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One characteristic feature of this book, which is André Green's most recent publication, is the courage with which he confronts not only the difficulties that arise in psychoanalytic work but also the disillusions that it brings in its wake. Based on more than 50 years' work as a psychoanalyst, this book brings together a whole sector of his experience - that of disappointing outcomes - and combines clinical observations from Green's own work and that of his colleagues with his thoughts on the difficulties that have arisen. Although the cases that he explores cover a whole range of topics, his thinking is both homogenous and coherent. The examples that he gives bear witness not only to the potentialities and limits of contemporary psychoanalytic therapy but also to the depth of mental pain and to the internal resistance that stands in the way of any positive outcome in psychoanalytic work. In this book, Green explores the issues that Freud raised in his final published papers (Freud, 1937c, p. 209; 1937d, p. 257; 1940[1938], p. 141) concerning negative therapeutic reactions and interminable analyses in which a negativizing regression occurs; in such situations, the patient's psychical structure feeds into his or her malaise and appears to hold on to it rather than fight against it (Green, p. 81).
The first chapter of the book focuses on Marilyn Monroe, echoing Michel Schneider's novel on her final sessions after some 30 months of analysis with Ralph Greenson. By offering her a kind of adoptive home, Greenson only worsened Marilyn's pain at having been deprived of such a haven in her early life. As she herself put it, she had never belonged to anything other than fear; she is a significant example of the failure of psychoanalytic treatment, overwhelmed as she was by the catastrophic impact of fate and of the always inadequate love of her husbands, her lovers and her friends. She had all the hallmarks of a sacrificial victim who, after having aroused love without anyo