You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Originally published in France in 1973 as ‘Le Discours Vivant’, this book was first conceived as a paper delivered to the 1970 Congrès des Psychoanalystes de Langues Romanes in Paris, at which the main theme was ‘the affect’, and it has now had a timely revival following the 1999 Congress of the Psychoanalytic Association in Santiago devoted to the same theme. The present version is based largely on the original text, but with the addition of a number of postscripts containing references to contemporary studies as well as to the author's more recent ideas.
This is a very knowledgeable and dense work, in which André Green starts from the position that the variety of different approaches to affect, both in the field of psychoanalysis and elsewhere, render it difficult to formulate any kind of definition or unified theory of affect that has meaning in the practice of psychoanalysis. He begins by reviewing the development of ideas relating to affect in the history of psychoanalysis, followed by a discussion of the locus of affect in a series of different clinical structures. This leads, in the original text, to his own hypothesis for a theory of affect as the culmination of the book. The additional chapters in the present version then build on the basic core with a critique of certain current trends in developmental and psychoanalytical ideas and with some related supplementary insights.
In the first section of the book, André Green traces the references to affect throughout the course of Freud's work in all their various twists and turns and reversals, beginning with his early view in Studies on Hysteria (1893-95) of affect as an excitation or quantity of energy seeking discharge, which is spread over the memory-traces of ideas, and following through to the view first published in The Ego and the Id (1923) that affect combines both quantity and quality, constituting firstly a discharge oriented towards the inside of the body, and secondly feelings of two types in the for