André Green (psychoanalyst)
French psychoanalyst (1927–2012)
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Through Psychoanalysis, Cairo and Jews
Life and career
André Green was born in Cairo, Egypt, to non-observant Jewish parents. He studied medicine (specialising in psychiatry) at Paris Medical School and worked at several hospitals. In 1965, after having finished his training as a psychoanalyst, he became a member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society (SPP), of which he was the president from 1986 to 1989. From 1975 to 1977 he was a vice president of the International Psychoanalytical Association and from 1979 to 1980 he was a professor at University College London. He died at age 84 in Paris.
André Green was the author of numerous papers and books on the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, and the psychoanalytic criticism of culture and literature; many of these works have been translated into English.
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Intellectual development
Encounter with Lacan
In the early 1960s, Green attended Jacques Lacan's seminars without abandoning his affiliation to the SPP - a bold decision which for some time enabled him to straddle the competing strands of French psychoanalysis from an independent position. As the decade progressed however, he moved further from Lacan, and finally broke with the latter in 1970 by criticising his concept of the signifier for its neglect of affect.
By doing so, he replaced the SPP's normally defensive approach towards Lacanianism with a direct theoretical confrontation. Green points out that whereas "Lacan is saying that the unconscious is structured like a language ... when you read Freud, it is obvious that this proposition doesn't work for a minute. Freud very clearly opposes the unconscious (which he says is constituted by thing-presentations and nothing else) to the pre-conscious. What is related to language can only belong to the pre-conscious."
In his later work Green would become increasingly hostile toward the Lacanian school, disparaging it as being not far from a Stalinist cult of personality. He also opined that the substance of Lacanian thinking itself was severely limited if one separated it from the "drivel", surrounding it.
The Greenian synthesis
Over the decades since, R. Horacio Etchegoyen concluded that what he called "the complex itinerary of Andre Green's prolific work" has continued to demonstrate the intellectually independent way in which "Green is a Freudian analyst who has managed to integrate in a lucid synthesis the influence of authors as diverse as Lacan, Bion, and, especially, Winnicott".
The result was to make André Green the creator of what has been called a Greenian theory of psychoanalysis (Kohon, 1999). Building on Freudian metapsychology, Green elaborated a further theory of the unrepresentable, relating thinking to absence as well as to sexuality.
While containing a multiplicity of local contributions - on the central phobic position; subjective disengagement; unconscious recognition; the dead mother; and more - the Greenian psychoanalytic framework has been seen as a totality, producing something greater than the sum of its parts.
Theoretical contributions
On the work of the negative
A significant part of Green's contribution to contemporary psychoanalysis has centred on his exploration of 'the different modalities of the work of the negative'. He has highlighted the way 'accepting the negation of what was there is necessary for relationships to new things to become possible' - the way that 'to accept the reality of lack...opens the door, through a process of working-through, to new experience, new ideals and new object-relationships'.
On the analytic setting
For Green, the analytic setting is in itself a recreation of psychic reality, Michael Parsons proposes, quoting the early Green:
'The symbolism of the setting comprises a triangular paradigm, uniting the three polarities of the dream (narcissism), of maternal caring (from the mother, following Winnicott), and of the prohibition of incest (from the father, following Freud). What the psychoanalytic apparatus gives rise to, then, is the symbolisation of the unconscious structure of the Oedipus Complex '.
On dreams
Mary Jacobus argues that for André Green, dreams are "negative states trying to accede to symbolization." In addition, she invokes Adam Phillips, who writes, "Dreams and affects, and states of emptiness or absence have been the essential perplexities of Green's work because they are the areas of experience...in which the nature of representation itself is put at risk."
Moral narcissism
Green saw moral narcissism as the attempt to elevate oneself above ordinary human needs and attachments - an ascetic attempt at creating an impregnable sense of moral superiority.