Florence, Kristeva's patient

I dreamed about Florence, a depressive woman. She is Kristeva's analysand. She appears in New Maladies of the Soul. I identified with her in my dream, I identified with Kristeva as Florence's psychoanalyst and I identified with me, a close friend of Florence.

Florence takes photos with a sophisticated camera (very sci-fi, a sort of robotic extended eye.)

Kristeva is getting bored with this case, she looks at her watch quite often. She drinks coffee. She has a strong red lipstick.

Florence gets in her dreams (and I can see them as Florence):

first dream: She (I) talks about her parents' wedding. I imagine an old photo (looks from the 50s, black and white, fancy dressed people.) The photo becomes alive, a scratched black and white movie, no sound. They are at a table, plates are empty, they are waiting, they become hungry. She start to cut each other with knives and eat them, I can see them yell, still no sound, I can see them biting flesh, legs, hands, bones on the big table. Party continues. I wake up. still as Florence. Kristeva asks for something more. I try to go back to the dream. There is a new one:

second dream: Florence masturbates, she gets sick. I feel sick, I feel like throwing up. Florence goes to my bathroom, she pukes in the basin. She pukes Kristeva's head. The head starts talking. Then i switch right away to Kristeva's seat in the session. She explains what's going on. Switch back to Florence. She doesn't hear anything Kristeva says. She has only one thought: Kristeva represents my mother.
That's all I remember.

I went back to the book. Kristeva explains the two dreams (they are pretty close to what I dreamed): a tragic, grotesque poetics that give meaning to Florence's drives. They are related to her anxieties, to her desire of killing her daughter. Kristeva connects the two dreams by telling that Florence absorbs the head and body parts of her mother in order to spit them in the basin in order to make a place for her own child (to occupy her own basin). By remembering quite well this oniric mise-en-abyme, I guess I have to spit Kristeva's theories and writing in order to make a place for my own stuff. That would be a small possible reading based on Kristeva's text. But does it mean my friendship with Florence, to the level that I become her and her analyst?

Cultural mise-en-abyme

Getting lost in Kristevan abjection and thinking a lot of my own limits of the abject, I ended up with a melancholic feeling about US. Last night I had a long conversation in a Thai-Hungarian restaurant about facing other cultures and what is going on in the process. My argument was that the most difficult shocks are those when you are not foreign to the culture but you have a sort of mise-en-abyme by confronting your own lack of cultural limits. It was exactly what I felt in US: on one hand I was so familiar with everything that I saw and touched but on the other hand it was so strange and uncanny. I wasn't sure of my own subjectivity and its abject limits. Being in and out of a culture that you think you know hugely disturbs. My dear friend, Jeanne, writes here a very interesting entry on her return to Memphis. No wonder that today I had an earlier post on Burroughs' vision of America.