Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis Vol. 7, No.

1 Revue Canadienne de Psychanalyse

Psychoanalysis and Freedom1

JULIA KRISTEVA
Paris, France

1. Some History: Freud and Lacan

Freedom is not a psychoanalytic concept. If we are to believe the Index
to the Standard Edition, Freud employs the word very rarelyin The
Uncanny (1919), and especially in Civilization and Its Discontents
(1929)to convey the sense of an instinctual urge shackled by the
necessity for humans to live in communities. This libidinal urge proves
to be profoundly ambivalent, always more or less taken up, or dominated, by the death instinct which civilization refuses to accept. In
resuming and deepening the propositions in Totem and Taboo (1913)
on the founding myth of the murder of the father, Freud specifies the
two conditions inherent in being human, which limit the absolute
freedom Freud attributes to the individual: namely, the realization of
his desires.
1. On one hand, there is the need to share satisfactions with the
other members of the community on whom the individual
depends, given his physical weakness and the inadequacy of his
technological mastery of nature.
2. On the other handand this is radical, since no technological
or even moral progress can undo what is best described as the
tragic essence of human lifethere is consciousness itself (or
conscience2), which is constituted at the origin, precisely
through a limitation on the freedom of the drives imposed by
repression and censorship, or, in other words, civilization.

The text was originally presented to the 24th Annual Congress of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society in Montreal, on June 19, 1998. The conversational style of the original French text has been largely preserved. Translation
by Charles Levin.

JULIA KRISTEVA

The last increasingly restricts the realization of desires (and

thus of freedom).
Through censorship, conscience transforms the reined-in desire into
remorse and guilt, but also into self-destruction, in which aggression
takes the ego as its target in masochism or melancholia. Thus,
The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest
before there was any civilization, though then, it is true, it had for the
most part no value, since the individual was scarcely in a position to
defend it. The development of civilization imposes restrictions on it, and
justice demands that no one shall escape those restrictions. What makes
itself felt in a human community as a desire for freedom may be their
revolt against some existing injustice, and so may prove favourable to a
further development of civilization; it may remain compatible with
civilization. But it may also spring from the remains of their original
personality, which is still untamed by civilization and may thus become
the basis in them of hostility to civilization. The urge for freedom,
therefore, is directed against particular forms and demands of civilization or against civilization altogether (S. E. 21:96).

Let us take note, further on, of the distinction between a bad and a
good freedoman instinctual freedom opposed to a freedom associated with security:
In fact, primitive man was better off in knowing no restrictions of
instinct. To counterbalance this, his prospects of enjoying this happiness
for any length of time were very slender. Civilized man has exchanged
a portion of his possibilities of happiness for a portion of security. We
must not forget however, that in the primal family only the head of it
enjoyed this instinctual freedom; the rest lived in slavish suppression.
. . . In this period however, . . . the instinctual life of primitive peoples is
by no means to be envied for its freedom. It is subject to restrictions of
a different kind but perhaps of greater severity than those attaching to
modern civilized man (S. E. 21:115).

Moral consciousness and its organ, the super-ego, thus impose, from
the beginnings of primitive man, a renunciation of drive freedom,
which Freud partly regrets but must eventually accept as a necessary
compromise in the name of survival.
At one point, in the course of this enquiry I was led to the idea that
civilization was a different process3 working above mankind and I am

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FREEDOM

still under the influence of that idea. I may now add that civilization is a
process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine isolated
human individuals, and after that, families, then races, peoples and
nations, into one great unity, the unity of humanity. Why this has to
happen we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this. But mans
natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all
against each, opposes this instinct of civilization. . . . This struggle is
what all life essentially consists of, and the evolution of civilization may
therefore be simply described as the struggle for life of the human
species. And it is this battle of the giants that our nurse-maids try to
appease with their lullaby about Heaven.4

I have quoted at length from this unique text of Freuds on the aporias
of freedom, not only because I know that the North American public,
which is ahead of Europe in the civilization now befalling us, doesnt
read mucheven less the founding texts of psychoanalysis (which
allows me to do some educational work)but also because Freuds
later work, far from being an appendage, as has often been suggested,
seems to me to reveal some of Freuds most daring challenges to
contemporary thought. But these elements still need to be brought to
the surface, where we can examine them.
It is not my intention to underline the claims and paradoxes of
freedom according to Freud, in light of the philosophy of freedom,
whose long history, as stated earlier, derives from pre-Christian
thought and theology, rather than ancient philosophy. I will limit
myself to indicating a few points that might be of interest to psychoanalysis today.
Freud seems to begin with a naturalistic conception of pleasure: with
the man of pleasure who wants to satisfy his drives naturally. Here we
are not far from a Greek idea of freedom as I can, as opposed to I
want, which implies an objective state in the body (doing as one
pleases), without a constraint emanating from a master or a physical
force. Remember that, for the Greeks, freedom (leutheria) is essentially freedom of movement (Freud says pouse, urge, drang)Go
where you see fit, eleuthein hopos ero. Very quickly, however, this
freedom comes face to face with the fable of the murder of the father,
implying another conception of freedom, which is consecutive to a
commandment. The tyranny of the assimilated/introjected father
becomes moral consciousness, the conscience or super-ego, which

