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In this article, the author discusses freedom and the psychoanalytic process. She first highlights some points from “Civilization and its Discontents,” in which Freud indicated that “the energy of desire … engenders its own censorship” (p. 4). In other words, there is no external commandment limiting freedom, but rather an internal one based on Eros, whose purpose of unity opposes the death instinct. While Freud denied knowing why this was, the author proposes that there is an answer in Freud's work. She posits that through “the emergence of thinking as realized in a shared language” (p. 4), we increase our ability to put ourselves in the place of the other and to accept the death of the other and the self.
Kristeva discusses how Freud's view suggests an “interiority” like that found in stoicism and Christianity. She briefly notes the responses of Nietzsche and Heidigger to these early views, and details Lacan's “antinormative” perspective on the “desire for death,” which raises the issue of the ethics of psychoanalysis (p. 7). The author asks us to wonder: “Does psychoanalysis restore to humankind the savagery of its desires, for which there remains nothing but Redemption, which would turn psychoanalysis into a kind of ‘Christocentrism,’ or is it atheistic and reinstating of ‘communal bonds’”? (p. 8).