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The Dead Mother: The Work of André Green is the latest in the New Library of Psychoanalysis series, which is published in association with the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London, and edited with brilliance and great care by Elizabeth Bott Spillius. Gregorio Kohon, the editor of this volume, has admirably achieved several aims. First, he has produced a comprehensive and concise overview of André Green's work. Second, the volume shows how Green's work relates to the many new theoretical paradigms that have evolved in psychoanalytic theory in recent years. Finally, intelligent and respectful attention is paid to the special part that Green has played in the rather remarkable contemporary psychoanalytic movement toward new synthesis.
An editor's contributions to a book are invisible to most readers, but Kohon's fine work is unmistakable here. The volume is clearly a labor of love. Kohon not only understands Green's work, but also has passion and respect for it. Edited collections are often uneven—lacking consistency of quality and aims, and rarely attaining a unifying and integrative narrative voice. This is not so here. The participants have been carefully selected and instructed, and each chapter is consistent with the project's guiding spirit and high aspirations. The result is a meaningful and integrated whole. I felt a strong sense of engagement with almost every article.
Kohon's introduction gives a clear and orderly summary of Green's work and a brief but informative summary of each author's contribution. Then comes an engaging, fifty-page interview of Green by Kohon. We learn autobiographical details of Green's childhood and young adult, prepsychoanalytic life. While Green traces his personal psychoanalytic development and history to the present, we