JULIA KRISTEVA

forbids: Thou shalt not sleep with thy mother, and thou shalt not kill
thy father.
However, this biblical resurgence in Freudian thought, which (it is
worth recalling) structures the psychoanalytic conception of the psychic apparatus, is the starting point for what Lacan, reader of Civilization and Its Discontents, calls an ethic beyond the notion of a
command, beyond what offers itself with a sense of obligation.5 As
we have just seen in the brief extracts from Civilization and Its Discontents, desire is not subordinated to a commandment exterior to it. To
state this more positively, moral obligation is rooted in desire itself; it
is the energy of desire that engenders its own censorship. Why? We do
not know, says Freud modestly. But the work of Eros is precisely
this, he continues, enigmatically.
Now, what if Freud really has an answer to this question, through an
insight that he reiterates throughout the course of his work?namely,
the emergence of thinking as realized in a shared language that reins in
the drive and commands it. This command becomes, from then on,
intrinsic to the drive insofar as the latter is human (a drive is from the
beginning an interweaving of energy and representation), and raises it
to another level of the psychic apparatus, where the drive becomes
desire. The drive is translated into the code of social communication,
always already structured by language, in which the dialectic of freedom can be played out. Drive and desire are caught in the net of
sharable language what Kant in the Critique of Judgement calls an
enlarged [mentality] because it involves put[ting] ourselves in
thought in the place of everyone else (fellow being, father, brother,
family, clan, nation, and so on, right up to that expanded totality we
have been calling, since Pascal, humanity).6 Insofar as it is thoughtspoken, desire inscribes the urge of the drive first in a representation,
and then in the necessity of accepting the others death and ones own.
Let us pause for a moment over this Freudian discovery about
freedom, that the natural spontaneous freedom of the drive, once
harnessed by thought and language, is caught up intrapsychically in
negotiations with the death instinct. Freud reveals this transcription of
the death instinct into symbolism in his reflections on Negativity
(1925) and also on sublimation in The Ego and the Id (1923). I
recommend the very relevant commentary in Andre Greens Travail du

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FREEDOM

negatif (Gallimard 1993). Structured by language, freedom of desire is

given over to two destinies:
1. First, sadomasochism. This had already been glimpsed by St.
Paul, who was the first to take up the dialectic of prohibition
and desire, Where the law abounds, there is an excess of sin.
But it was de Sade who had the last word on this. He knew, like
Freud, that the super-ego commands: take pleasure [jouis]!
to the point of the destruction of thy neighbour, as well as
thyself.
2. Then, and perhaps simultaneously, there is the achievement of
sublimation, which culminates in the biblical and evangelical
precept: Love thy neighbour as thyself. This is an impossible
alchemy, according to Freud, and he is not wrong: how can one
transfer to another, even if she is very close, ones own autoerotic or narcissistic satisfaction, whether libidinal or lethal
(thanatique)? Except perhaps in the experience of maternal
love: since, for the mother, the childespecially the male
childis not really an object, but an other, the first (and
perhaps the only?) other toward whom is addressed a drive
inhibited as to aim, and thus deferred and differentiated into
tenderness. Another exception might be the experience of the
mystic, the saint who, like certain contemporary artists,
achieves a total, enigmatic sublimation of perverse pleasures.
I have cited these two experiences of love that, by exhausting desire
in sublimation, end up leaving the place of the other blank. What is left
of our fellow creature, or even God himself, in this jouissance in which
the same is transferred totally to the other? The saint, like the writer, is
alone, in the absolute of Hilflosichkeit (helplessness), awaiting the help
of no one, on the edge of melancholy or . . . atheism. These are the dire
straits of sublimation, which will remind you, no doubt, of the end of
analysis, when the transference counter-transference dependence is
ruptured.
And how does the dereliction of the mother fit in to this schema (that
is, when she does not try to escape through a showdown with her
offspring, in which she reenacts the love-hate of her marriage and,
above all, her relationship with her mother)? We assign her a program
of the good enough motherwhich is an even more utopian ideal

