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André Green's recent book on contemporary psychoanalytic clinical practice is the testimony of one of the greatest thinkers in contemporary psychoanalysis. Published posthumously, it brings together a series of articles published between 1997 and 2007. Green redefines the fundamentals of analytic work here. He does it from various entry-points: the setting, the process, the countertransference, interpretation, repetition compulsion, shame, passivation, sexuality. Each of these themes is elucidated by the clinical treatment of non-neurotic cases. The fundamentals of psychoanalysis are revisited in the process.
In Green's conceptualization, analytic work constitutes a return to the self by the detour of the fellow other (Green, 1988, 1995). The transference is double - both transference on to the object and transference on to speech. Representative activity occupies a fundamental place. The drives, which originate in the body, find their psychic representative in emotionally cathected representations (Freud, 1926). The object plays a determining role in this work of delegation. It is a matter of thinking, dialectically, about the drive and the object together.
This is the perspective to which Green's reflection on the concept of the setting belongs. Constituted essentially by the analysand's free association and the analyst's free-floating attention, the analytic setting, by its realization of the force of the transference, opens the way to “emotionally cathected representations”. In doing so, it allows “the transitory manifestation of the aspects least controlled by the ego”, those of “private madness” (p. 24).
When the analytic setting proves impossible to establish or difficult to maintain, as is often the case with non-neurotic structures, the status of the setting has to be reconsidered:
The actual events of the encounter then become the issue of the psychotherapeutic session, and the psychotherapy, the exercise of the internalization process in its immediacy - or be