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This book is a somewhat expanded version of a day’s celebration for Andre Green held in London by the British Psychoanalytic Society in September 2015 three years after Green’s death in 2012 at the age of 84. All the speakers had the good fortune of having met Green so that reminiscences of their contact with him made the conference proceeding more personal. Half of the contributors were from the British Psychoanalytic Society. This is a testimony of the close relationship Green established with his colleagues from across the channel. The title of the conference was, “The Greening of Psychoanalysis.” This title is a pun on Green’s name: Green is able to integrate quite successfully the concepts of multiple thinkers from both French (e.g., Lacan) and British contributors (Winnicott and Bion). This “process of arborescence with the concepts undergoing organic growth and forming an ever-expanding whole ‘is the essence of the Greening of psychoanalysis’” (Foreword, p. xxii).
The conference illustrates Green’s considerable influence on the expansion of psychoanalytic theory and practice to be able to deal with what is commonly referred to as the non-neurotic patients. These patients require rather substantial changes in what is considered classical analytic technique. Rather than castration anxiety, these patients suffer from the alternation between separation anxiety and intrusion anxiety. Green’s genius consists in the fact that in contrast to many post-Freudian groups such as the ego psychologists or the Kleinians or the Lacanians he was not invested in founding a new school or acquiring disciples, but instead he started from the clinical end to see what he could change or add whilst keeping a strong alliance to Freud’s basic tenets.
Abstinence has to be a more benevolent type; countertransference is more of a factor in elucidating the patients’ projective identifications.
This book is particularly welcome since many of Green’s contribution are written in a dense sty