Chapter 8 Adam Phillips: André Green and the Pragmatics of Passion

…a final eccentric solitariness.

What does the analyst want for the patient that the patient can, at least hope for, from the analyst? One of the striking things about André Green’s writing has been his willingness to formulate answers to this question. Green has never been shy about making claims for analysis, about what psychoanalysis really is—both what it entails and where it cannot suspend its judgement—and thus what its aims might be. The idea of psychoanalysis as having aims (the relative freedom to love and work, the achievement of the depressive position, the capacity to play, the flourishing of one’s true self) is one of the ways psychoanalysis makes sense of itself. An aim, after all, gives direction to our wishes, it gives hope a target. We think of the patient’s purposes, his sense of direction, changing during an analysis, but not of the whole notion of a sense of direction being put into question. In psychoanalysis (both as theory and practice), the teleology of a life is recomposed but never disappears as a guiding principle. It gives the idea of the unconscious its necessary minimum of intelligibility: we may not know what we want, but we know that we want. We are always going somewhere for something.

Despite, or perhaps because of the rigour of his theorising—his always acute and incisive Freudian inductions—Green’s stated aims of analysis have always been poignantly simple, with none of the covert moralism of the more esoteric versions of psychoanalysis.

Green writes:

…my hope at the end of the analysis will be, according to Freud’s guidelines, that my analysand will be able to enjoy life a little more than he used to do before coming into treatment or, as Winnicott says, that he will be more alive, even if his symptoms do not all disappear.

And after going from Freud to Winnicott he can, as ever, make good his return to Freud: ‘Is our psychoanalytic Puritanism,’ he continues, ‘responsible for th