‘I Am Not Your Son!’: Adolescence as the Fulcrum for Negation and Negativism

ABSTRACT

This paper uses clinical material to develop the notion that adolescence, at least in this culture, is a developmental fulcrum, a pivot, for foundational, even primary experiences that are refracted in the theoretical concepts of negation and negativism, as developed by André Green in his masterpiece, The Work of the Negative. His thesis is that the negative is a, if not the, foundational psychoanalytic concept, with negation being conceptualized as its creative “work” momentum, and negativism its pathological destructive entropy. Using the original sources Green’s densely rich introduction points us to, we will follow the thread of the negative to link clinical material through philosophy, clinical theory, and metapsychology. This thread that will take first to the “master-slave dialectic” (Hegel), then to the “fort-da game” (Freud), to “the birth of the subject into the symbolic order” (Lacan), to “absence and the transitional object” (Winnicott), to “attacks on linking” (Bion), to “the effort to drive the other crazy” (Searles), and to depression without an object (Marty). Finally, we will also highlight some theoretical dimensions of negation, specifically the socio-cultural, that are notably overlooked in Green’s associative sequence. These include the concepts of “destruction as the cause of coming into being” (Spielrein), of “woman as Other” (De Beauvoir), and of the “adherence of black skin” (Fanon). To conceptualize the cultural dialectical arrest as a simple variant of individual development (notwithstanding the infinite amounts of overlap), would be a grave error, and be victim to the forces that keep this “dialectical arrest” in place, and the individuals in the dialectical struggle, in their place.

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Pascal Sauvayre

Pascal Sauvayre, Ph.D., is faculty and training analyst at the William Alanson White Institute for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He writes and studies at the interdisciplinary boundaries of psychoanalysis with a special interest in philosophy. He has a private practice in New York City.