JULIA KRISTEVA

than medieval sainthood, though we certainly need to maintain it as the

horizon of an optimal psychic life.
Thus, while certain of Freuds formulations suggest that he believes
in a natural freedom of the drives, the whole adventure of psychoanalysis consists of locating that freedom within the realm of representation, and making it depend on an internalization of prohibition. In so
doing, Freud is faithful, whether he knows it or not, to the Stoic
tradition and Christianity, which, from Epictetus to St. Augustine,
discovered the interiority of mankind. For the Stoics, this consisted of
phantasia and representation, and for Augustine it was the Will. The
West would develop its speculations on freedom on this basis, and not
on the idea of a pure, natural desire. We must recall that for the Greeks,
freedom did not fall into the domain of desire or appetite which, on the
contrary, were thought to subjugate humankind and render all passive.
In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle ranks them among animal features, and goes so far as to coin a new term, proairesis, meaning
choice in the sense of preference between alternatives,7 to approximate what would be the Will in the Christian sensean exquisitely
problematic zone that would eventually provide a philosophical home
for the roads to freedom.8
Thus Freud situates psychoanalysis in the wake of Aristotle, St. Paul,
and St. Augustine. As Lacan, who never shrank from an associative
leap, remarks, It is odd to find this strange Christocentrism in Freuds
writings.9 For in this freedom of desire, the subject (as Freud reveals)
is free to die of it, to offer up his own flesh for the ideal of his father:
the glory and the hell of redemption, through which Judeo-Christian
monotheism acknowledges in a paroxysmal but nonetheless authentic
manner, a universal structure of human desire, insofar as it is caught in
the nets of meaning.
Neitzsche was the first to expose the impasses of this freedom of
desire: namely, that desire, which in a deeper sense is desire for/of
death (dsir de mort), is in the last instance a desire for power; and that
this desire realizes the desperate will of manof the Overmanto
keep himself alive, which remains the sole and unique value of the
dialectic of freedom. Freud says basically the same thing when he
diagnosed the malaise of civilization, though, unlike Nietzsche, he
says it in the spirit of disillusionment rather than rage and indignation.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FREEDOM

The Heidegerian Turn (Kehre) is, of course, a response to the

libertarian omnipotence of this fierce will to be alive. Heidegger tries
to return us to the wandering of Being, to the serenity of letting go in
the historical. In this way, he tries to resist subjectivism for the sake
of a meditation on the nature of Being, which only the poets language
can realize.10 Needless to say, such a perspective rules psychoanalysis out of court, not only because it biologizes the essence of
man, but because it succumbs to a subjectivism of desire assimilated
to voluntarism.
Opposed to Heidegger, but still sensitive to his concerns, Lacan
maintains the broadly Christian value of subjective interiority, while
radicalizing it in the extreme. Not only is the subject free, even heroic,
on condition that he does not give ground relative to his desire; but,
according to Lacan, the only thing one can be guilty of is giving
ground relative to ones desire.11 Insisting that the contribution of
psychoanalysis is precisely to authorize the subject to discover her
desire and to go to the depths of herself, Lacan proselytizes against the
normalizing tendency in psychoanalysis, which he justly accuses of an
all-embracing moralism and of taming of perverse jouissance.12
He attributes to psychoanalysis the power to lead the subject to recognize that desire is a desire of/for death, and to establish this distress as
the precondition for all extra-analytic activity.
This position is not only anti-normative, an implicit polemic against
ego-psychology and other behaviourist deviations in psychoanalysis,
mostly North American. It is an exculpating attitude, which rehabilitates desire, in the most Freudian sense of the latters dangerousness, as
outlined above; it reveals the radical truth of the Freudian discovery
its uncomfortableness, the principal reason that it meets, and will
always meet, with so much resistance from the moralizing universe of
technics and adaptation.
Lacans position also requires the courage to raise the question, not
dealt with by Freud, of the ethics of psychoanalysis, albeit without
resolving it. The theme of your Annual Congress this year, freedom in
the psychoanalytic process, is an inspiration to reopen the question.
If the benign neutrality of the psychoanalyst allows the patient not to
give ground relative to his desire, it is still true that we greet this
freedom with a certain number of ideals. The analyst doesnt just let

JULIA KRISTEVA

these desires, relative to which one does not give ground, pour out,
purely and simply. His or her way of listening and interpreting
welcomes these desires from the perspective of a moral choice, which
constitutes an ethics. Though these implicit ethics are certainly nonpedagogical, they are not devoid of communitarian objectives which
frame, when they do not actually restrain, the desires liberated in the
transference. Lacan himself evokes some of these ideals: to make the
patient capable of love, to privilege authenticity as opposed to the as
if or the false self, to reinforce independence . . . The least one could
say is that this frame imposes a powerful negotiation on whoever does
not give ground relative to his desire. But which negotiation? If it is
true that the so-called liberated modern world has created no new
perversions,13 can we have discovered any new responses to the old
and indelible perversity of our sadomasochistic freedoms?
And with this question, we are back at the starting point. 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 without any God apart
from the Signifier? Or does psychoanalysis prefigure a form of atheism
that is thoughtful, perhaps even tragic, but immediately reinstates the
multiplicity of communal bonds, through their possible new beginning?

