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 André 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