Representations and Their Vicissitudes: the Legacy of andrÉ Green

Abstract

André Green is a leading voice in French psychoanalysis whose contributions sit at a crossroads, 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 reminds us have yet to be fully appreciated or developed. In offering a summary of Green's work, two of his recent books, Key Ideas for a contemporary psychoanalysis: Misrecognition and recognition of the unconscious' and Psychoanalysis: a paradigm for clinical Thinking, give readers a chance to join him in his struggles to understand and treat patients whose difficulties lie beyond the spectrum of neurotic disturbances for which psychoanalytic treatment was originally intended. Additionally, they allow readers to listen in depth to the reflections of a sensitive clinician who is also an intellectual and a theoretician in the best sense of these words, as he looks back over some of the major issues that have shaped his professional lifetime and ahead to what is still to be settled in our field. Readers of these excellent translations will discover that Green's work is accessible, thought-provoking, original, and deeply rooted