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.
This book brings together the excellent papers presented at an event organized as an homage by the British Psychoanalytical Society to the late Professor André Green and his work. Green is a widely known French psychoanalyst who was highly influenced by British authors, with a very close connection to the thought of Wilfred Bion and Donald Winnicott. If nowadays Bion is a recognized and accepted psychoanalytic author, back in the 1970s, when Green started exploring Bion's ideas, he was still a kind of pariah. Green was one of the first authors to bring attention to Bion's work and to the relevance of his work in the treatment of regressed patients with psychotic and borderline conditions. The work of Green also started in the clinical investigation of schizophrenic patients, and after that to an enormous interest in the borderline conditions and how psychoanalysis could treat those difficult to treat patients. All this clinical and theoretical path is closely examined by the authors of the papers included in this book. They all worked directly with André Green, and had the opportunity to exchange clinical and theoretical ideas and to develop their own thought with the help of Green—and at the same time to know with detail and complexity his ideas. This is what one immediately notices upon reading this book.
André Green had a unique situation and background. Trained as a psychiatrist in Paris, he had direct contact with some of the most important members of French psychiatry (Henri Ey, Julian de Ajuriaguerra) and psychoanalysis (Anzieu, Nacht, Bouvet, Lacan, Rosolato, Pontalis, Piera Aulagnier, Laplanche). At the same time he trained in medicine and psychiatry, he also had a strong intellectual background, with special interest in philosophy, Greek classics, literature, and theater as a longtime passion. He lived firsthand the May of 1968 cultural revolution while in college and got in contact with Jacques Lacan, witnessing all the turmoil in French psychoanalysis dur