This work, in which André Green consolidates the groundbreaking reorientation of psychoanalytic thought he began some twenty years before the present volume, is important and stimulating. The author here places his ideas under the rubric of the “negative,” a topic he divides into normal and pathological. The normal work of the negative shows itself as the indirection instituted by repression and other defenses to protect the mental apparatus from becoming overwhelmed. Through such indirection individuals spare themselves the psychic truths that we analysts help our patients retrace to their unconscious roots. The work of the pathologically negative is destructive, the withdrawal of investment in the object world.

Green's originality lies in a radical reconceptualization of the metapsychological field of psychoanalysis. Because conventional wisdom has it that the model of neurosis lies at the heart of all (rather than most of) Freud's psychoanalytic theorizing, the ground against which conscious thought is generally understood to show itself is the