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.
Andre Green begins this book with a quote from W. B. Yeats's “The Tower”: “It is time that I wrote my will.” It is an opening that stops readers in their tracks.
In his preface, Green stated that this book would be his attempt at an outline of psychoanalysis, and his final book. Then, toward the end of this book, he writes that he is “transcribing here the essential ideas that have informed my writings from 1954 to 2002” (pp. 234-235). Considering how much Green has written in over forty years, Green's aspirations make writing a review of this book quite daunting.
Green's essential writings have included books on affect (The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse), on symbolization, absence, and the dead mother (On Private Madness), on narcissism (Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism), on masochism and analytic failure (The Work of the Negative), on time (Diachrony in Psychoanalysis), and on psychoanalytic thinking (Psychoanalysis: A Paradigm for Clinical Thinking).
Green is proposing to condense over a thousand pages of writing into a three hundred-page book. He is once again debating Lacan, absorbing Winnicott and Bion, rereading Freud and in rereading, rediscovering Freud and psychoanalysis. Green himself approaches his task by modeling himself after Freud, who at the end of his life wrote An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, by describing this work as an outline. As was the case with Freud's, it is much more than that.
Indeed, one of the things I most valued in my reading of Green is the way he brings his readers back to Freud and helps his readers appreciate Freud all over again. Having said that he was taking Outline as a model, I went back to look again at this work from the end of Freud's life. In sixty pages and nine chapters, Freud succinctly lays out what is most essential to him in psychoanalysis: the apparatus of the mind (brain, acts of consciousness, the vast area of the unconscious); a theory of instincts that includes Eros and the death drive; the deve