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Psychoanalysis: A Paradigm for Clinical Thinking is a collection of André Green's articles published between 1996 and 2001. It offers an introduction to his work for the reader who has not encountered him before and an expansion of familiar arguments for those who have already made his acquaintance. The articles written late in his career extend the ideas he has been developing over a lifetime: the relation of drives to objects; the organization of neurotic and nonneurotic structures; the roles of affect, language, and representation in the mind; the double nature of transference and the place of the third and the negative in psychic functioning. Despite his international prominence and the fame of his “The Dead Mother” (1983), Green's books have been relatively slow to be published in English, and his work is less well known in the United States than the writing of other foreign authors. This is unfortunate, as he proposes a contemporary Freudian perspective of unusual scope and originality.
In his introduction, Green defines psychoanalysis as a form of thinking arising out of and making sense of the clinical encounter. “Clinical thinking forges concepts which express the reasons of the unconscious, the diversity of answers called for by its advances, their transformations into hallucinatory ‘realisations', acting out, somatisations, rationlisations, under the effect of counter-investments, involving disinvestment, etc.” (pp. 10-11). But clinical thinking is subject to the very forces it tries to describe. “To speak of clinical thinking is to allude, in the last instance, to the transformations dictated by anxiety, suffering and pain, to the strategies for denying them, combating them, attempting to get rid of them, but also for trying to transcend them” (p. 11).
Green describes the emergence of clinical thinking in Freud's work on the Dora case and the growing and central recognition by Freud and his contemporaries and successors that clinical thinking was no longer