Concept
Negative hallucination
The failure to perceive something that is present, the counterpart of the positive hallucination that perceives what is absent. Freud touched on it in connection with hypnosis and in his metapsychology of dreams; André Green made it a central notion, holding that the infant's negative hallucination of the mother, once her care has been taken in, leaves a framing structure, an empty space in which representations can then form, while where this fails a blank appears in place of thought.
Development
Undated
developed by André Green
Taking up Freud's notion, Green made the negative hallucination of the mother the basis of the framing structure: the mother's erased presence becomes an empty frame within which the child can represent and think.
In The Work of the Negative (1993)
Relations
- developed by André Green
Taking up Freud's notion, Green made the negative hallucination of the mother the basis of the framing structure: the mother's erased presence becomes an empty frame within which the child can represent and think.
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