Since arriving in France in 1966 from Bulgaria, Julia Kristeva (1941–) has achieved international recognition for her writings about women in the psychoanalytic tradition. Her work is considered multi-disciplinary, encompassing art criticism, philosophy, and cultural critique. Kristeva’s primary theoretical contribution has been a distinction between the symbolic aspects of language and what she calls the semiotic, a psychic level of meaning based on a child’s relationship to its mother. Primary human desires are attached to the semiotic, which is based on the biological rhythms of the maternal body, although the semiotic eludes symbolic translation.