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.
André Green is one of the few French psychoanalytic thinkers who translates successfully from one side of the Atlantic to the other. The present volume is basically a translation of Green's Le Discours Vivant, originally published in 1973, with an appendix consisting of a postface and three postscripts. The postface was a report to the Congrès de Psychanalystes de Langues Romanes, given in 1970; the first postscript was part of a symposium on representation at the Paris Society in 1984; the second seems to be a previously unpublished reflection on the representation of affects; and the third reproduces a recent article from the International Journal,1 originally presented as a prepublished paper for the Forty-First International Congress in Santiago in 1998. The appendix accounts for about a third of the text and serves to bring some of Green's thinking about affects closer to the present.
The main body of the text dates from a quarter century ago, and in consequence, has a somewhat dated quality. Green centers his discussion on the contributions of Freud to the concept of affect, an effort that carries him through most of the major Freudian texts. Green traces carefully the evolution of Freud's ideas as they gradually evolved from the beginning formulations of Studies on Hysteria (1893-1895) and the Project (1895) to Freud's final works. Green's reflections do not stray far from the Freudian texts, with only occasional advertence to the post-Freudian literatuse. The text reflects the influence primarily of Kleinian and Lacanian thought: the Kleinian