André Green

Green was born in Cairo on 12 March 1927, the youngest of four children in a Jewish family. French was his first language. At the Lycée français du Caire he studied both philosophy and the sciences, and after his baccalaureate he turned to medicine. In 1945 he left Egypt for Paris to continue his studies at the faculty of medicine, where he specialised in psychiatry. He later said that psychiatry let him combine his philosophical and scientific interests, above all the relation between body and mind, brain and psyche.

He did most of his internship at the Sainte-Anne hospital. There he met the psychiatrist Henri Ey and took part in the meetings Ey organised at Bonneval. He also first met Lacan at Sainte-Anne: in 1953 by his own recollection in Against Lacanism⁵, in 1955 according to French biographical accounts. His first analysis, from 1956 to 1960, was with Maurice Bouvet. He later had further periods of analysis with Jean Mallet and then Catherine Parat. He became a full member of the SPP in 1965. The publisher of his early books describes him as a former chef de clinique in mental illness at the Paris faculty.

Green attended Lacan's seminar while remaining in the SPP. By his own account he went from 1960; other accounts say from 1961. He lectured at the seminar in 1965 and 1967, and in 1962–1963 he also presented Lacanian theory in Roland Barthes's seminar at the École pratique des hautes études. In Against Lacanism⁵ he recalls being held by Lacanian thought while being drawn to British psychoanalysis. That pull began at the International Psychoanalytical Association's congress in Edinburgh in 1961, where he met Herbert Rosenfeld, Hanna Segal and Winnicott. He found there a clinical practice suited to the difficulties of real patients, and for years he was torn between it and Lacan. Accounts differ on when he first met Winnicott and Bion: one French biography places both meetings at the IPA congress in Paris in 1957, while Green dated his meeting with Winnicott to Edinburgh. Their work shaped his thinking on borderline states, analytic technique and the transitional area.

The break with Lacan came in 1967. Green connected it with a long paper of his on narcissism that did not cite Lacan. A 2012 account ties it instead to his rejection of Lacan's thesis that the unconscious is structured like a language.

In 1966 Green ran a seminar at the Institut de psychanalyse de Paris. Its guests included Jacques Derrida, René Girard, Michel Serres, Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant. In the first half of the 1970s he directed the Institut. He was a vice-president of the IPA from 1975 to 1977, held the Freud Memorial Chair at University College London in 1979–1980, and was president of the SPP from 1986 to 1989. He received the Sigourney Award in 1995 and was an honorary member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He died in Paris on 22 January 2012, aged 84.

Green's first book, Un Œil en trop¹ (1969), reads tragedy as the stage on which the Oedipus complex is played out. It concentrates on the complex's negative face: hostility between the sexes and between the generations. Each of its three central essays takes one act of violence. The first takes matricide in Aeschylus' Oresteia, compared with the Electra plays of Sophocles and Euripides. The second takes a husband's murder of his wife in Shakespeare's Othello, which Green treats as a tragedy of jealous madness that lays bare the course of paranoia. The third takes a father's sacrifice of his daughter in Racine's Iphigénie, set beside Euripides.

A prologue presents the psychoanalytic reading of tragedy as a contribution to literary criticism. An epilogue asks how the Oedipus myth relates to the truth that emerges through its distortions. Alan Sheridan's English translation was published as The Tragic Effect in 1979.

Le Discours vivant² (1973) sets out Green's theory of affect. He traces the place of affect through Freud's work and the later literature, then in clinical structures and the analytic process. The book ends with a theoretical model of affect, language and discourse in which negative hallucination already plays a part. Against theories that reduce the unconscious to language, it argues that affect belongs at the core of psychoanalytic discourse, bound up with the drive and with representation. Its English translation, The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse, appeared in the New Library of Psychoanalysis in 1999.

L'Enfant de ça⁶ (1973), written with Jean-Luc Donnet, reads line by line the transcript of a single interview. The interview took place during a psychoanalytic consultation in a general psychiatric department, with a second analyst listening. The patient, Z, summed up both his origin and his trouble in one claim: his mother had slept with her son-in-law, and he was the child of that union.

