Against Lacanism: An Interview With André Green

A long conversation between André Green and Sergio Benvenuto, recorded in Green's Paris office in May 1994 and published in English translation in the Journal of European Psychoanalysis (no. 2, 1995–96; reprinted in no. 24, 2007). Green retraces his relations with Lacan: their meeting at the Sainte-Anne hospital in 1953, his attendance at the Seminar from 1960, and the break of 1967, which he ties to a long paper of his on narcissism that did not cite Lacan. Alongside this he recalls discovering British psychoanalysis at the Edinburgh congress of 1961. Against Benvenuto's repeated objections, he argues that Lacan's theory cannot be separated from his practice: the short, arbitrarily ended session, the exploitation of patients' masochism and the cult of the master show a turn away from clinical experience toward a logic of the pure signifier. He also asks why Lacan won over French intellectuals, to whom he offered a Freud without drive, sexuality or childhood, and discusses Dolto, Derrida, Ricoeur and the reception of psychoanalysis among philosophers.