Julia Kristeva found in her invitation to lecture to Catholic students of L'Ecole Sainte Genevieve in Versailles the opportunity to reflect about probable connections between psychoanalysis and faith. She brings to her considerations outstanding scholarship from three converging fields: linguistics, literary criticism, and clinical psychoanalysis. Kristeva is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Paris VII and a practicing psychoanalyst.

The book is closer to a meditation than to a systematic study of the subject. It is not aimed at instructing or convincing. Its goal is to question both psychoanalysis and faith, facing, as they seem to do, the opposing dangers of reconciliation and implacable antagonism. Kristeva finds that in the distress evoked by these dangers “may lurk the suffering of religion as well as of rationalism, along with more strictly personal discomforts and anxieties” (p. xiii).