[10] She resigned from that role with a public letter intended to open a radical discussion in the artworld, following the administration's rejection of her request for a pause due to the attacks on civilians in Israel and in Gaza and the ongoing heavy losses of life.

As well as painting, drawing, artist-books (notebooks) and photography, she began writing her theory of the matrixial space in ethics, aesthetics and psychoanalysis, and received a D.E.A.

[17] She continued to train as a psychoanalyst with Françoise Dolto, Piera Auglanier, Pierre Fedida, and Jacques-Alain Miller, and became an influential contemporary French feminist.

Her art has inspired historian Griselda Pollock, international curator Catherine de Zegher, and philosophers Jean-François Lyotard, Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Brian Massumi, who dedicated a number of essays to her painting.

[33] Ettinger's art engages in the subjects of trauma, mothers and women during the Shoah and during wars, as well as the feminine in mythology: Eurydice, Medusa, Demeter, Persephone, and matrixial Eros.

[34][35][36] Her subjects concern the human condition and the tragedy of war, and her work in this aspect joins artists such as Käthe Kollwitz and Francisco Goya.

Since 1992, apart from her notebooks, most of her artwork consists of mixed media and oil paintings, with a few parallel series that spread over time like "Matrix — Family Album", "Autistwork" and "Eurydice", with themes of transgenerational transmission of personal and historical trauma, traces of memory and remnants of oblivion, the passage from pain to beauty Shoah and the World Wars,[41][42][43] the gaze, light, color and the space,[44] female body, womanhood and maternality, inspired by classical painting and creating an abstract space where the questions of beauty[45] and sublime are renewed for our time.

In the last decade, Ettinger's oil on canvas paintings involve figures like Medusa, Demeter and Persephone, and Eurydice, and the subject matter of the Pietà, the Kaddish, Eros, and Chronos.

[94] Ettinger is a theoretician who invented and developed a language for a feminine-maternal-'matrixial' (matricial) dimension in artistic creativity[95] and in ethics of care and responsibility.

Working on the question of trauma, memory and oblivion[101] at the intersections of human subjectivity, feminine sexuality, maternal subjectivity, psychoanalysis, art[102] and aesthetics, she contributed to psychoanalysis the idea of a feminine-maternal sphere of sexuality and ethics, function, and structure where symbolic and imaginary dimensions are based on femaleness in the real (the meaning of matrix is womb).

The French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard related to Ettinger's writing and painting in two famous articles written in 1993 and 1995, Anima Minima (Diffracted Traces)[103] andL'anamnese (anamnesis).

Therapists must likewise realize that during regression phantasmatic maternal "not-enoughness" appears and must also be recognized as the result of the process itself, and be worked-through without the mother-hating that Ettinger considers contributes to a "psychotization" of the subject, which blocks the passage from rage to sorrow and from there to compassion.

[107][108][109] Ettinger revolutionized the field of psychoanalysis and cultural studies when she coined in artist's books (Notebooks) that she exposed publicly starting from 1985 and in a long series of articles published since 1991 the concept of the matrixial (matricial) space and proposed the feminine matrixial time-space of feminine/prenatal encounter-event as source of human aesthetics and proto-ethics, and femininity as the deep core of ethics, which enters the human subjectivity via the maternal.

She had suggested that pre-natal impressions, connected to the phantasmatic and traumatic real of the pregnant becoming-mother, are trans-inscribed in the emerging subject and form the primary phase and position of the human psyche.

According to Ettinger, in parallel but also before expressions of abjection (Julia Kristeva) or rejection (Freud on Narcissism) of the other, primary compassion, awe and fascinance (which are unconscious psychic affective accesses to the other, and which join reattunement and differentiating-in-jointness by borderlinking) occur.

The infant's primary compassion is a proto-ethical psychological means that joins the aesthetical fascinance and creates a feel-knowing that functions at best within maternal (and also parental) compassionate hospitality.

Ettinger's recent theoretical proposals starting around 2008 include the three Shocks of maternality and the paternal infanticide impulses (Laius Complex)[129] Carriance[130] and the Demeter–Persephone Complex, working around Greek Mythology and the Hebrew Bible, the woman artists Eva Hesse, Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz and the poets and writers Sylvia Plath, Marguerite Duras and Alejandra Pizarnik.

Some of her portraits, like those of Christian Boltanski,[140] Jean-François Lyotard,[141] Edmond Jabès,[142] Emmanuel Lévinas,[143] Robert Doisneau[144] and Yeshayahu Leibowitz appear in several official publications and collections.

The knowledge revealed in this way, of the invisible chords to which our senses are not yet attuned, is at the basis of the ethical obligation to attend to the vulnerability of the other, human, animal, and even our shared earth, through care and compassion and in wonder and reverence.

Lets work together against retraumatization and toward an understanding of a human subject which is informed by feminine transubjectivity in all genders, and become sensitive to the particular Eros of borderlinking between each I and non-I, which is a kind of love...[145][146][147]Fascinance is forum which was started by Srishti Madurai in South India on 24 December 2013[148] which offers Introductory Course in Ettingerian Psychoanalysis[146][149] The aims of the forum are: Ettinger is author of several books and more than eighty psychoanalytical essays elaborating different aesthetical, ethical, psychoanalytical and artistic aspects of the matrixial.

She is co-author of volumes of conversation with Emmanuel Levinas, Edmond Jabès, Craigie Horsfield, Félix Guattari and Christian Boltanski.

Her book Regard et Espace-de-Bord Matrixiels (essays 1994–1999) appeared in French in 1999 (La lettre volée), and has been published in English as The Matrixial Borderspace (2006, University of Minnesota Press, edited by Brian Massumi and foreword by Judith Butler and Griselda Pollock).

[1] Ettinger is one of the leading intellectuals associated with contemporary French feminism and feminist psychoanalytical thought alongside Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray.