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The purpose of this text is to pay tribute to a great figure, a great personage of psychoanalysis, André Green: not to forget, to make an act of memory.
André Green would himself certainly support the idea that a tribute also has another aim, that of ‘nourishing life’;2 in other words, of liberating life investments, of giving up the wish to remain immobilized with the lost loved one.
It is thus proper, first and foremost, to recall the considerable œuvre of the man of life that André Green was. He never ceased to praise the virtues of light and illumination, evoking Freud's own remarks to the effect that all human beings are equal from the point of view of needs, and that only their achievements distinguish them.
No science lives and evolves by itself; it needs great men who radically challenge its knowledge, who rethink it, opening it up towards unexplored fields, who enhance its authority, who reinvigorate man's respect for it, as well as their wish to see it evolve further, and who inspire it with hope in the face of the disappointments that accompany it. Psychoanalysis does not escape this law. More than a science, it is a life discipline, a mode of thinking; it is constantly attacked on account of the very fact that it cannot keep the promises and sustain the illusions that it nourishes, and that are ascribed to it; furthermore, it transmits and lays claim to a painful phase of disillusionment, proposing as a horizon of maturity the oscillating interplay of illusion and disillusion.