Contemporary Psychoanalytic Practice

Aiming to theoretically re-establish clinical practice, Green revisits the very foundations of the analytic method. He traces a new map of the psychoanalytic field, now redefined by the predominance of non-neurotic structures, and follows the Freudian technical model centered on the notion of transference, and the post-Freudian model emphasizing countertransference (or the "analyst's desire").

From this innovative perspective, Green distinguishes the myths from the realities of the analytic process, questions the extension of the concept of countertransference, reevaluates the technical articulations of interpretation and construction, and reformulates the relationships between repetition, memory, and elaboration. This volume closes with three essays on functioning at the limits of analyzability, including the remarkable theoretical-clinical study: “Sexuality in non-neurotic structures”.

The essays in this book were selected by Green in dialogue with Fernando Urribarri to make them accessible to a wider readership. They reflect the post-1974 elaborations and conclusions drawn from Green’s extensive clinical experience treating and supervising analytic work. They are a testament to Green’s determination to extend Freudian theory to adapt to contemporary clinical challenges, while consistently remaining within the Freudian paradigm. 

This is the perfect book to launch the pivotal French Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Voices, Classical Texts series. Filled with fresh ideas, it is essential reading for all psychoanalytic clinicians, academics, and trainees.

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.