Judith Le Soldat: Band 5: Kissing & Killing in Kyoto

›For a person like me, who came to psychoanalysis out of indomitable curiosity and, to put it bluntly, out of vital necessity, it is an uncomfortable challenge to speak to you here about the question of whether analysis has cured me.‹ With this sentence, Judith Le Soldat opened the lecture she gave in 1992 at the Vienna Congress on the subject of ›Does psychoanalysis heal?‹, in the course of which she demonstrated in her own inimitable way, as astute as she was personal, profound and rhetorically brilliant, what psychoanalysis is and can do - by putting the subject of the conference itself on the couch, so to speak, and deconstructing the question as a symptom of an unconscious conflict that no one who practises psychoanalysis can escape. This lecture is one of the highlights that the fifth and final volume of the Judith Le Soldat-Edition is making available to a wider audience for the first time. The volume brings together the essays, lectures and articles published in journals and anthologies. The ten texts are supplemented by a previously unpublished essay from her literary estate.

The title Kissing & Killing in Kyoto was taken from the last article published during Le Soldat’s lifetime. This text occupies a special position within Le Soldat’s oeuvre in that it is the only one in which she presents what she described in the posthumously published lectures as ›the second variant of transgression‹ in more detail, using Kleist’s character Penthesilea as an example.