The authors reconstruct the history the interview implies and propose a key to its enigma. They also reflect on the interpretation they built after the fact, and on the unease Z caused his listener. From this they draw the concept of blank psychosis. It names a psychotic core without delusion or hallucination, marked by blanks and blocking in thought, in which the capacity to think is emptied out under the pressure of objects felt as intrusive or lost. They saw it as a possible first stage from which a florid psychosis may later develop. The book's closing part introduces the concept and sketches a theory of psychic spaces and of the relation between drive and thought. The book is credited with changing how French psychoanalysts approach psychosis.

Green wrote on narcissism from 1963 onward. Narcissisme de vie, narcissisme de mort³ (1983) collects his essays on the subject, some previously unpublished. Freud had let the concept recede after the revisions of around 1920, which brought the opposition of life and death drives and the second topography. The book's publisher presents Green as one of the few authors to have tried to tie narcissism to that last theory of the drives.

Beside the narcissism of the life drives, which seeks the unity of the ego, Green postulates a death narcissism, which he calls negative narcissism. It aims at abolishing the ego in an aspiration towards zero: the extinction of desire and of every tie to objects. Clinically it appears as emptiness, a pull towards nothingness and withdrawal from relations.

The book's first part treats the theory of narcissism: the same and the other, primary narcissism as structure or state, and anxiety. Its second part describes narcissistic forms met in the clinic: moral narcissism, the neutral gender and the dead mother. A postface on the ego, caught between knowing it is mortal and believing it is immortal, closes on the figure of a Janus-faced Narcissus. Andrew Weller's English translation, Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, appeared in 2001.

Linking narcissism to borderline states led Green to his theory of the negative. He described the borderline patient as caught between the obligation to survive and an inability to face the wish to live.

La mère morte⁷ began as a lecture to the SPP in 1980 and was first published as the last chapter of Narcissisme de vie, narcissisme de mort. It describes the dead mother complex: the trace left in a child by a mother who remains alive and present but becomes psychically absent. She is sunk in depression, often after a loss of her own. Losing her living presence, the child withdraws its investment from her and identifies unconsciously with the "dead" mother. This leaves a cold, empty core beneath a later life that may look ordinary. It shows as an inability to love, to take pleasure and to invest new objects.

Green presented the complex as a discovery made in the transference, one that may not be visible when an analysis begins. It appears as a depression in the transference, the repetition of an infantile depression that often cannot be remembered. The essay was published in English as "The Dead Mother" in On Private Madness (1986), and later in Hebrew as a separate book, translated by Orit Rosen and edited by Michel Granek.

In Le Travail du négatif⁴ (1993) Green made the work of the negative the organising concept for the psychic operations that say no. The phrase comes from Hegel; Lacan had brought it into psychoanalysis and later dropped it. Green grouped under it repression, foreclosure, disavowal, negation, splitting and negative hallucination. Grouping them shows what they share while keeping their effects distinct. In his view those effects best reveal the structure of the subject and shape how an analysis turns out.

He traces the negative in parts of Freud's work where it usually goes unrecognised, such as dream-work, mourning and identification. He also follows Freud's clinical path, from neurosis as the negative of perversion to the masochism behind the negative therapeutic reaction. Freud's late pessimism, he argues, becomes clearer once it is seen as characteristic of non-neurotic, borderline structures.

The negative, for Green, is not only pathological. Through repression and sublimation it is a general condition of human life: the drive in excess must be refused for a person to belong to the human community. The book closes by asking why, in some people, this no becomes a refusal to live, governed by a destructive negativity.

