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Unrepresented States and the Construction of Meaning comprises twelve sophisticated, often complex essays, all well-written and very informative. the book is dedicated to the memory of André Green, and in an
introductory chapter the editors—Gail Reed, Howard Levine, and Dominique Scarfone—describe Green's understanding of the primordial mind. They describe too the theoretical and technical innovations he believed were required in undertaking the psychoanalytic treatment of nonneurotic, borderline, and often severely traumatized individuals who lack, in whole or in part, a capacity for self- and object representation and who have a related absence of psychic structure. Green presented his views on the psychoanalytic treatment of these “borderline” patients during an historic debate with Leo Rangell on the issue of change in psychoanalysis at the 1975 meetings of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Each of the authors in this volume touches, directly or indirectly, on representation or its absence in Green's work, or in their own. the editors espouse the position taken by Green forty years ago when he argued that psychoanalysts needed a new set of basic assumptions regarding work with borderline patients, and had to modify their clinical expectations, their techniques, and the analytic setting in order to treat them successfully. With this volume the editors seek to present these ideas, their subsequent development, and evidence of their clinical utility to North American analysts, many of whom might not yet have been exposed to Green's groundbreaking innovations or to the work of others currently grappling with the vicissitudes of understanding and treating patients who lack an adequate capacity for representation.
This volume's introductory chapter provides a superb explication of Green's theoretical postulates and his approach to psychoanalytic work with these patients. as one of those for whom Green's work was unfamiliar, I found this chapter essentia