Andre Green Revisited: Representation and the Work of the Negative

André Green was a leading voice in French psychoanalysis, a brilliant thinker and an innovative contributor to our field. His writings sit at the crossroads of contemporary psychoanalysis, where the challenges posed and the opportunities presented by the work of Lacan, Klein, Winnicott and Bion meet the still generative insights of Freud, many of which Green reminded us have yet to be fully developed or appreciated. Green’s expansion of Freud’s theory of psychic representation and his own formulation of the work of the negative exemplify his idea of clinical thinking and herald what many believe is a new paradigm for psychoanalysis.

This volume of essays, written by an international group of scholars in response to and appreciation of Green’s contributions, continues to explore the tension between presence and absence, loss and remainder, fort and da and the creative, dialectical arc that exists between these pairs in psychic development and the analytic process. It aims to expand the reach of our theory and practice to patients whose difficulties lie at the limits of analyzability, beyond the spectrum of neurotic disturbances for which classical psychoanalysis was originally intended, and to place the reader at the frontiers of contemporary clinical thinking and analytic technique.

Gail S. Reed is the co-editor of Unrepresented States and the Construction of Meaning (Karnac, 2013) and On Freud’s Screen Memories (Karnac, 2014). She is also the author of Transference Neurosis and Psychoanalytic Experience: Perspectives on Contemporary Clinical Practice (Yale University Press, 1994). She is the founder and a member of the Group for the Study of the Psychoanalytic Process, a member of and Training Analyst in the Contemporary Freudian Society and the Berkshire Psychoanalytic Institute and a member of NPAP. She is also Associate Book Review Editor for Foreign Books of JAPA, n Editorial Board Member of Psychoanalytic Inquiry,a former Editorial Board Member of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly and a former member of the Publications Committee of the IPA. She practices psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy in New York City.

Howard B. Levine is a member of the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, East (PINE), the Contemporary Freudian Society, the Newport (California) Psychoanalytic Institute, the Group for the Study of Psychoanalytic Process and the Boston Group For Psychoanalytic Studies, inc. He is a former member of the Board of Directors of the IPA, on the editorial Board of the IJP and Psychoanalytic Inquiry and in private practice in Brookline, Massachusetts. He has authored many articles, book chapters, and reviews on psychoanalytic process and technique, intersubjectivity, the treatment of primitive personality disorders, and the consequences and treatment of early trauma and childhood sexual abuse. His most recent co-edited books include: Growth and Turbulence in the Container/Contained (Routledge, 2013); Unrepresented States and the Construction of Meaning (Karnac 2013); On Freud’s Screen Memories Paper (Karnac 2014); The W.R. Bion Tradition (Karnac 2015); Bion in Brazil. (Karnac 2017); and Engaging Primitive Anxieties of the Emerging Self (Karnac (2017).