One of the first things that T has told me when coming to therapy was how difficult it has always been for her to speak. T’s stories were often unclear and felt like an attempt to detach the words from their emotions. Her language felt empty and shallow and I experienced myself unable to be emotionally involved. I never experienced her sadness, her anger, her anxiety. Her words came out in short sentences as pieces of dried reality that were devoid of any musical dynamics. It was missing a rhythm and an emotional tone in a way that turned her speech into a monotonous utterance, often making me wonder about the semiotic aspect of her language.
According to Kristeva ‘[T]he drives that extract the body from its homogeneous shell and turn it into a space linked to the outside, they are the forces which mark out the chora in process’ (Kristeva, 1998: 143). Harnessing Plato’s khôra – the archaic mobile and receptacle realm, she conceptualises the semiotic khôra, as the pre-verbal dimension of language, which – although lacking structure and meaning – is non the less necessary for the creative and infinite potential of its signifying capacity. Stemming from the relationship to the mother’s body, this (pre)linguistic aspect of language contains the movements, the rhythms, and the emotional reverberations that generate the ‘multiplicity of ex- pulsions, ensuring its [language’s] infinite renewal’ (Kristeva, 1998: 134, my addition).
Indeed, T’s mother died when she was a school-age child, but her death and its reverberations in her life remained untouched in our sessions for a long time. Often, when speaking about her mother, she would get confused, or forget, let go of what she was saying, as if she was not invested in her own words. Gradually unveiling bits and pieces of her life, I learnt that T was always a quiet child without many friendships.