Interview with André Green

This interview with Dr. Andre Green was conducted in November, 1986 during his jour-day visit to southern California. He spent two days at the Newport Center for Psychoanalytic Studies in Orange, one at the University of California, Los Angeles, Continuing Education Seminar in Westwood and a night at a combined meeting of the Southern California Psychoanalytic Society and the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute in Los Angeles. He presented a total of five papers and a case, as well as responding to five case presentations. We were not strangers as I had had the pleasure of presenting a case to him in Paris in July, 1985 and had communicated with him by letter and phone regarding this California visit. He graciously fit this interview in at various times in an impressive, yet fatiguing, professional and social schedule. In addition to being a creative genius, he is a warm, candid, and extremely generous man.

Virginia Hunter: What I want to do today is simply have you talk about the path you traveled from Cairo to becoming a world famous author and French psychoanalyst.

Andre Green: I was born in Cairo in 1927. I was the fourth child of the family. I have two sisters and an elder brother, three years between each. I was born nine years after my brother, who was the third one in the family. My parents belonged to the Jewish community of Cairo and during that time the great division was between the Arabs and the so-called European community, of which the Jews were a part. The common language of the European community, which was very cosmopolitan, was French and we spoke French at home. We only spoke Arabic with the servants. But all the people who were there—Italians, Greeks, Armenians, and so on—all the people belonging to the European community had, as a common language, French which was at that time the diplomatic language; so

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French is really my maternal tongue. Going to the Lycee Francais in Cairo exerted an enormous influence on me because the cultura