  In Kristeva's understanding of melancholic breakdown, the problem is similar to the one discussed above in the section on Irigaray, namely that loss goes unnamed and unmourned but thereby stays unprocessed within, leaving the subject stagnant and inert. Women, in Kristeva's view, suffer the loss of creativity, the incapacity for sublimation, more severely than men. Women's access to language, and creative self-transformation, is more vulnerable to disturbance both because of the (previously discussed) inexorable repression of their pre-Oedipal relation to the mother and because they have greater difficulty establishing a primary identification with the father. Whereas the loss of the archaic bond with the maternal body is (potentially) sublated by men into the rhythms of language, for women it often becomes a dead space where once there was life, filled only with loss and emptiness. Imprisoned by an undead, unmourned, mother, excluded from language or representation, women are vulnerable to the devastations of symbolic sacrifice without recompense.