  Still, Kristeva charts differing arcs for the paternal and maternal relationships in the constitution of subjectivity. The imaginary father empowers a new psychic space premised on the distinction between internal and external, self and other. The breaking in of the signifier inaugurates individuation, the assumption of bodily form and corporeal unity, and thereby entails loss of the maternal body. In Kristeva's view, matricide, repression of the maternal body, is a necessary event on the way to subjectivity. The bodily exchange between mother and child can serve as a barrier to love, imprisoning the child in an overwhelming bond. The loving mother provides the first approach to language and law by demonstrating love for an object who is not the child, a third outside this dyad who makes the dyadic relationship itself possible and releases the emotional pressure of it. The loving father proffers a kind of promise, even as he disrupts fusion with the mother, allowing and encouraging the child to represent itself. Kristeva's thought here follows Lacan's idea that a mother whose only object of desire is her child will produce a child who cannot move beyond the psychosis of being the phallus for her.