2. Is Psychoanalysis an All-encompassing Moralism?

I wanted to take you down these pathways, which may seem too far
reaching, if not abstract, to some of you, before showing how much
they are implicated in the everyday realities of our practice.
Of the whole range of the new maladies of the soul14 offered by
our patients in this closing of the second millennium, I will single out
two categories schematically: those who suffer from having followed
their desire to the end, and those who have yet to find their desire. The
perverse provide an example of the first category: by definition unappeased, endlessly indulged by the consumer society of the spectacle,
lacking any point of reference, any sense of limit or value, any relation
to the father. The anorexic (but this could also be the borderline, the
psychosomatic, or the melancholic) belongs to the second: here it is a
matter of restoring access to the patients desires in order to free him

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FREEDOM

from his symptoms. The work of the psychoanalyst consists neither of

releasing nor repressing, but of elaborating and working through the
psyche, to allow a self-renewal at each internal or external challenge.
If the history of psychoanalysis teaches us one thing, it is surely that
the psyche is too complex and unpredictable to know completely in
advance. Freud paved the way for this insight, which has been enriched
by the contributions of many successors: Kleinians, Lacanians,
Winnicottians, Bionians, and so on.
Unique in the history of ideas, the psychoanalytic model is inseparable from the transference-countertransference experience. One can
never say enough about the advantages of this approach compared to,
for example, the structuralist or cognitivist models of mind. That Freud
may not have conceptualized it in precisely this way takes nothing
away from the fact that he discovered it. The task of theorizing and
developing it belongs to the modernity of psychoanalysis. What
emerges of particular note is that freedomwhich might well be
termed a sadomasochism of desire, such as psychoanalysis understands
itis actualized in a paradoxical relation, which is the psychoanalytic
relational bond itself. This real, yet at the same time eminently imaginary, bond invites the reactualization of past experience, of memory, and
especially of traumatic memory, and their re-elaboration. The analystother is not only in the position of the parental function of symbolic
prohibition, but also in the real position of my15 social debt (which I
pay) and in an imaginary position toward which I address my desires
and/or death wishes in the transferenceuntil they, or my imaginary
identifications, are exhausted. The same is true for the analyst, through
and in the countertransference.
A laboratory is thus created in which that enlarged mentality dear
to Kant can be experienced, through language, permitting me to univeralize my particularities and to communicate them to the other, to
others. But there is also a concrete relational bond, both sensual and
worldly, in the Greek sense of these terms, which Hannah Arendt
interprets as the seed of the political.16 You will note that Lacanian and
Bionian speculations on the unstructuring-restructuring processes of
the subject at the moment of analytic communication (linguistic communication for Lacan, Alpha-Beta for Bion) are concerned only marginally with the transference-countertransference implications of the

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JULIA KRISTEVA

actual desires and fantasies thus liberated. Yet we all know that the
patients desire and its derivatives depend on the analysts way of
listening. But how? And to what end? There is still much work to be
done toward a better understanding of the role of countertransference,
if we wish to throw more light on the way that the patients freedom
unfolds in relation to the limitations of the analyst.
Before trying to answer this question, let me draw certain consequences from the fact that human desire is realized in psychoanalysis
from within a relational bond. The human subject who recognizes
himself there recognizes himself first as a subject of human plurality:17
concretely, the plurality of his family but also that of his analyst and of
other analysands. Thus, with the help of the analyst, the helplessness of
the end of my analysis, i.e., that I expect nothing from anyone (or, as
Chairman Mao used to say, I can count on nothing but my own
strengths) is first felt as a shared fate, something in common with the
suffering of others. But this community isnt really a community, for
no institution will officially embrace this shared experience, this perception of the plurality of the discarded (except psychoanalytic societies for the privileged, but that is another matter).
Moreover, to the extent that my analysis is terminated but not
finished, the suspension of the transferential bond in which a portion of
my drive life and my desires is left unelaborated and unsublimated
incites me to turn my aggression against every unity, identity, norm,
and value: in short, to make myself the subject of a perpetual rebellion,
an incessant questioning, a perpetual analysand.
Ultimately, for this reason exactlythe liberation of my desire
through its elaboration or sublimationI am in a state of perpetual
rebirth at the end of my analysis. Winnicott says something very new
and incontrovertible on this subject. He seems to hold that birth already
presupposes an autonomy of biopsychological life, making it possible
for the infant to withdraw from environmental impingement and to
avoid the traumatic violence of labour and delivery. This nuclear
independence would be the precondition, in a way, of the later internal
world, which Winnicott considers the most precious and mysterious
freedom inherent in being human. Indeed, human being is here meant
in the sense of being, as opposed to doing or acting. Winnicott rediscovers this freedom equally in the capacity to be alone and in the

