Bracha L. Ettinger

Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger (born in Tel Aviv, 1948) is a feminist artist, psychoanalyst and philosopher of Israeli and French background. She is best known for the theory of the matrixial space, a proposal that questions the central place of the phallic model in psychoanalysis and aesthetics, and that has had a lasting impact on contemporary feminist thought.

She studied clinical psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she worked as a research assistant to Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Between 1975 and 1979 she trained and worked in London, including with R. D. Laing. In 1981 she settled in Paris and turned to painting as a full-time profession. She earned a doctorate in psychoanalysis in 1987 and another in aesthetics in 1996, both at universities in Paris. Her main theoretical works include Matrix and Metramorphosis (1992), The Matrixial Gaze (1995) and The Matrixial Borderspace (2006).

Her thinking starts from a psychic space that precedes sexual differentiation, linked to the maternal body and to the early bond with the mother, in which the self takes shape through shared borders with others. From this starting point she reconsiders the gaze, ethics and trauma, especially the trauma of the Shoah, the intergenerational transmission of pain and the relationship between art and memory.

Ettinger is also a painter. Her work, often centred on mythological figures such as Eurydice, Medusa and Persephone, has been shown in European and Israeli museums. Her influence reaches feminist theory, aesthetics and the study of trauma.