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What struck me about this book—and I have found this throughout André Green's work—is the author's exceptional way of combining his knowledge of and loyalty to Freud's texts
with a felicitous creativity and intuitiveness that opens up new and original vistas. This familiarity with Freud's oeuvre never takes the form of a ‘religion’ or ‘ideology’, but constitutes a living field to be ploughed for hints, ideas and intuitions that afford access to the new.
There is also a kind of ‘modesty’ in Green, in the sense that others—even if they lacked his profound knowledge of Freud's work—would go their own way in blissful unawareness of how much implicit or indirect inspiration they derive from the ‘folds’ of Freud's text, whereas Green is very precise in this respect and can always specify exactly which Freudian ‘thread’ constitutes the starting point for his development. I am therefore impressed to see how Freud's theories do not hold back Green's thought but instead serve in effect as a runway along which he first taxies and from which he then takes off into the blue of his new ideas.
The book is admittedly not an easy read, for a number of reasons. As stated, there are constant references to the ‘folds’, both explicit and implicit, of Freud's thought, thorough familiarity with which cannot be presupposed in all readers. He also refers frequently to important French psychoanalytic authors, many of whom are not so well known in other cultures. And references to the cultural climate of France abound. However, in this book the author takes the reader by the hand, helping him through difficult passages and showing him their ‘secrets’, as well as demonstrating his method of thinking and research. Metapsychology becomes an instrument for reflection and a way of trying out new formulations and hypotheses. As used by Green, metapsychology puts me in mind of the work of a brilliant mathematician who succeeds in ‘predicting’ or anticipating what physicists will later discover ‘expe