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11

isolation of the secret ballot in the democratic voting booth. Better still,
he finds it in the process of analytic treatment, in the undoing of the
false self constructed as a defence against external impingement, and
the recovery of that native interiority that, however, must always be
recreated, and thus alone makes us free. Freedom thus becomes synonymous with an interiority to be recreated in relation to an external
world to be internalised. This is not freedom in the sense of resisting
the two tyrants of instinctual desire and external reality, as Freud
thinks; but rather freedom as the interiorization of the outside, if and
only if this outside (to begin with, the mother) allows for play, and lets
itself be played with. In sum, at the end of an analysis terminated but
still infinite, we refind ourselves, and we rediscover ourselves, because
we have unveiled the freedom-unto-death of our desires, not only as
mortality, but as natalityto use Hannah Arendts term in The Life of
the Mind.18
This brings us to yet another perspective on freedom in psychoanalysis: far from the unrestraint19 of the one who will not give ground
relative to her desire, freedom in psychoanalysis implies two kinds of
issue that have already been encountered in philosophy. But psychoanalysis broaches each of them in a new way: the issue of choice and
the issue of beginning.
As the inheritors of humanism, we know that humankind (like the
work of art) has no end outside itself: man is his own end. It follows
that if freedom consists of the freedom to choose between good and
evil, we have no other aim to propose than the well-being of the human
subject, insofar as the latter proceeds from the subjects capacity to
establish a maximum of ties with others. From a psychoanalytic point
of view, this does not arise from a preoccupation with making the
subject socially useful to a community, according to some preestablished criteria (as ideologies and religions try to do). Rather, it is
to permit the flourishing of a diversity of relational bonds in the context
of communities that are mobile and subject to challenge. We are talking
about the subjects capacity to encounter others as others, and, to start
with, to encounter the analyst as other (which in principle ought to be
a criterion for termination of analysis). This capacity constitutes the
basis for a choice that permits the subject, outside the analytic
framework, to decide freely between good and evil. The more he is
able to transfer himself into the place of others, in order thus to

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JULIA KRISTEVA

liquidate this transference, the more our subject-analysand will be open

to well-chosen relationships and appropriate judgements.
Finally, in the writings of St. Augustine, the biblical preoccupation
with beginnings (In the beginning God created . . . , In the beginning was the Word) becomes, as you will recall, an insistence on that
specific beginning that is the birth of each human being, in its irreconcilable singularity: the simple fact of this unique birth is the guarantee
of our eventual freedom of thought, will, and judgement, whose development needs to be protected and nurtured. Augustine adds to the
principium of the Logos (Verbe) the initium of humankind: That
there be a beginning man was created, before whom nobody was.20
Let us say it without false modesty: no other modern experience,
apart from psychoanalysis, offers such a prospect for recommencing
psychic life, and thus, in a sense, life as suchin the opening up of
choices that secures the manifold capacity for relationships (liens).
This version of freedom is perhaps the most precious, and most serious,
gift that psychoanalysis has given to humanity. Since Augustine, and
against the weight of what is called historical or biological destiny,
psychoanalysis alone is willing to take onand sometimes even to
winthis wager on the possibility of a new beginning.

3. Why is Psychoanalysis an Atheism?

It has become conventional to say that philosophy is a white theology because it preserves the logical armature of theology, while whiting out the place of God. In counterpoint, I would say that psychoanalysis is a coloured Judeo-Christianitycoloured with desire and
instinctuality, even in the biological sense of these terms. That changes
our traditional point of view.
As the theory and practice of the intertwining of sexuality and
thought, psychoanalysis is apparently the only intellectual movement
to grasp as immanence what Western metaphysics traditionally interpreted as transcendence. To repeat: the human aptitude for producing
meaning, following both a certain neurobiological maturation and that
mythic event of instinctual repression through murder-assimilationidentification with the fatherthis is what appears to us, as psychoanalysts, to constitute that hohere wesen in menschen, that higher essence
of humankind that modulates and models the energic impetus into a

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13

dynamic of meaning with the other, in which is inscribed the subjects

freedom.
From this point of view, religions appear as recognitions of this
higher essence of humankind: of this capacity to make meaning, which
they celebrate in the image or the fantasy of one or many figures of
symbolic power with real effects. These divinities are in a sense the
guarantors of meaning. Recognition of an essential human capacity
provides religion with its truth function, beyond the consoling fascination it procures, for this truth function involves a form of recognition
that is both phantasmatic and denied, systematizing the internal and
external psychodynamics we are discussing into a hierarchy of values.
As a protective and consoling system of values, religion assures certain
human freedoms (we have seen how before and after Christianity
theology is the instigator of the problem of freedom). The price of this
advance does not lie only in the persecutory exclusion of others (of
other religions and dissidents) who do not share the same system of
values. More serious is the price of sexual repression reinforced by
divine threat, which leads, in the last analysis, to the inhibition of
critical thinking, that is to say, the inhibition of thought as such. On the
personal level, religion both generates neurosis and provides consolation for it, through the mechanism of faith itself: credo, I believe
which means to gives ones heart in exchange for a promised
compensation, the supreme version of which is eternal life granted by
the celestial Father. The neurosis that the religious threat fosters in the
subject is compensated by a range of authorized transgressions,
through which the believer can satisfy her perversion.21 Monotheism,
particularly the Catholic form of it, excels in establishing this balance.
It leads to a trade-off between threat/repression and freedom/perversion, and this counterbalance seems more and more to take on the
aspect of a libertarian moralism in the economically favourable context
of Western democracies. It is not radically different from humanist
morality, but possesses the abundant advantage of benefiting from the
security and comfort of tradition. And it exercises a growing fascination today, at the conclusion of the millennium, a fact of that psychoanalysts are well aware, and perhaps alone in taking the full measure.
The tragic history of our century with its two totalitarianisms, and
now the symptoms of postmodern society (the erosion of taboos, the
proliferation of sado-masochistic sexuality, from delinquency to van-

