Preoedipal Articulations Clinical Reflections on Kristeva and Irigaray

Gone into the night, complicit, a star-porous leaf for a mouth: something remains for wild wasting, treeward.

A psychoanalytic cure originally meant a capitulation of the hysterical patient to the oedipal order with its incumbent internal structures and renunciations. The hysterical symptom was seen as an enactment of unrequitable desire, a refusal to be transformed by the regulating principles of the social and linguistic order. The resolution of a transference neurosis over years of psychoanalytic work could offer relief from the pain of hysterical symptoms along with the opportunity to pursue love and work unencumbered by the embattled impasses of drives and prohibitions. In his late speculations concerning the terminability of analysis, Freud (1920) concluded that when all was said and done, the fear or the experience of symbolic castration and the regressive lure of the death instinct remained insurmountable obstacles to most patients' acceptance of the oedipal order.

Psychoanalysis has wandered far from this schema during the ensuing decades. Almost from the beginning, social feminist critics attacked the conservatism inherent in psychoanalysis's acceptance of the prevailing order of sexual politics. Was the “hysterical” symptorn