Article
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.
Main ideas
- Lacan's theory and practice cannot be separated. For years Green rejected the practice while valuing the theory; in 1984 he concluded that the two stand together, and that Lacan answers for his followers, since an analyst, unlike a philosopher, deals with patients and not only with texts.
- In Green's view the renewal Lacan brought to French psychoanalysis was circumstantial: it drew on the intellectual scene, from Hegel and Wallon to Saussure, Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss, rather than on clinical problems. Rebuffed by the linguists, Lacan turned in the 1970s to topology and a logic of the pure signifier, away from affect, the drives and the earliest months of life.
- The short session is an exercise of power. Lacan theorised the Law and the Name-of-the-Father, yet in the session he behaved, Green says, more like an abusive mother than a law-giving father; and sessions of a few minutes leave no time to speak, which contradicts the primacy he gave the signifier.
- Lacan grasped Freud's lesson on primary masochism but exploited it, where Freud had refused the executioner's part. Institutions such as the passe and the journal Scilicet, where only Lacan signed his articles, kept the distance between the master and his anonymous disciples.
- Earlier dissidents from Freud quarrelled over theory but kept the analytic setting; Lacan attacked the setting itself. Many who had trained or worked with him, among them Laplanche, Pontalis, Anzieu, Rosolato, Aulagnier and Perrier, left him, in Green's account because they found his practice indefensible.
- At the Edinburgh congress of 1961, where he met Rosenfeld, Segal and Winnicott, Green found in British psychoanalysis a clinical practice suited to real difficulties, and for years he was torn between it and Lacan.
- The formula that the unconscious is structured like a language flattered those who work with words while sidestepping sexuality and childhood. Green calls Lacan's version a rewriting of Freud in a Christian key, and holds that the Écrits gave guilty intellectuals an inoffensive, philosophical Freud.
- Benvenuto presses objections throughout: that Green turns a theoretical dispute into a moral one, that misconduct is found in every school, and that for Lacan desire is bound to the law. Green answers that an analyst is answerable to patients, so conduct in the session cannot be set aside when judging a doctrine.
- Green holds that Freud largely failed to win over the philosophers. He reads Derrida's theory as close to Freud's primary process, praises Ricoeur's book on Freud, doubts that a philosophy of the unconscious is possible, and hopes that Freud's work, a permanent workshop to be carried further, will enter epistemology.
What it shows
- 1967
André Green broke with Jacques Lacan
After several years at Lacan's seminar, Green parted from him in 1967. Green recalled that the break followed a long paper of his on narcissism that did not cite Lacan; a 2012 account ties it to his rejection of Lacan's thesis that the unconscious is structured like a language.
Jacques Lacan influenced André Green
Green followed Lacan's seminar through most of the 1960s, lecturing there in 1965 and 1967, and later said he had been held by Lacanian thought while also being drawn to British clinical psychoanalysis. Accounts date his attendance 1960–1967 (his own) or 1961–1966 (Carnet PSY).
André Green disputed with Jacques Lacan
Green argued against Lacan that the drive and affect cannot be reduced to language and the signifier, and that Lacan's later work left clinical experience behind; he also attacked the Lacanian practice of short, arbitrarily ended sessions.
Donald Winnicott influenced André Green
Winnicott shaped Green's thinking on borderline states, analytic technique and the transitional area. The sources differ on when they first met: 1957 in the Carnet PSY biography, the Edinburgh congress of 1961 in Green's own recollection.
André Green reworked Narcissism
Green wrote on narcissism from the 1960s on and tied it to Freud's last theory of the drives, splitting it into a life narcissism that unifies the ego and a death narcissism that tends to abolish it.