André Green Revisited

Representation and the Work of the Negative

Gail S. Reed, Howard B. Levine, Gail S. Reed, Howard B. Levine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429811340
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

André Green was a leading voice in French psychoanalysis, a brilliant thinker and an innovative contributor to our field. His writings sit at the crossroads of contemporary psychoanalysis, where the challenges posed and the opportunities presented by the work of Lacan, Klein, Winnicott and Bion meet the still generative insights of Freud, many of which Green reminded us have yet to be fully developed or appreciated. Green's expansion of Freud's theory of psychic representation and his own formulation of the work of the negative exemplify his idea of clinical thinking and herald what many believe is a new paradigm for psychoanalysis.

This volume of essays, written by an international group of scholars in response to and appreciation of Green's contributions, continues to explore the tension between presence and absence, loss and remainder, fort and da and the creative, dialectical arc that exists between these pairs in psychic development and the analytic process. It aims to expand the reach of our theory and practice to patients whose difficulties lie at the limits of analyzability, beyond the spectrum of neurotic disturbances for which classical psychoanalysis was originally intended, and to place the reader at the frontiers of contemporary clinical thinking and analytic technique.

PART I

REMEMBRANCES

CHAPTER ONE


In dialogue with André Green

René Roussillon

My journey of psychoanalytic thinking has long been shared with a few “special companions”, some of whom, like Winnicott or Bion, I have known only from their books, while others I could meet and also have exchanges and debates with. André Green was one of these special companions, one of those with whom, whatever I thought, said, or wrote, I continued the dialogue. For many French psychoanalysts of my generation, Green was one of those—but there are not so many—with whom it was interesting to think and discuss, one of those who illuminate the path ahead. I do not think I have ever ventured to write an article or explore a question, whether clinical, metapsychological, or technical, without finding out first what Green had thought or said about it.

I am not, however, what one might call a “disciple” of Green, or a pupil; moreover, I do not think that it is a good policy for a psychoanalyst to be a disciple or pupil, and if it sometimes happened, rarely enough, it is true, that I did not agree with his propositions, his thinking has always elucidated my own.

Green himself pointed out that the major lesson he learnt from his adventure of encountering Lacan’s thought was that of not contenting oneself with travelling endlessly down the well-trodden paths of what has already been thought, of the belief that one has thought about everything, or of the “right-thinking” transmitted by psychoanalytic orthodoxy or by a type of master. Psychoanalysis only remains alive and vibrant if it is constantly re-examined, if the adventure of thought that it represents, the exploration that it implies, are constantly renewed.

When he tries to think about the relationship of the creator with the societies in which he is immersed, Bion describes the figure of the mystic. I would not say that Green was a mystic, as this word has a particular connotation in French that does not really suit him; on the other hand, I would use the characteristics that Bion associates with it. Psychoanalysis cannot do without its establishment, but, at the same time as it becomes institutionalised psychoanalysis, it is in danger of losing the crux of its essence, of becoming “psychoanalytic ideology”. That is why the psychoanalytic project must be re-examined constantly and cannot cease to explore the question of its foundations.

Conversely, the impact of a thinker or of a body of thought also supposes that it belongs to the established societies, which wrestle with it while transmitting it. This supposes that the creator occupies a particular position, at once sufficiently inside the establishment so that his thinking has its maximum impact and, at the same time, sufficiently independent of the established orthodoxies, thus sufficiently outside, so that, freed from established ideas, he can pursue his own creative exploration. A complex alchemy has to be achieved here and a particular posture maintained in order to avoid splitting and to preserve independence of thought.

Green achieved this alchemy marvellously and he knew how to walk the ridgeline that it implies. His thinking never ceased to draw on Freud’s own thought, to explore it more deeply, and, thus, found its place within the French-speaking psychoanalytic tradition; at the same time, by drawing on Bion and Winnicott to elucidate his own clinical experience, he was constantly venturing well beyond the limits fixed by it.

I do not think it is possible to reflect on his scientific contributions by separating them from the different institutional, political, and epistemological “dialogues” that he engaged in throughout his life, because, in fact, we find the same attitude on these different “fronts”. I am, therefore, going to present a few of the areas of dialogue and reflection in which he was involved.

Dialoguing with the limit and the other fields of the human sciences

A creator in the world of clinical psychoanalysis, however intrinsically pertinent his creation is, must, if he wants to leave a lasting imprint, link his name to the exploration of a particular clinical problem: for Melanie Klein, it was child psychoanalysis; for Bion, groups, psychosis, and transformational processes; for Winnicott, the world of the baby and early childhood. Green, and it was an interest he shared with Anzieu, his co-reporter of the CPLR of 1970, linked his name to the question of the borderline states of the psyche.

