Concept
Work of the negative
André Green's umbrella concept, set out in his 1993 book of that name, for the psychic operations that say no: repression, negation, disavowal, foreclosure, splitting and negative hallucination. Taking the phrase from Hegel, he held that the negative is not only pathological, since the psyche has to refuse excess drive in order to form itself, as in repression and sublimation; in its destructive forms, however, it empties the psyche, attacks links and undoes the investment of objects.
Development
1993
developed by André Green
The phrase comes from Hegel, and Lacan had brought it into psychoanalysis; Green made it the organising concept of his 1993 book, gathering under it repression, negation, disavowal, splitting and negative hallucination, and their destructive forms.
In The Work of the Negative (1993)
Relations
- 1993 developed by André Green
The phrase comes from Hegel, and Lacan had brought it into psychoanalysis; Green made it the organising concept of his 1993 book, gathering under it repression, negation, disavowal, splitting and negative hallucination, and their destructive forms.
- derives from Negation
Green's work of the negative widens Freud's negation, together with repression, disavowal and other forms of saying no, into one category of psychic operations.
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