Kristeva, Julia

Julia Kristeva is a philosopher, literary and cultural theorist, practicing psychoanalyst, chair of linguistics at the University of Paris, and permanent visiting professor at Columbia University in New York. In her writing, she uses representations of mothers in art and literature and examples from her patients' case histories to illustrate her theories about the psychological impact of the mother, or, rather, of attitudes about the mother, more than any actual person. Her most well-known idea is that of the abject or death-bearing mother, which she develops [Page 624]in some of her later works particularly by building on the theories of Sigmund Freud and D.W. Winnicott, but she is also interested in religion, especially Catholicism, and writes extensively on the Virgin Mary in some of her ...