This question and what it implies, at both the metapsychological and the clinical level, is, to a lesser or greater extent, always present, sometimes openly, sometimes implicitly, in his different reflections, even when they seem to be far removed from the question of limits or from the threat to identity that it poses for the life of the subject. It was here that the crux of the effort had to be made, both in France, in the dialogue at a distance with Lacan—a dialogue that never ceased completely at any point during his life’s work—and on the international stage, in the array of studies on narcissism which occupied the foreground of the stage of psychoanalytic reflections.

It was the major question of psychoanalytic research and exploration, largely anticipating both the evolution of the demands for psychoanalysis which would characterise the last quarter of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, and their dialectic with social evolution and the particular mode of handling the narcissistic organisation that was becoming such a common feature of clinical work. It was the question in the light of which all the others would be revisited, the question that was at the centre of both dialogues and debates, and even the struggle for the defence of clinical psychoanalysis.

In these different fields, Green knew how to ride the most promising wave by placing the accent on the question of the particularities of représentance (see my remarks below) and of affect (and the non-distinction affect representation in relation to the psychic representative of the drive) in extreme modes of functioning and psychic states by exploring their effects in the problem of artistic creation, and even by examining their effects on the neurotic economy itself, and, finally, by regarding them as the interface of encounters with the other fields of the human sciences.

For exploration of the problem of limits does not confine thinking to the edges of borderline patients alone; it opens up a field that covers the most diverse aspects of clinical psychoanalysis: it is a new paradigm for psychoanalysis and not a regional advance that concerns only a certain number of limited clinical entities. It was a question on the basis of which the narcissistic component of each of the modes of psychic functioning would be explored in greater depth. Green even felt, beyond the question of limits, that the current studies on melancholy and autistic processes were paving the way for a new paradigmatic evolution, the next one, no doubt, once all the lessons of the previous one had been sufficiently drawn.

The question of limits encounters, and is dialectalised with, that of the sexual and the first forms of drive life, the drive impulses, as much as it is rooted in the body and certainly the biological itself; its pivotal point, Green sensed early on, taking up a fundamental aspect of Anglo-Saxon psychoanalysis, was to be sought around affect, its composition and its forms. The new paradigms in view in the case of autism and melancholia will extend, as we can already sense in contemporary studies, to explorations of sensory-motricity and its place in the process of symbolisation.

The burning question of the autistic paradigm, which, as we know, has unleashed the anger of the sworn opponents of clinical psychoanalysis and obscurantism, leads me to make another remark. Green always considered, and in this he was faithful to a Freudian tradition, that psychoanalysis should be in dialogue with the other disciplines of the human sciences. In his article of 1970 devoted to “repetition”, he offers very profound thoughts on the biological anchoring of double effects while emphasising this particularity of the first processes of life: the fundamental processes revealed by genetics, which represent the first operations of DNA. DNA with the double helix, before the transfer RNA and the messenger RNA, begins by providing itself with a copy of itself, by fabricating a double of itself. Since the discovery of efference copies¹ in modern neuroscience research and of the famous mirror neurons, the question of reflection and double representation in biological processes has been constantly highlighted.

But this anchoring in the processes arising from biology was, no doubt, a form of legacy from his medical training; this reminder of the biological body was not the only dialogue or excursus that Green allowed himself. His work is regularly dotted with references to linguistics (in his studies on language), to mythology, even to certain studies in developmental psychology, not to mention his immense knowledge of the artistic field, and others that I have forgotten. Green did not fear dialogue with related fields, knowledge of which could enrich psychoanalytic thought. A strong anchoring in clinical work underpins his identity sufficiently for there to be no need to be afraid of encountering other disciplines, provided, of course, that one continues to practise and to be open to exploration.

It was in this same spirit that, when he took over the reins of a psychoanalytic society, he inaugurated in France, in 1989, colloquia open to the general public, proposing that psychoanalysis and its debates should no longer be reserved only for clinicians and their work sessions within psychoanalytic societies. He had foreseen, then, that psychoanalysis was going to make its entry into “politics”, that it was going to become an object of social debate, a situation we are very much faced with now.

Dialogue on the politics of psychoanalysis

This leads me to the question of the “politics of psychoanalysis” in which Green also distinguished himself.

It was also necessary to re-establish dialogues with the other psychoanalytic societies, dialogues that had been interrupted in France by the various splits of 1953, 1963, and 1968, to show that the psychoanalysts of diverse persuasions could engage in dialogue together, that psychoanalysis remained one in spite of its theoretical diversities, and that the various forces could be united for the social struggles that were looming.

