Book
Tales of Love
Histoires d’amour
A psychoanalytic and historical study of love that runs from Narcissus, Plato and the Song of Songs through Christian agape, the troubadours, Don Juan and Romeo and Juliet to the cult of the Virgin, treated in the essay 'Stabat Mater'. Kristeva situates love between narcissism and idealisation and traces its origin to a primary identification with an 'imaginary father' who comes before the Oedipal father. She treats analysis as a renewed experience of love within the transference. Leon S. Roudiez translated the book into English as Tales of Love (1987).
Main ideas
- Love is placed between narcissism and idealisation.
- Primary narcissism is recast as a structure organised around an emptiness rather than an objectless state.
- The 'imaginary father of individual prehistory' is the first identification, prior to the Oedipal father and to any object.
- As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy reads it, this father is linked to love rather than to law, so that love first opens the way into language.
- Western discourses of love are read from the Song of Songs to the cult of the Virgin in 'Stabat Mater'.
- Analysis is a renewed experience of love in the transference.
What it shows
- 1983
Julia Kristeva reworked Primary narcissism
In Histoires d’amour Kristeva recasts primary narcissism as a structure rather than an objectless state, organised around an emptiness and sustained by primary identification with the “imaginary father of individual prehistory”.