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dalism, not to mention the new maladies of the soulpsychosomatosis, addiction, the diffusion of psychosis within neurotic
structures, and so on)all these phenomena indicate that it is the
system of recognition-denial itself that is in crisis.
Thus we have two models of freedom: freedom-adaptation, and
freedom-revelation.
The first of these (freedom-adaptation) was announced by Kant,
along with the French Revolution, in the Critique of Pure Reason
(1781) and Critique of Practical Reason (1789). Echoing the initium of
Augustine, Kant defines freedom for the first time, not negatively as
the transgression of a limit or a constraint, but positively as a selfbeginning (autocommencement). It is possible to relate his cosmological argument relative to Reason and Being to the more restricted plane
of human life in order to understand it: the capacity of each to undertake an action, to initiate an act from within. This is a magnificent idea
of freedom, but we can already see the possible deviations contained
within it: we are free to undertake . . . within the terms of a preestablished logical order, the moral logic of a god, the economic logic
of free enterprise, globalization, and the dollar.
The second model of freedom was linked by Heidegger, in his
reading of Kant, to pre-Socratic thought prior to the establishment of
logical categories and values. This other freedom has to do with the
revelation of self in the presence of the other through speech. Here I am
not concerned with making a point about the Christian connotations of
pre-Socratic philosophy, or details about the deconstruction of metaphysics implied in Heideggers debate with Kant; and even less with
the problem of political disengagement that Hannah Arendt tries to
solve in her proposed philosophy of judgement.22
I would say only that if this freedom-revelation, as opposed to
freedom-adaptation, has more than a speculative existence, it would be
in the transference-countertransference experience that it is actualized.
Free associating in the transference, the subject confronts both the
unspeakability of the instinctual drives, her desires, and their traumas,
and also the injunction that is imposed by the very fact of language (the
capacity to symbolize) as well as the place of the analyst. The subject
constitutes herself within herself for the other, and in this sense he
reveals herself: in the strong sense of the word, she frees herself.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FREEDOM

15

Analytic discourse is a constant process of questioning. I have had

occasion to describe elsewhere how questioning, or putting into question (which have nothing to do with posing questions or answering
them) is the method par excellence of expression in psychoanalysis, the
logical equivalent of castrationif this fantasy is understood as the
realization of lack, uncertainty, and infinite regress, which constitute
the fundamental split in the psyche (cf. The New Maladies of the Soul,
87ff).23 Its eternal return puts us in the timelessness of the temporal
frame of the session, which actualizes, through analytic speech, the
timelessness of the unconscious. It challenges identities and values, but
it also provisionally restructures the subject in a new rebirth, as enabled
by his transferential bond. However, if this bond is itself undone by
terminating the treatment, it does not mean that the patient is restructured once and for all by his analyst or a particular school of analysis.
Rather, it means that he has achieved a psychic flexibility capable of
traversing the repression barrier, of remobilizing drives, and thus of
promoting creative adventure in his subsequent experiences of life as a
subject. An aptitude for the renewal of relational bonds, links, and
connections is thus established in the optimal conclusion of treatment.
Of course, we all know how often we remain far from achieving this
optimal result! Nevertheless, the implicit political significance of it is
obvious, insofar as it is true that the analyzed subject is an irreconcilable subject, a subject necessarily in revolt.24
To say that the analyzed individual discovers his irreconcilable
conflictuality, the dramatic split that constitutes him and detaches him
from any will toward control, power, or even unity, means that this
freedom of which we have been speaking distances psychoanalysis
from the moralistic or beatifying kind of humanism.
However, to say that the penchant for revolt leads the analyzed
individual to recreate bonds could signify that the analytic experience
is at the source of a more seriousor soberhumanism. I use the
word revolt in the etymological and Proustian sense of the term,
already discussed in my lectures on Le sens et non sens de la rvolte
and La rvolte intime (Fayard 1996, 1997): the return of meaning to the
drive and vice versa, which gives rise to memory and revolves the
subject. The questioning of value systems is an unending opening
out, which is neither a faith nor a nihilism. I am speaking about
knowing how to take a position in order to assume responsibility for a

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JULIA KRISTEVA

judgement in a specific situation, and being able to question it from

someone elses place; such a position reaches that apprehension of the
benign neutrality we obtain through the many dissolutions of transferences.
This is how I understand the radically liberating atheist potential of
the analytic experience: as an exhaustion of transcendence and its
inhibiting or consoling imagos, achieved through transcendence itself,
for which we have another term: splittingthe psychic heterogeneity
of biology and meaning. For Sartre, atheism is a cruel and exacting,
long-term enterprise. After what I have said, you will understand that
it can be, from the point of view of psychoanalysis, a luminous experience too, and yesvery long and exacting too!

