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February 25, 1990

SADNESS STARTS EARLY

By PERRY MEISEL; Perry Meisel is the author of ''The Myth of the Modern.''

BLACK SUN
Depression and Melancholia.
By Julia Kristeva.
Translated by Leon S. Roudiez.
288 pp. New York:
Columbia University Press. $29.
The pioneering French feminist and semiotician Julia Kristeva, a professor of linguistics at the
University of Paris, is also a practicing psychoanalyst; she is also the author, most recently, of a
series of psychoanalytic studies that supplement her ground-breaking work on language, literature
and gender over the past two decades.
The third in the series, ''Black Sun'' (the title comes from a poem by Nerval), is an absorbing
meditation on depression and melancholia, moving from essays in psychoanalytic theory based
upon the ''symptomatology'' of Ms. Kristeva's patients to rather more formal studies of depression
in Holbein the Younger, Nerval, Dostoyevsky and Marguerite Duras. Leon S. Roudiez's translation
is, as usual, sturdy (he has translated most of her work into English), and nearly as transparent as
Ms. Kristeva's French allows.
While Ms. Kristeva's lyricism and rigor can give way to unintentional melodrama and imperfect
convolution, within this miasma of style (she herself jokes about its mirroring of the mood swings
in her patients) is a persuasive theory of depression that is both moving and provocative.
Though relying on the orthodox psychoanalytic tradition that begins with Freud's ''Mourning and
Melancholia,'' Ms. Kristeva makes extensive use (sometimes explicit, sometimes not) of Melanie
Klein and Jacques Lacan and finds depression and melancholia the same in practice if not
necessarily in principle. ''While acknowledging the difference between melancholia and
depression,'' the author writes, ''Freudian theory detects everywhere the same impossible mourning
for the maternal object.''
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SADNESS STARTS EARLY - The New York Times

8/2/16, 13:46

Ms. Kristeva is feminist in her emphasis on ''the maternal object.'' The status of the father as both a
category and an image is diminished in her scheme, and the stress shifted onto the mother and the
pre-Oedipal stage, before weaning and the onset of the law of fathers and symbols. In ''Black Sun,''
depression is characterized by a denial of this normal childhood prehistory, or by what Ms. Kristeva
calls ''the denial of negation.'' ''Negation'' - the usual infantile acceptance of the loss of oneness with
the mother - is unconsciously refused by the depressive, who clings to a fantasy of union with the
mother instead.
The maternal object, however, turns out to be no object at all, but a ''lost Thing,'' as Ms. Kristeva
calls it after Lacan, never to be recovered. The ''lost Thing'' is a ''preobject,'' an archaic memory of
identity with the mother before the inevitable emotional separation from her. The depression that
Dostoyevsky or Marguerite Duras shares with Ms. Kristeva's patients is a ''mourning'' for ''the
elusive preobject'' before separation, whose capture is impossible to achieve.
The normal child ''leaves the crib to meet the mother in the realm of representations'' - that is, a
world of language and symbols. ''If I did not agree to lose mother,'' says Ms. Kristeva of successful
separation and the acquisition of language that compensates for the mother's loss, ''I could neither
imagine nor name her.'' The depressive, however, gets it backward: ''In order to protect mother I
kill myself.'' This leads Ms. Kristeva to a paradoxical idea: ''My depression,'' she writes, ''points to
my not knowing how to lose.''
Julia Kristeva has always been remarkably idiosyncratic despite her intellectual allegiances. She is
now iconoclastic as well as ecumenical, endeavoring to harmonize semiotics, psychoanalysis and
feminism with Christian belief, psychopharmacology and even the family. That urge to a synthesis
leads her to some strained conclusions. One might object, for example, to her desire in ''Black Sun''
to equate psychoanalytic cure and Christian faith - based upon an assumption of similarity between
Christ's forsakenness in his dark hour upon the Cross (particularly acute in Ms. Kristeva's reading
of Holbein's ''Dead Christ'') and the depressive's emotional world. Ms. Kristeva is also original but
highly unorthodox in her analysis of Christianity's avoidance of ''the desire to put the father to
death,'' and the role of such repression in the genesis of melancholia.
To offer such reservations, however, without noting Ms. Kristeva's own ironic acknowledgment of
the limits of her ideas would likely be to underestimate her.
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