An introduction to the work of André Green

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1. Translated by Andrew Weller.

Notes

1. Translated by Andrew Weller.

2. For Edgar Morin, complex thinking is characterized by three principles: the dialogical principle, the principle of organizational recursion and the hologrammatic principle. It comprises “the impossibility of unification, completion, a portion of uncertainty, a portion of undecidability & and (ultimately) the recognition of the final tête à tête with the inexpressible” (2005, p. 77–104).

3. The dialogical principle “makes it possible to maintain duality at the heart of unity, by associating two terms which are at once complementary and antagonistic” (Morin, 2005, p. 99).

4. The notion of the double reversal was introduced and developed for the first time by André Green in 1967, in his article Primary narcissism: Structure or state (in Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, 2001a). This notion, which, according to him, constitutes “a basic model of psychoanalysis” (Green, 1984, p. 162) underlies implicitly or explicitly, and in a recurrent manner, his developments on narcissism, play, the subject of the unconscious, représentance, and language.

5. Translator’s note: ‘représentance’, a neologism derived from the German repräsentanz [representative] is a general category including different types of representation (psychic representative, ideational representative, representative of the drive, etc.), which implies particularly the movement or activity of representation.

6. As Green explains the wooden reel game, “On the one hand this set‐up includes: a wooden reel (the object); a piece of string attached to it (the throwing action of the drive); a curtained cot with sides (the screen separating inside and outside). And, on the other, a child endowed with: a hand; eyes; a voice plus a witness, Freud, the grandfather.” (Green 2003, p. 73?4).

7. Translator’s note: This is an unpublished text.

8. During many years, she told me in her sessions about instantaneous and massive forgetting of what she had just said and of what I had just said to her – acts of forgetting which left her in a state of painful emptiness comparable to the void she experienced when she saw her image in a window or mirror, a perception which give her ‘a strange sensation’. This void, she told me later, ‘is a sense of nothingness, of inexistence; I have the impression that a part of me is dead. I am like a jellyfish; there’s nothing to get hold of, nothing.’