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.
Part 2 of a two-part interview. Based on a critical analysis of the difficulties inherent in psychoanalysis as an “a-scientific” discipline, and the limits of an analytic method designed for the treatment of neuroses, André Green posits the need for a broader vision of the field of pathologies concerned by psychoanalysis, and the methodological and conceptual rethinking required to deal with an ever-increasing demand from non-neurotic patients. These non-neurotic pathologies, including the diversity of borderline cases, most often require face-to-face psychoanalytic treatment. Following in the footsteps of Winnicott, C. Bollas and many others, André Green considers psychotherapy to be a psychoanalytic practice in its own right, requiring not only a more active listening and presence on the part of the analyst, but also specific “conceptual tools” that are indispensable for understanding and analyzing psychic functioning that differs from neurotic functioning, which has become the de facto benchmark of normality. After backing up his position with clinical examples and asserting the need to include psychotherapy training in the analytic curriculum, André Green, at the end of the interview, goes on to clarify and attempt to define the concept of “clinical thinking”. Unlike the medical approach, clinical thinking in psychoanalysis, he says, involves a reference to experience that cannot be approached in a descriptive and abstract way. Clinical thinking in psychoanalysis is the uncovering of what psychic activity allows us to deduce from the facts; it is "analysis of analysis," but also, proceeding from free association, it understands its own impossibility.