The Work of the Negative

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).