Affect And Clinical Technique

It is difficult to do justice to the richness of Green' original printed presentation, which had consisted of thirty-four densely packed pages in English, in which he gave evidence as a master clinician of broad experience as well as a diligent scholar of every aspect of the theoretical aspects of psychoanalysis including the subject of affects (see also ‘On discriminating and not discriminating between affect and representation’, 1999, Int. J. Psychoanal., 80:277-316). The paper he actually delivered departed somewhat from the printed version and is the one Ruth Stein attended to rigorously.

Green' presentation was entitled ‘On discriminating and not discriminating between affect and representation’. He began by describing his frame of mind at the beginning of an analytic session: he maintains free-floating attention, tries to perceive the patient' internal conflicts and ‘something addressed, implicitly or explicitly to me’, as he put it.

Despite his obvious respect for the work of Freud and his obvious mastery of Freud' complicated metapsychology, which he was reluctant to abandon in favour of new psychoanalytic theories that to him are often superficial, he nevertheless expressed his debt to Lacan, Bion and Winnicott in particular for his new frame of mind. As he put it, ‘what happens in the Freudian experience is not an observation of the visible but a reading of that emerging in an intersubjective, bi-personal field where what happens is co-determined by the agents present. The receiver becomes an inducer’, says Green. This is the core of the transference.

Because his presentation was cut short by the dramatic appearance and greetings from the President of Chile, Green was unable to present the most sensitive, detailed and dramatic last part of his paper. This was a comprehensive outline of the defensive limitations of borderline patients in which ‘denial of affect may reach extreme forms due to their inability to separate affects and representation’.

Andrade de Az