  The confusion of borders, the ambivalent relation to maternal space at the outskirts of narcissism, also motivates melancholia. The idea of the maternal as the primally repressed recurs in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, where Kristeva claims, “matricide is our vital necessity” (Kristeva 1989, 27), the founding partition that facilitates the birth and growth of the ego. Kristeva praises the child, the “intrepid wanderer” who “leaves the crib to meet the mother in the realm of representations” (Kristeva 1989, 41). Maintaining that the organization of the psyche is premised on loss, Kristeva also understands that the suffering entailed by loss can derail the formation of a self, that loss itself can become the dominant reality for some who are unable to establish a secure relation to themselves. While mourning, for Kristeva as for Freud, enables a subject to, gradually and painfully, let go of loss by establishing a relation in language to it, melancholia is a practice which enables the subject to hold onto lost objects, most especially the mother or, better, the dead (or repressed) mother. The loving father facilitates mourning and linguistic creativity; the deadening mother disables self-creation. The generation of the ego out of expulsion, the division of unity, is not simply a mournful moment, but also potentially a joyous one, in which the advent of language, the promise of the father, offers reparation and life with a world of others, so that words can provide the nourishment that the breast previously had. The father makes it possible to fill the void with language and the formation of signifying bonds.