Book
The Work of the Negative
Le Travail du négatif
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).
Main ideas
- Repression, foreclosure, disavowal, negation, splitting and negative hallucination are forms of one work of the negative; grouping them shows what they share and sets their different effects apart.
- The negative is at work in parts of Freud where it usually goes unseen, such as dream-work, mourning and identification.
- Freud's late pessimism about the negative therapeutic reaction and masochism becomes clearer once it is seen as characteristic of borderline, non-neurotic structures.
- The death drive works as a disobjectalising function, withdrawing investment from objects and finally from the ego, in tandem with negative narcissism.
- In borderline cases splitting runs from disavowal to disengagement.
- Negative hallucination, the non-perception of what is there, has a place in the formation of the psyche, not only in its disorders.
- The negative is a general human condition: the drive in excess must be refused, through repression and sublimation, for a person to belong to the human community; sublimation itself can be turned to serve the death drive.
- The book's closing question is why, in some people, the no that founds psychic life becomes a refusal to live, ruled by destructive negativity.
What it shows
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 introduced Negative narcissism
Green postulated a death narcissism, which he called negative narcissism, beside the life narcissism that seeks the unity of the ego: it aims at the ego's abolition, an aspiration to zero. The papers collected in his 1983 book develop it.
- 1993
André Green developed Work of the negative
The phrase comes from Hegel, and Lacan had brought it into psychoanalysis; Green made it the organising concept of his 1993 book, gathering under it repression, negation, disavowal, splitting and negative hallucination, and their destructive forms.
André Green introduced Disobjectalising function
Green named the disobjectalising function as the work of the death drive: an undoing of investment that strips objects, and finally the ego, of their value, set against the objectalising function of the life drives.
André Green developed Negative hallucination
Taking up Freud's notion, Green made the negative hallucination of the mother the basis of the framing structure: the mother's erased presence becomes an empty frame within which the child can represent and think.
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André Green reworked Death drive
Green recast the death drive in psychic rather than biological terms, as a disobjectalising function that withdraws investment from objects and the ego, and tied it to a negative narcissism aiming at zero.
Negative narcissism derives from Death drive
Negative narcissism is Green's narcissism of the death drive: where life narcissism binds the ego into a unity, it pursues the ego's extinction.
Disobjectalising function derives from Death drive
Green conceived the disobjectalising function as the way the death drive works: undoing the links that invest objects, as against the objectalising work of the life drives.
Work of the negative derives from Negation
Green's work of the negative widens Freud's negation, together with repression, disavowal and other forms of saying no, into one category of psychic operations.