4. Freedom as Re-beginning: The Case of Marie-Rose

I will conclude this reflection with a clinical case whose modesty is a
little out of harmony with the essential problems I have tried to place at
the heart of our daily analytic work. It does bear witness to a kind of
banality of revelationwhich is perhaps the only counterpoint to the
banality of evil. It seems to be the most precious version of our psychoanalytic adventure, which permits the subject to diminish her sufferings, to
rediscover her desire, to reinstate her creativityindefinitely.
Anorexia is a kind of paranoia turned against the self. Marie-Rose
devoured my interpretations the better to vomit them up, in order to
play out more or less divine scenes of persecution and adoration,
behind what she was saying in the secret of her digestive tract. As her
sadomasochism was played out in her body, she had no tolerance for
sexuality, to the point of deadening it, and evacuating it from her polite
language, while her limpid intelligence observed this process of mummification.25 She remembered the first attacks of vomiting, during
vacations, in her parents room, wishing and terrified to be both man
and woman at once.
The scene rivals the one described by Cline on London Bridge.26
Marie-Rose was the knight-errants pageboy, the faithful admirer (chevalier servant) of her mother; she could not separate herself from this double
body, both male and female, that made love only to its progenitor, by
killing off its living matter, the living mater (mother), even down to the
germ plasm, through somatization, amenorrhea or losing teeth.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FREEDOM

17

In the transference, Marie-Rose decided to recount this hold on her

body through the double body of the parents reunited in the primal
scene. In so doing, she marked the sexual and bisexual etiology of her
troubles, but did not renounce them: she transformed them. The
anorexia was modified into psychic pain. The telling allowed her
anxiety to come to the surface, a moral anxiety that even endangered
the possibility of continuing the analysis.
Is this not the necessary path of working through, which replaces the
somatic acting out with the drama of the struggle between ego and
superego? If mental suffering is not necessarily progress, compared to
the pain of vomiting, it is nevertheless undoubtedly a victory over
psychic death, a coming to terms with the otherness within the self,
which can arise as a conflict with the analyst.
Marie-Roses politeness burst into pieces, and she recounted all the
evil she thought of me, my son, my husbandall of which was
self-evident. At the end of the session, she added, without shrinking
from the paradox, that the analysis was the only moment of her life
when she could be tender.
I pondered this bizarre tenderness. Tender with? Or tender to?27 Free
association, that sexualized telling in the transference, stages her sadomasochism. This is what spares the patient her own destruction, permitting her to be tender with her instinctual Being. But what is this
instinctual Being? A mute strength, amoeba or humanoid from the Ice
Age inorganic corpse, inanimate matter? We recall the Freudian fable.
Marie-Rose was tender with this instinctual Beingwith her once
anorexic auto-erotismto the extent that she was able to give me a
sadomasochistic account of it.
What is language, in the Freudian sense of the term? Is it the
tenderness of the speaking being? Tenderness to speaking-being,
through free associations of the sadomasochist narrative? That means
beyond the hallucination and cruelty put back into play with the analyst. The narrative (implicit or explicit, fluid or impeded) of free
association achieves a reconciliation between word-presentations and
thing-presentations, which helps us unconsciously experience that the
meaning communicated to someone else is a violence that provisionally shelters us from death. The telling of cruelty (in contrast to
Artauds Theatre of Cruelty) brings us back to life, body and soul

18

JULIA KRISTEVA

reunited. Tenderness through sheer narration. Marie-Rose wrote poems

at the beginning of analysis. Analysis changed her behaviour: the
anorexia disappeared, and Marie-Rose published a collection of stories. A way of being freesolemnly, interminably.
SUMMARY
This paper is a response to an invitation from the National Scientific
Program Committee of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society to discuss
the theme of freedom in the psychoanalytic process. Several conceptions of freedom are outlined in relation to drive theory and Freuds
reflections on the relationship between civilization and the superego. It
is suggested that human freedom is not merely the absence of external
constraints on the drives. Understood as an interweaving of energy
and representation, drives may be seen as engendering an intrinsic
moral dialectic of commandment and constraint, which is a precondition for a psychoanalytic concept of freedom. These ideas are then
explored in relation to St. Augustine, Kant, Heidegger, and Arendt,
with particular emphasis on the analytic process as a new beginning, and
the discovery of freedom through the revelation of self in relation to the
other.
RSUM
Comme le comit national des programmes scientifiques de la Socit
canadienne de psychanalyse a invit les intresss examiner le thme
de la libert au sein du processus psychanalytique, le prsent texte se
penche sur cette question. Plusieurs conceptions de la libert sont
prsentes en relation avec la thorie des pulsions et les rflexions de
Freud sur le lien entre la civilisation et le surmoi. On y suggre entre
autres que la libert ne se limite pas une absence de contraintes
extrieures rfrnant les pulsions. Envisages comme un mlange hybride dnergies et de reprsentations, les pulsions comportent une
dialectique morale intrinsque qui est axe sur la prescription et la
restriction et sous-tend le concept psychanalytique de libert. On peut
par ailleurs examiner ces notions selon la conceptualisation de SaintAugustin, Kant, Heidegger et Arendt, en mettant laccent sur le renouveau cr par le processus analytique et la dcouverte de la libert
grce la rvlation de soi dans ses rapports avec les autres.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FREEDOM

