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“Psychoanalytical interpretation is not exhaustive but specific. It illuminates certain factors that enter into the creation of a work about which it alone can say what it has to say.” Thus replied André Green (2006, p. 103) to questions from Maurice Corcos concerning the limits of psychoanalysis as applied to literary work. With L'aventure négative: Une lecture psychanalytique d'Henry James, published in 2009, Green shows us once again that, as Corcos puts it, he is “well equipped to dig out the unconscious roots of a text”, and that what Green calls ‘biographical fiction’, constructed from disparate biographical elements, cannot be rejected as a source of knowledge of the creative process.
Taking the work and life of Henry James as his starting-point, Green's book, while naturally addressing literature's contribution to our knowledge of unconscious phenomena (Green, 2003, 2004, 2005), also points up the importance of the concepts of narcissism, language, context and ‘thirdness’ - all of which, alongside the negative, are central to his psychoanalytical work. He proposes a theory of the transformations undergone by all instincts in the course of sublimation, and the place he assigns to the negative - the guiding theme of this book - explains his choice of the title The Negative Adventure - a Jamesian expression which he had already used as the title for an article on James's novella The Beast in the Jungle (Green, 1986).
Green's deep familiarity with James's work, as well, perhaps, as certain intimate resonances of his with the writer, elevate the psychoanalyst's theoretical thinking here to the level of the creative inspiration of the novelist, described by Green in his preface as his ‘inseparable’ double. The book, somewhat puzzles-like in its construction, includes texts published between 1980 and 1994 which reflect the back-and-forth in Green's analytic thinking between consideration, on the one hand, of unbinding and, on the other, of the rebinding at work in th