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Lest there be any doubt that the highly intellectual author of this book, the first translation into English of his 1973 volume, Le Discours vivant, is also a man of passion, we have only to read the last sentence of the original text. “What is more difficult,” the author writes, “is to love the truth as Freud loved it, that is to say, as one loves a sexual object” (p. 260). This book is a testament to Andre Green's passionate search for the truth in Freud's unanswered questions about affect.
It is unfortunate that Le Discours vivant has not been translated into English before now, for this text gives us the origins and most complete rendering of Green's lifelong preoccupation with the relationship between affect and representation in a way that allows us to comprehend his current thinking more readily, both because we come to see its roots and context and because of the work-out we have had in the process. It is an experience like reading a difficult philosophical tract, at moments seemingly incomprehensible, at others blazingly lucid. We wonder at times if the difficulty is the complexity of the ideas (surely a factor), our own inadequate cognition — this is not a book to be read late at night — customary French usages that sound foreign to our ears even in translation, or the translation itself. We realise that the effort has been worth it when, in the end, we discover that we have come to understand the text in a way we could not have imagined and have, in turn, added new depth to our appreciation of the clinical situation.
The main body of the book is divided into three parts. Part I was heretofore available to the English-speaking reader only in a condensed form, his