Book
The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse
Le Discours vivant: La conception psychanalytique de l'affect
André Green's study of affect, one of the least treated subjects in psychoanalytic theory. In three parts it follows affect through Freud's work and the psychoanalytic literature after him, examines its place in clinical structures and in the analytic process and the Oedipus complex, and closes with a theoretical study of affect, language and discourse that includes negative hallucination and drafts a model of the process. Against theories that reduce the unconscious to language, Green argues that affect belongs to the core of psychoanalytic discourse, bound up with the drive and with representation. First published by Presses universitaires de France in 1973, it appeared in English as The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse in Routledge's New Library of Psychoanalysis (1999).
Main ideas
- Affect has been neglected in psychoanalytic theory, and its place has to be traced through Freud's work and the literature that followed.
- Affect takes different forms in different clinical structures and has its own part in the analytic process and the Oedipus complex.
- Against theories that reduce the unconscious to language, affect belongs to the core of psychoanalytic discourse, bound up with the drive and with representation.
- Affect has to be placed in both of Freud's topographical models and in relation to language and discourse; negative hallucination already enters this theoretical model.