Concept
Disobjectalising function
André Green's restatement of what the death drive aims at. Where the life drives serve an objectalising function, creating objects, investing them, binding and giving meaning, the destructive drives work to unbind object relations and withdraw investment, not only from objects but from their substitutes, from the ego itself and in the end from investment as such. It is paired in his work with negative narcissism, and shows clinically in the deadening of psychic life.
Development
Undated
introduced by André Green
Green named the disobjectalising function as the work of the death drive: an undoing of investment that strips objects, and finally the ego, of their value, set against the objectalising function of the life drives.
In The Work of the Negative (1993)
Relations
- introduced by André Green
Green named the disobjectalising function as the work of the death drive: an undoing of investment that strips objects, and finally the ego, of their value, set against the objectalising function of the life drives.
- derives from Death drive
Green conceived the disobjectalising function as the way the death drive works: undoing the links that invest objects, as against the objectalising work of the life drives.
Works
- 1993
André Green's book on the negative in psychoanalysis. The notion comes from Hegel; Lacan brought it into psychoanalysis in his reinterpretation of Freud and later dropped it. Green gathers under the work of the negative repression, foreclosure, disavowal and negation, together with splitting and negative hallucination, to show what unites them while distinguishing their effects, which best reveal the subject's structure and shape the outcome of an analysis. After comparing Hegel and Freud, he traces the negative where it usually goes unrecognised in Freud, as in dream-work, mourning and identification, and follows Freud's clinical path from neurosis as the negative of perversion to the masochism behind the negative therapeutic reaction, whose pessimism he reads as typical of borderline structures. Later chapters treat the death drive, negative narcissism and the disobjectalising function, masochism in analytic failures, splitting in borderline cases, negative hallucination and sublimation. The negative is not only pathological: the drive in excess has to be refused for a person to belong to the human community. The book ends by asking why, for some, this no becomes a refusal to live. Published by Éditions de Minuit in 1993, it appeared in Andrew Weller's English translation as The Work of the Negative (1999).
See also
People
References
- The Work of the Negative1993Evidence for a relation