TWO INTERVIEWS WITH JULIA KRISTEVA
I.
Elaine Hoffman Baruch
EHB:
Do you feel that France is as narcissistic a society as critics
such as Christopher Lasch have said that the United States is?
JK:
(in English)
Narcissistic?
What does it mean?
EHB:
Well, concerned only with the self, to the exclusion of institu–
tions, such as the family, such as even political institutions.
JK:
What I can say is that French culture is an extremely chauvinis–
tic culture. That is to say, it is preoccupied with national values.
It
is interested in its own past. It treats its tradition as a model,
and it suffers from being closed towards the outer world. Yes, it's
a form of narcissism. But the idea of the "self' is not a French
idea. It is an idea belonging originally to Anglo-Saxon psychoan–
alysis, and it doesn't fare very well in French psychoanalytic liter–
ature. It's not a key idea, if one is talking about psychoanalysis.
Are individuals in France narcissistic? I wouldn't say that. One
would have to make use of other categories. The French are more
hysterical, more paranoid, not so much narcissistic - if one can
generalize in this area. Personally, I would avoid national diag–
noses. I don't think there is a national psychology, there are indi–
vidual differences.
EHB:
You do have what is called the borderline personality in
France also?
JK:
Yes. Yes .
EHB:
What direction will psychoanalysis have to take in order to
treat the borderline personality?
JK:
That is a very interesting question. The French authors who are
beginning to get interested in these problems have been influenced
by people such as Winnicott, and Fairbairn. To come to terms
with this problem, one would have first of all to reread Freud, and
to see, every time he speaks of his neurotic cases, how he treats the
problem of narcissism. It is at these moments that the question of
Editor's Note: These interviews were conducted in the summer and fall of 1980,
before the publication of Julia Kristeva's
Powers of Horror
by Columbia University
Press. They were translated from the French by Brom Anderson (Part I) and
Margaret Waller (Part II) .
