Contemporary Psychoanalytic Practice

André Green, French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, member of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society (SPP), was one of the most pre-eminent figures of the contemporary psychoanalytic movement, both for his theoretical and clinical research and his role within institutions. In 1965, Green became a member of the SPP, of which he was President from 1986 to 1989. From 1975 to 1977 he was a Vice-President of the International Psychoanalytical Association and from 1979 to 1980 a Freud Memorial Professor at University College London. He was elected an Honorary Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society.He attended Jacques Lacan's seminars between 1961 and 1967, when he definitively broke with him. He then directed a seminar at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in Paris where he invited the great philosophers and authors of his time including, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Michel Serres, Jacques Derrida, Marcel Detienne, and René Girard. A great reader of D. W. Winnicott and a friend of W. R. Bion, he constantly bridged the gap between British, American, and French psychoanalytical research in a spirit of international openness and turned towards the future of psychoanalysis. His theoretical contributions – the dead mother, private madness, the work of the negative, the analytic third, and the analytic object – opened the way to psychoanalysis beyond neurosis, the hallmark of twenty-first-century psychoanalysis.Many of his works, such as Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, On Private Madness, and The Work of the Negative are classics of psychoanalytic literature.Litza Guttieres-Green, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, full member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society and the Swiss Society of Psychoanalysis, is the author of a number of articles on hysteria, psychic pain, and the feminine.

‘This book offers a precious opportunity to engage with André Green’s revolutionary approach on psychoanalytic theoretical and clinical practice. The texts were selected by André Green himself in the year prior to his death and were revised by his wife Litza Guttieres-Green. The book gives access to some of Green’s oral presentations to congresses and to many of the concepts that he introduced, such as the internal framing structure of the analyst, the dichotomy between the dream and the act, and the distinction between passivity and passivation. It is a privilege to be able to engage once again with Green’s world, now published in English with a scholarly introduction by Howard B. Levine.’

• About the author and contributors Author’s remarks to the French edition Editor’s remarks to the French edition Preface to the French edition by Fernando UrribarriIntroduction to the English edition by Howard B. LevineText sources 1. The psychoanalytic frame: Its internalization by the analyst and its application in practice2. The psychoanalytic process: Myths and realities3. Issues of interpretation: Conjectures on construction4. Repetition compulsion and the pleasure principle5. Passivity—passivation: Jouissance and distress6. The enigma of guilt and the mystery of shame7. Sexuality in non-neurotic structures: Past and presentReferences Index