19

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The translator would like to express his appreciation to Margaret-Ann
Fitzpatrick-Hanly, Marie-Claire Lanctt-Blanger, and Franois Sirois for
their generous assistance.

NOTES
1. A note on the text: All footnotes have been added by the translator,
except where the initials J. K. appear in parentheses.
2. The French conscience suggests both consciousness and conscience
throughout this text.
3. This is a modification of Stracheys translation, which is inaccurate. For
discussion of the translation of this passage, see Jean Imbeault, The
Hitlerian Superego, American Imago, 51 (2): 197212. See also Jean
Imbeault, Mouvements. Paris: Gallimard, 1997, pp. 97ff.
4. Freud, S. E. 21:122, emphasis added. Lullaby from Heaven
(Eiapopeia vom Himmel) is a quotation from Heinrich Heines poem
Deutschland. Heine is quoting a popular song of renunciation, in
which he adds, When they whimper, one must rock the people, that
enormous baby. (J. K.)
5. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis:
19591960 (1992), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter. New
York: Norton, 1992, p. 3.
6. Kristevas reference is to Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, section 40, Of Taste as a Kind of Sensus Communis. I have used the J.
H. Bernard translation (1951), New York: Hafner Press, pp. 13637.
See also Hannah Arendt (1971). The Life of the Mind, 2: Willing. New
York: Harcourt Brace, Appendix.
7. Hannah Arendt (1971). The Life of the Mind, 2: Willing. New York:
Harcourt Brace, 60f.
8. Kristeva is here alluding to the philosophy of existentialism, and in
particular to Jean-Paul Sartres trilogy of novels, The Roads to Freedom.
9. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis:
19591960 (1992), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter. New
York: Norton, p. 176.
10. Kristeva here refers to ideas advanced by Heidegger in The Question
Concerning Technology and Poetry, Language, Thought.

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JULIA KRISTEVA

11. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Ibid., p. 319f.

12. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Ibid., p. 4.
13. Here Kristeva alludes to a passage in Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Ibid., pp. 1415.
14. Julia Kristeva, The New Maladies of the Soul.
15. In this and other passages, Kristeva uses the first personal singular to
refer to the patients point of view.
16. Kristeva is here drawing on Hannah Arendts conception of freedom as
rooted in the worldly politics of the public realm, or vita activa. See
Hannah Arendt (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
17. The French pluralit in this context connotes multiplicity, but the term
plurality is retained here because it echoes Hannah Arendts usage,
which Kristeva clearly has in mind. For Arendt, Plurality is the condition of human action: it derives from human natality, the fact that
every human life represents a new beginning, and that nobody is ever
the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live (The Human
Condition, pp. 89).
18. See The Human Condition, esp. pp. 79, 17678. Also The Life of the
Mind, pp. 1089.
19. Here the French dfoulement can be understood in two senses: liberation from repression and absence of constraint.
20. Augustine, City of God, 7, ch. 20. Quoted in The Life of the Mind:
Willing, p. 217.
21. Pre-version: Kristeva puns on the word father in the original French:
to get around the law, to fool the father.
22. See The Life of the Mind, Appendix.
23. Kristevas use of clivage here and elsewhere in the text is misleading.
She does not seem to mean splitting in the Kleinian sense, but something more like Spaltung, or primary repression, primary topographical
division as constitutive of the psyche.
24. For Kristeva, the term revolt has in this context many unusual connotations, including a sense of how the analysand is always re-turning into
himself and re-starting himself: a new beginning. The Latin root is
revolvere: to roll back; roll again: suggesting continuous motion.
25. In the ambiguity of the original French, Kristeva here seems to refer
simultaneously to a deadening of the body and a deadening of sexuality.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FREEDOM

21

26. Kristeva discusses Clines writing in Powers of Horror: An Essay on

Abjection, chapters 10 and 11.
27. Kristeva here considers different senses of tendre: tender, fond, affectionate (adj.); to hold out or extend (i.e., the hand), which suggests
reaching toward, but also offering or giving. This condensation links the
transferential movement described above with the patients budding
emotional expressivity.
Julia Kristeva
76 rue dAssas
75006 Paris, France