The central chapters recast the death drive in psychic rather than biological terms, as a disobjectalising function. It withdraws investment from objects, from their substitutes and finally from the ego itself. It stands against the objectalising function of the life drives and is paired with negative narcissism. Other chapters treat splitting in borderline cases, from disavowal to disengagement, and sublimation turned to serve the death drive. Taking up Freud's notion of negative hallucination, Green held that the infant's negative hallucination of the mother, once her care has been taken in, leaves a framing structure. This empty space is where representations can then form; where it fails, a blank appears in place of thought. Andrew Weller's English translation, The Work of the Negative, appeared in 1999.

Green set out his case most fully in a conversation with Sergio Benvenuto recorded in Paris in May 1994, published as Against Lacanism⁵. He argued that Lacan's theory cannot be separated from his practice. For years he had rejected the practice while valuing the theory, but by 1984 he had concluded that the two stood together, since an analyst, unlike a philosopher, answers to patients and not only to texts.

He described the short, arbitrarily ended session as an exercise of power. He also held that it contradicted the primacy Lacan gave the signifier, since a session of a few minutes leaves no time to speak. In his reading, the renewal Lacan brought to French psychoanalysis drew on the intellectual scene, from Hegel to Saussure, Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss, rather than on clinical problems. Lacan's later turn to topology and a logic of the pure signifier then moved away from affect, the drives and the first months of life.

The formula that the unconscious is structured like a language, Green held, flattered those who work with words while sidestepping sexuality and childhood. Elsewhere he argued that Freud had placed the unconscious among thing-presentations, so that what belongs to language can only be preconscious. He pointed out that many who had trained or worked with Lacan had left him, among them Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. Benvenuto pressed objections throughout: that Green turned a theoretical dispute into a moral one, that misconduct can be found in every school, and that for Lacan desire is bound to the law.

The same disagreement runs through Green's books. Le Discours vivant² was written against theories that reduce the unconscious to language. Le Travail du négatif⁴ takes up a Hegelian theme that Lacan had introduced and then abandoned.

R. Horacio Etchegoyen described Green as a Freudian who achieved a lucid synthesis of Lacan, Bion and above all Winnicott. He wrote this in his preface to The Dead Mother: The Work of André Green (1999), a collection of essays on Green's thought. In the same volume Adam Phillips argued that dreams, affects and emptiness are central to Green's work because there the nature of representation itself is put at risk. Rosine Jozef Perelberg, reviewing his work, saw his framework as a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

His ideas reached English readers mainly through translation. For many years only two of his books were available in English: The Tragic Effect (1979) and the collection On Private Madness (1986), which contains "The Dead Mother". Translations of his major French books followed from 1999. "The Dead Mother" has also appeared in Hebrew.

After his death, the International Journal of Psychoanalysis published an obituary of him, and Dominique Cupa wrote a tribute in Le Carnet Psy in 2012. In 2025 the same journal devoted a dossier to his clinical commitment, with essays on his contribution to psychosomatics and on life and death narcissism.

Green's books with Éditions de Minuit, most in its Critique series, are Un Œil en trop (1969), L'Enfant de ça with Jean-Luc Donnet (1973), Narcissisme de vie, narcissisme de mort (1983), Le Travail du négatif (1993), Le Temps éclaté (2000) and La Diachronie en psychanalyse (2000). Le Discours vivant appeared with Presses universitaires de France in 1973.

His other French books include La Folie privée: psychanalyse des cas-limites and Le Complexe de castration, both of 1990; La Déliaison (1992); La Causalité psychique (1995); and Les Chaînes d'Éros (1997). In the 2000s came La Pensée clinique (2002), Jouer avec Winnicott (2004), Pourquoi les pulsions de destruction ou de mort? (2007) and Illusions et désillusions du travail psychanalytique (2010). His last books were Du signe au discours (2011) and La Clinique psychanalytique contemporaine (2012), followed after his death by Penser la psychanalyse avec Bion, Lacan, Winnicott (2013).

In English, besides the translations already named, there are On Private Madness (1986), The Chains of Eros, Psychoanalysis: A Paradigm for Clinical Thinking (2005) and Key Ideas for a Contemporary Psychoanalysis (2005).