Opening up a dialogue within psychoanalysis itself by organising a congress in 2002 devoted to the encounter with the other psychoanalytic societies and with the clinical workers from the different fields of psychic care was a way, was it not, of trying to hone the tools with which psychoanalysis would try to defend itself?

In this sense, too, if the current and coming generations continue to draw the lessons of openness that he proposed, Green’s legacy will, no doubt, continue to be active for many years to come.

Whatever one might think of Green’s sometimes difficult character, he did not cease to open up fields of encounter and dialogue, either within the psychoanalytic community or with the other sciences of man and of his forms of expression.

One cannot, in fact, reduce his contributions to the exploration of the question of limits and of the forms of narcissistic suffering with which this question is crucially bound up, or even to language and its relation to the psychoanalytic situation. For they also concern the absolutely crucial question of creation in its diverse forms, but also of the diverse forms of production of the human imagination, myths, dreams, etc.

To be quite honest, none of the fields of expression of conscious and unconscious psychic life and of their metapsychological theorisation escaped the delight of his explorations and the wisdom of his propositions. When Green turned his attention to the clinical practice or theorisation of a particular field, it at once promised a significant advance and announced a renewal of the question. His thinking was creative and exerted itself in all the domains in which a psychoanalytic approach promised to be pertinent. Green was a “generalist” of clinical and psychoanalytical thinking, a generalist in the sense that his contributions covered the whole field, but also a specialist of each of these fields in so far as, when he ventured into one of them, it was always with a good knowledge of the existing studies concerning it, even when he did not take the trouble to mention them or cite them in detail. There is no lack of choice, therefore, when it comes to paying tribute to his prodigious activity and to his immense scientific creativity, and I must say, for my part, that I have never engaged in reflections on one of the fields covered by psychoanalytic thought without first informing myself about what André Green had produced there.

I have no doubt that many future studies will stress the fecundity of his diverse contributions, but, in these troubled times for contemporary psychoanalysis, it is another aspect of his presence in the international community that I want to turn my attention to now: what I would be tempted to call his “politics of psychoanalysis”, a policy of openness and a policy of open debates. But the man remained faithful to himself, for what I am going to summarise briefly concerning the positions and actions of Green in his “external” politics of psychoanalysis is merely the transposition of the positions that he also held within the internal politics of psychoanalytic thinking. He was one of those who, at a time when they were strongly opposed by many French psychoanalysts, opened up psychoanalytic reflection to a number of Anglo-Saxon or Latin-American psychoanalysts whom he knew as a consequence of his extensive travelling. Opening up French psychoanalysis to the most stimulating work of psychoanalysts from elsewhere was the same process as the one we are going to discover now in his endeavours to open psychoanalytic societies to the socius.

In 1989, when he was president of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society (SPP), he initiated and inaugurated the colloquium at UNESCO, the first of the “Colloquiums of the SPP president”. This colloquium marked a turning point, in as much as it was the first large-scale colloquium, the first “official” colloquium of the SPP that was open to a wide public sympathetic to psychoanalysis, to practitioners who did not belong to the component societies of the IPA, and which was organised for, and orientated towards, the clinicians engaged in the domain of psychic care who sought, in psychoanalytic thinking, reference points for reflecting on their own endeavours in the various clinical fields in which they were operating.

André Green had clearly foreseen the dangers hovering over a psychoanalysis that was timid, turned in upon itself, holed up in an ivory tower, and which refused dialogue with society in general and the debates that this implied. To hell with a psychoanalysis that was in danger of becoming nothing more than an introverted “dusty psychoanalysis”, and of continuing to consider itself as a psychoanalysis that was idealised by an intelligentsia in control of cultural life; it was necessary both to explain and present its new developments and, at the same time, to accept possible controversies with those who were beginning to contest the field of clinical practices.

When the danger became even clearer many years later and, in the same spirit, he was once again at the origin of a vast colloquium that brought together not only the majority of the analysts from the French component societies of the IPA, but also from societies of the Lacanian movement. It was necessary to re-establish the dialogue interrupted by the various splits of 1953, 1963, and 1968 and to show that psychoanalysts of different schools could engage in dialo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• IPA Publications Committee
• About the Editors and Contributors
• Introduction: André Green, a personal appreciation
• Part I: Remembrances
• Part II: The Dead Mother
• Part III: Representation
• Part IV: The Work of the Negative
• Part V: Clinical Applications
• Index