La Clinique Du Négatif: Narcissisme, Destructivité et Dépression (The Clinic of the Negative: Narcissism, Destructivity and Depression). By André Green. Paris:  Ithaque, 2022,  141 pp.

The expression “clinic of the negative,”1 from which this collection takes its title, is found in André Green's (1980, p. 226) pioneering essay on the dead mother syndrome. The essays constituting it, dating from the last decade of Green's life and whose contents he discussed with Fernando Urribarri shortly before his death in January 2012, grow out of his principal conceptualizations on the work of the negative (Chapters 1, 2, and 4), including life and death narcissism (Chapter 3; previously published in English), depression (Chapter 5), and psychosomatic illness (Chapter 6). A dismissive 1972 review of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (the “schizo,” the contemporary revolutionary hero caught in the crossfire of individual libidinal economy and capitalistic political economy, heralds the destruction of Oedipus struggling merely between mother and father), is herein appended. Along with the revised edition of On the Destruction and Death Drives (Green 2010), Ithaque has published several volumes of Green's uncollected papers, and La Clinique du Négatif belongs to this rewarding undertaking.

In his 1975 London report, André Green laid the groundwork for the metapsychological comprehension of certain mental structures—borderline states—that did not correspond to that of neurosis explored by Freud but for which Freud paved the way in his final drive theory. In Green's fullest formulations, as in this volume, the clinical thinking of the negative relates to a range of non-neurotic structures, that is, in addition to borderline patients, severe depressives, perversions, narcissistic personalities, and psychosomatic conditions. The seemingly intractable defenses

of patients suffering from these symptoms in which features of the work of the negative include repression, splitting, forclosure or radical, unsymbolizable rejection, and negation (pp. 52 and 83).

The co