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With Freudian metapsychology going through a critical stage and psychoanalysts divided into groups with conflicting theoretico-clinical and practical approaches, it has become impossible to ignore the scale of the attack directed at the Freudian conception of sexuality and the drives by recent theoretical reformulations in psychoanalysis. In certain currents of psychoanalytic thinking this has led to the adoption of radical positions that effectively dispense with the concepts of drive, libido and sexuality and attempt to replace them with alternative hypotheses that their advocates claim have the advantage of greater closeness to the analytic situation.
Throughout over a quarter-century of achievements in the clinical and theoretical field, André Green has always demonstrated his adherence to the central place and fundamental value, in working with the mind, of the concepts of sexuality and the drives bequeathed to us by Freud. Many articles and book chapters give ample evidence of this (1973, 1983, 1984, 1990, 1995a, b), in particular one of his most recent pieces, ‘Has sexuality anything to do with psychoanalysis?’ (1995c), which was the subject of a highly acclaimed lecture and also appeared to herald a more extensive piece of work.
Now, in Les chaînes d’Éros, his fourteenth book, Green gives a wide-ranging exposition of the revision, or rehabilitation, of the status of sexuality and the drives that he considers to be essential for psychoanalysis today, beginning with a critical evaluation of some contemporary theoretical viewpoints.
Green's thesis might be usefully summarised with this simple sentence: ‘This work arises from the need to shed some light on sexuality, and on the problem that its status is creating for post-Freudian psychoanalysis’ (p. 261). Stressing that contemporary sexuality seems to lack the aura that gave the earliest psychoanalysts the ‘sense of being explorers of the mind, discoverers of a new continent’, the author points to the diminishing