You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The publication by Free Association Books of these two books, on the question of time and psychoanalysis, has added to the increasing amount of Green's work which has been translated into English. His work has come to represent an entente cordiale between the Anglo-Saxon and Continental traditions. Writing in French he encourages a critical engagement with different theories and credits Lacan, Bion and Winnicott as major influences. Green notes that, while philosophy has given a lot of attention to the question of time, psychoanalysis has given some thought to space but time remains a latent albeit central theme - a situation that he attempts to rectify. In Time in Psychoanalysis: Some Contradictory Aspects his exegesis highlights the implications of the timelessness of the unconscious, the imperative of repetition, infantile amnesia, Nachträglichkeit, primal fantasies and the question of historical truth. Diachrony in Psychoanalysis is a collection of his papers on these same themes spanning the years between 1967 and 1994 and can be read as tracing the development of his thought in Time in Psychoanalysis: Some Contradictory Aspects. In both books Green sets out to explore the relation of time to the unconscious and to examine what the psychoanalytic hypothesis of the unconscious tells us about time.
Green initially trained as a psychiatrist before qualifying as a psychoanalyst. In the early 1960s he attended Lacan's seminar for six years whilst also frequently visiting London where he became familiar with the work of Bion and Winnicott. In 1975 at a conference in London with Anna Freud presiding he presented a ground-breaking paper entitled ‘The analyst, symbolization and absence in the analytic setting’ in which he warned of a crisis in psychoanalysis. He spoke of the need to respond to patients who were suffering from a borderline condition which he characterized by the stopping of time, the failure of symbolization and the decathexis of the object. He went on