This Incredible Need to Believe (review)

This brief but dense book, the bulk of which is made up of Carmine Donzelli's interview of Julia Kristeva before an Italian audience, takes us on a high speed ride through Kristeva's varied and voluminous intellectual career. Donzelli knows Kristeva's work well and asks informed and intelligent questions, allowing Kristeva to respond with a seventy-seven page account of where she is now and how she sees the work she has done over the past forty years as continuous with her current projects. One might not always agree with Kristeva's analyses of her earlier work, yet her persistent affirmation of the singularity of her intellectual trajectory is bracing and, as we will see, intimately tied to the importance singularity has come to play in her theoretical, literary, and psychoanalytic practice. For a long-time reader of Kristeva, the process of back-formation—Kristeva revisiting and, arguably, reconceiving her old work in light of her new -is itself illuminative of the ways in which we tell stories about ourselves, a central Kristevan theme. For those new to Kristeva, the volume—which includes five other short pieces, including two written on the occasion of the death of Pope John Paul II—provides a new and provocative psychoanalytic account of religion, in particular, Christianity.

Donzelli, like many in the first decade of the twenty-first century, wants to hear about religion and politics—and about how psychoanalysis might provide what Kristeva calls "laboratories of new forms of humanism" (28). The line of questioning is, of course, congenial to Kristeva, who has written in detail about religion since at least Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection (published in France in 1980). Kristeva refuses any clearly drawn distinction between religion and secularism, just as she troubles the popular trope of "the clash of religions." Instead, Kristeva insists on the centrality of belief to all human engagements.

Although one might read Freud's The Future of an Illusion (1927) as reducing religion to illusion, Kristeva argues that there is a more complicated set of arguments in Freud's work—"from Totem and Taboo, the exchanges with Jung, Romain Rolland, or Pastor Pfister, right up to Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) and The Man Moses (1939)" (4). To this end Kristeva briefly sketches two kinds of psychic experience Freud links to religion. The first is the most familiar—that "oceanic feeling" Freud describes in response to a question from Romain Rolland:

This would relate to the intimate union of the ego with the surrounding world, felt as an absolute certainty of satisfaction, security, as well as the loss of our self to what surrounds and contains us, to a container, and that goes back to the experience of the infant who has not yet established borders between the ego and the maternal body (7).

Always harboring the risk of psychosis—an inability to separate oneself from one's object—"this prelinguistic or translinguistic experience" is the source of belief. Yet this pre-Oedipal state of bliss and "dazzling certainty" (8), "goes hand in hand," Kristeva argues, "with a no less fleeting and suggestive illumination of another element of the need to believe: 'I' am only if a beloved authority acknowledges me" (9). This beloved authority, who grounds our own authority to speak, is the loving father, the "Father of individual prehistory" (10).

Most importantly for Kristeva, "analytic experience itself is not foreign to 'belief' in the broadest sense of this term." "Does not," she asks, "the transference/counter-transference establish, at the heart of the analytic cure, the conviction, both affective and logical that the interpretation is well-founded?" (4) And, she goes on to note, the entire analytic project is founded on the analyst's belief in the psychic reality of her analysands. In other words, the analyst begins with the belief that the analysand's symptoms, dreams, and words have meaning. And of course—what Kristeva curiously leaves out—the analysand must himself share this belief, or at the very...