Abjection

Literary/ Cultural Context Note

Litencyc Editors (Independent Scholar - Europe)
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  • The Literary Encyclopedia. WORLD HISTORY AND IDEAS: A CROSS-CULTURAL VOLUME.

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“Abjection” is a central concept in Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic work which is very much influenced by, and taking its critical distance from, Jacques Lacan’s “return to Freud”. The concept is particularly developed in her essays translated and collected in the influential book

The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

(New York, Columbia University Press, 1982). For Kristeva, the human sense of abjection is inaugurated by the child’s loss of its imaginary identification with the mother and by its encounters with the social rules which determine appropriate patterns of defecation (i.e. its move from the oral to the anal stage in Freudian terms, its induction into social regulation; similarly, in Lacanian terms, its induction into the Symbolic order). The child’s…

322 words

Citation: Editors, Litencyc. "Abjection". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 April 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=16296, accessed 19 March 2024.]

16296 Abjection 2 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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