Professional Documents
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JULIA KRISTEVA
Paris, France
The text was originally presented to the 24th Annual Congress of the Cana-
dian Psychoanalytic Society in Montreal, on June 19, 1998. The conversa-
tional style of the original French text has been largely preserved. Translation
by Charles Levin.
2 JULIA KRISTEVA
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 man’s
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 Freud’s 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, doesn’t
read much—even less the founding texts of psychoanalysis (which
allows me to do some educational work)—but also because Freud’s
later work, far from being an appendage, as has often been suggested,
seems to me to reveal some of Freud’s 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 psycho-
analysis 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 (éleutheria) is essen-
tially freedom of movement (Freud says pousée, 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
4 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 psy-
chic apparatus, is the starting point for what Lacan, reader of Civiliza-
tion 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 Discon-
tents, 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 free-
dom 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 thought-
spoken, desire inscribes the urge of the drive first in a representation,
and then in the necessity of accepting the other’s death and one’s 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 Green’s Travail du
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FREEDOM 5
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 non-
pedagogical, 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 psy-
choanalysis 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 begin-
ning?
actual desires and fantasies thus liberated. Yet we all know that the
patient’s desire and its derivatives depend on the analyst’s 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 patient’s freedom
unfolds in relation to the limitations of the analyst.
Before trying to answer this question, let me draw certain conse-
quences 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 isn’t really a community, for
no institution will officially embrace this shared experience, this per-
ception of the plurality of the “discarded” (except psychoanalytic soci-
eties 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 exactly—the liberation of my desire
through its elaboration or sublimation—I 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 redis-
covers this freedom equally in the capacity to be alone and in the
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FREEDOM 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 synon-
ymous 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 “natality”—to use Hannah Arendt’s term in The Life of
the Mind.18
This brings us to yet another perspective on freedom in psychoanal-
ysis: 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 psycho-
analysis 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 subject’s 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 pre-
established 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 subject’s 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
12 JULIA KRISTEVA
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 concep-
tions of freedom are outlined in relation to drive theory and Freud’s
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 precondi-
tion 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.
RÉSUMÉ
Comme le comité national des programmes scientifiques de la Société
canadienne de psychanalyse a invité les intéressés à examiner le thème
de la liberté au sein du processus psychanalytique, le présent texte se
penche sur cette question. Plusieurs conceptions de la liberté sont
présentées en relation avec la théorie des pulsions et les réflexions de
Freud sur le lien entre la civilisation et le surmoi. On y suggère entre
autres que la liberté ne se limite pas à une absence de contraintes
extérieures réfrénant les pulsions. Envisagées comme un mélange hy-
bride d’énergies et de représentations, les pulsions comportent une
dialectique morale intrinsèque qui est axée sur la prescription et la
restriction et sous-tend le concept psychanalytique de liberté. On peut
par ailleurs examiner ces notions selon la conceptualisation de Saint-
Augustin, Kant, Heidegger et Arendt, en mettant l’accent sur le renou-
veau créé par le processus analytique et la découverte de la liberté
grâce à la révélation 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 Lanctôt-Bélanger, and François 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 Strachey’s translation, which is inaccurate. For
discussion of the translation of this passage, see Jean Imbeault, “The
Hitlerian Superego,” American Imago, 51 (2): 197–212. 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 Heine’s 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:
1959–1960 (1992), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter. New
York: Norton, 1992, p. 3.
6. Kristeva’s reference is to Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, sec-
tion 40, “Of Taste as a Kind of Sensus Communis.” I have used the J.
H. Bernard translation (1951), New York: Hafner Press, pp. 136–37.
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 Sartre’s trilogy of novels, The Roads to Free-
dom.
9. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis:
1959–1960 (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.
20 JULIA KRISTEVA
Julia Kristeva
76 rue d’Assas
75006 Paris, France