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André Green is one of the most important contemporary psychoanalysts to have followed the line of enquiry Freud inaugurated from the 1920s onwards, when he confronted the limits of psychoanalysis through the elaboration of the concepts of the death instinct, primary masochism and the repudiation of femininity (Freud, 1920, 1924, 1937). Green has pursued his research into the work of the negative and the polysemic dimensions it may take (1993), and has been concerned to understand the phenomena which are potentially at the limits of symbolic representation, not only due to mechanisms of repression, splitting, denial and negation, but also because they relate at the same time to something profoundly destructive in the psychic sphere that breaks through the capacity of the mind to contain it. Green has been interested in the ‘death-like quietus out of emptiness and nothingness’ (1980, p. 55), which he has identified in his work on clinical expressions of the negative: ‘The category of “blankness”—negative hallucination, blank psychosis, blank mourning, all of which are connected… with the problem of emptiness, or of the negative, in our clinical practice.’ They are, Green suggests, ‘the result of one of the components of primary repression: massive decathexis, both radical and temporary, which leaves traces in the unconscious in the form of “psychical holes”’ (1980, p. 146).
André Green has played a leading role in pushing psychoanalytic enquiry into the areas of borderline states and psychosis: ‘this is where the future of our work lies’ (personal communication). In turn, developments in the understanding of borderline states in the last twenty years may shed further light into some points already delineated at the time ‘The dead mother’ was published. The themes presented in this seminal paper constitute not only general features of the borderline patient’s system of internal object representations (or, of course, such patients’ lack of such a stable syste