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The French title of this book—Un oeil de trop (An Eye Too Many), part of a quotation from Hölderlin about Oedipus—is happier than the English one. For it is the power of the "extra eye" that is central to this brilliant work. The phrase alludes to a power of the mind that, to quote Flaubert's definition of the true artist, belongs to the "triple thinker." André Green knows that psychoanalysts need the "third eye" as well as the "third ear" to do their clinical work. The ability to turn this mental force, which is capable of operating in and with multiple dimensions—of performing in contrapuntal perception—to the extraclinical has not been granted to many psychoanalysts. Our first and greatest mind—Freud—valued, made use of, and contributed understanding to the complexity and mysterious creative power of myth and literature; but often psychoanalytic critics of art and artists (and sometimes Freud himself) have proceeded with a crudely reductionist hermeneutical bent. We are fortunate that André Green is able to be a "triple thinker" who has not only the necessary erudition, but a subtle, critical intelligence capable of containing contradictions and maintaining ambiguities—an intelligence that respects but is not paralyzed by the mysteries of artistic creativity and of the mind.
Green presents the theater as a metaphor for the mind. He elaborates on Freud's quotation from Fechner about dreams taking place on a "scene of action" (Schauplatz—literally showplace) different from that of waking ideational life.1 Freud called Fechner's remark, in a letter to Fliess dated February 9, 1898, the "only sensible" one in the literature on dreams.2 Freud used the metaphor of a hypothetical mental "place" and set up the topography for it in Chapter