Foreword

It is an honour for the New Library to publish the book that André Green says will be his last, and his ‘will’. André Green is a leading figure of psychoanalysis in France and well-known in the world through his extensive writing. In Idées Directrices Pour Une Psychanalyse Contemporaine, Green presents a summary of the main ideas which he developed over nearly 50 years and the guiding concepts which underlie his work. This includes his notion of ‘le negatif ’ (including his concept of ‘hallucination négative’ and ‘la function désobjectalisante’), his views on temporality, on ‘la tiercité’ (thirdness, which need not be equivalent to the Oedipus complex in the strict sense) and on the centrality of sexuality.

Within French psychoanalysis, André Green had the merit and stature to free French psychoanalysis from the power of Lacan’s writings. From a deep understanding of his work, having studied with Lacan until he broke with him in 1967, Green argues against certain basic tenets of Lacan’s theory. He takes exception in particular to Lacan’s claim that his theory is a ‘return to Freud’, to the role Lacan ascribes to language and to his assertion that the unconscious is structured as a language. He takes exception with Lacan for discounting the role of affect and he shows convincingly that in fact for Freud the unconscious includes the prediscursive phenomena. In particular he underlines the connection between the regressive mode of communication through free association and the mental state of reverie or even dreaming. A recognition of the specificity of this mode of communication in the psychoanalytic setting is absent from Lacan’s writings.

Green also discusses his disagreements with the American schools and with the Kleinian school. From British psychoanalysis his appreciation goes to Winnicott in particular for his conceptualization of the role of illusion for the healthy development of the psyche, and to Bion for his theory of thinking.

In this book André Green gives