubt whatever that her mind is stored with things of thrilling interest. And she's a nice character’ (p. 5). Kristeva ends the section: ‘Melanie Klein has since become a major figure of indisputable worth—just like the psychoanalysis that she practiced so ingeniously’ (p. 6). The tone and content of the work are dramatic, at times provocative, quite different from the low-key, systematic and scholarly examination of Klein in the contemporaneous Likierman (2001).
A few headings will give a glimpse of the issues Kristeva tackles: ‘Jewish families, European stories’; ‘In the beginning was the death drive’; ‘The grief that affords us a soul’; ‘A most early and tyrannical superego’; ‘The cult of the mother or ode to matricide?’; ‘Do women have an affinity for the archaic?’; ‘The post-Kleinian approach to the archaic and the primary’; ‘Cultural acts of sublimation: Art and literature’; ‘The politics of Kleinianism’.
Kristeva's work can be read as an attempt to account for Klein's genius in her uncovering a set of infantile fantasies and impulses towar