  The abject is horrifying, repellent, but also fascinating; it is strange but familiar. The process of abjection is not merely a symptom of phobia or borderline disorder, but a necessary and even recurring ordeal in any subject's transition to identification with the father and accession to language. It is the most archaic form of negativity, an exclusion or expulsion which functions by securing the borders of self, carving a space, marking a divide, out of which the ego can emerge. Kristeva calls it the violent attempt “to release the hold of maternal entity” (Kristeva 1982, 13) or rather what will have been the mother, since this process establishes the distinction between the maternal body and the infant in the first place, making possible primary narcissism. The abject exposes the precariousness of the subject/object divide, the fragility of identity, the need to constitute oneself against the threat of, and desire for, dissolution.