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Divining psychoanalysis: Melancholia, Dostoevsky, and Kristeva

Sayers, Janet V. (2003) Divining psychoanalysis: Melancholia, Dostoevsky, and Kristeva. Women: A Cultural Review, 14 (3). pp. 281-291. ISSN 0957-4042. (doi:10.1080/0957404032000140399) (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:12557)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided.
Official URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0957404032000140399

Abstract

Julia Kristeva has recently depicted Melanie Klein as a female genius in divining and bringing to life her analytic patients' psyche, by identifying with them and projecting her fantasies into them, as Kristeva says mothers do in transforming the proto-fantasies constituted by their infants' object-oriented bodily drives into semiotic and symbolic meaning. In explaining how Kristeva arrives at this account of psychoanalysis Sayers discusses her previous work on melancholia, and the accounts by Freud and particularly by women psychoanalysts—notably Joan Riviere, Melanie Klein and Hanna Segal—of melancholia as a defence against loss and guilt over the hateful destruction of others through thing-like self-division of hate and love. She also explores the religious and psychoanalytic theories of William James and Wilfred Bion. Most of all, however, she illustrates Kristeva's approach to melancholia, as Kristeva does herself, by using the example of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, in which Sonia identifies with the arguably melancholic Raskolnikov and thereby resurrects him to psychological life. Sonia, however, is a fiction. Kristeva, by contrast, in describing Melanie Klein as a female genius in transforming psychoanalysis into a species of divination, presents such ideals and fictions about women and femininity as fact

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1080/0957404032000140399
Subjects: H Social Sciences
B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion
Divisions: Divisions > Division for the Study of Law, Society and Social Justice > School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research
Depositing User: Janet Sayers
Date Deposited: 08 Sep 2008 14:54 UTC
Last Modified: 16 Nov 2021 09:50 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/12557 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

Sayers, Janet V..

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