Speaking is always already an alienation in as much as it contains a chasm from the thing-in-itself, but for T, the trauma of her mother’s death brought in another aspect of this betrayal. As Kristeva articulates, every speech is first and foremost an act of mourning the losses inherent to the primary separation from the mother’s body. She writes: ‘Through the mouth that I fill with words instead of my mother whom I miss from now on more than ever, I elaborate that want, and the aggressivity that accompanies it, by saying’ (Kristeva, 1982: 41). Losing her mother as a child, T’s resistance to speaking was also a way to preserve her mother, to avoid separating from her. If any speech is, in a way a confirmation of separating from the mother, for T this ratification was unbearable in a way that made all other speech unspeakable.
After the dream, T gradually began sharing fragments of the broken puzzle of her mother’s death, in which, it emerged, the mother killed herself while T was in the other room. Her father found her sitting outside the locked bathroom door, waiting quietly, and for many months after that, she refused to speak at all. T was in fact the only witness to her mother’s death, perhaps for her, to her mother’s betrayal. She did not have any memory of that period of time.