The Work of the Negative

by André Green

This is the first English translation of Le Travail du Negatif by the French psychoanalyst and thinker Andre Green. Green draws our attention to the work of the negative in Freud, examining aspects that are not normally associated with it: dream work, the work of mourning, identification, etc. The kernel of Green's argument is that the development of the ego and any experiencing of ourselves as subjects has to be achieved against an essential background of loss and absence. The phrase work of the negative refers to how we do or do not cope with this inevitability of lacking what we want.

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Philosophy

420 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

André Green was a French psychoanalyst. He was born in Cairo, Egypt, to non observant Jewish parents. He studied medicine (specialising in psychiatry) at Paris Medical School and worked at several hospitals. Then, in 1965, after having finished his training as a psychoanalyst, he became a member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society (SPP), of which he was the 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 professor at University College London. He died, aged 84, in Paris.

Reviews

[Micah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Borrowing a key phrase from Hegel and turning it to different purposes, lingering in the impact of a fundamental disunion or human tragedy, but placing the negative on the other side of consciousness, Green follows a polysemy that is sometimes bewildering. Maybe we can start with anxiety, a falling-short somewhere that indicates the object's inadequacy. Then the various defenses, repression, disavowal, splitting etc. that outline a lack, making absence present, as perversion is the "negative" of neurosis. All psychical work, from identification to sublimation, seems to carry structuring and destructuring traces of a negative that can veer into the death drive or "negative" therapeutic reaction.