Andre Green - The Work of the Negative

This passage is offered in memory of Andre Green who died on January 22, 2012.  The excerpt addresses his concept of "The Negative" which is one of his most enduring contributions to the field of psychoanalysis:

"Bion's work has been one of the sources of inspiration of my book published in 1993: Le travail du négatif.1 The work of the negative is an expression borrowed from Hegel but the way I use it for psychoanalytic theory is analogous to the way Bion uses Kant's philosophy for his own thinking. We both give these philosophical concepts a new meaning according to their applications to clinical psychoanalysis. It is impossible to evaluate Bion's own discoveries with precision without starting with Freud and comparing the point of departure to the point of arrival. During a meeting in Lyon where Bion gave one of his thinking improvisations, I went to him when he ended and had a short private exchange with him before the discussion started. I told him: ‘The more I listen to you, the more I see that you quote less Melanie Klein and more Freud’. He replied: ‘Melanie Klein was a contribution, an important contribution but just a contribution’.

I do not wish to evaluate here the respective influence of Freud's and Melanie Klein's work on Bion. What I wish to emphasise is the presence in Freud's work of an unnoticed framework about the concept of negative that has since been developed in many directions, each depending on a different context. For instance, with Lacan (‘The mirror stage’, 1949), Winnicott (Playing and Reality, 1971) and Bion, we have different views of it. It is not so important to raise questions of priority here as these different theoretical contexts did not communicate with each other and did not derive one from the other. It has been my attempt to show that a set of correspondences could be deduced from the confrontation of the different theoretical corpuses. All of them, in fact, derive from Freud, whether they are ready to recognise it or not.

It is important to be aware that the negative is very present in the ‘basic assumptions’ of Freud. Let us think only of the two major central concepts: the unconscious and the id. About the first one, the remark is obvious as the word is forged with the prefix un- that speaks for itself. Concerning the second, Freud says that almost everything we know about the id is of a ‘negative character’ compared to the ego (1933, ). Moreover, if one thinks of the subtractions due to repression, consciousness is, in Freud's view, in the opposite place it has in classical philosophy. It is a very restricted portion of psychical activity. There is no need to recall here the constant struggle of Freud against the equation psychical = conscious. Moreover, the fact that for Freud drives are at the root of psychical activity implies that something is basically in excess, an overload charge on the mind, linked with the bodily exigencies of the drives whose derivatives have to be sent back to the unconscious because their free expression forbids psychic organisation. This is what happens in the building of the ego, more precisely in its conscious part. So, the negative that is at the base of psychic activity is not only normal, it is also a prerequisite for any kind of psychic development. Moreover, it is because of the lack of the object under the pressure of the drives seeking satisfaction that the mind is activated and gives birth to the wish hallucinatory fulfilment that constitutes the most elementary form of psychic activity, at least according to Freud.

Later on, in 1943, Susan Isaacs, during the Freud - Klein Controversies, defended the idea that ‘phantasy’ is the psychic expression of the drives, a well known Kleinian idea that deserves a lot of attention and can raise a reasonable number of criticisms despite its apparent simplicity (Isaacs, 1948). Freud was to discover that his description of repression found in neurosis as well as in normal development was incomplete. This step was taken in his comment on the Schreber case. After having written that repression was at work in the patient's symptomatology, he corrects himself: ‘It was incorrect to say that the perception which was suppressed internally is projected outwards; the truth is rather, as we now see, that what was abolished internally returns from without’ (1911, ).

So, in 1911, Freud added to the mechanism of repression (Verdrängung) the mechanism named foreclosure (Verwerfung) by Lacan, who took notice of this distinction.2 Freud's observation supposes a radical difference between to repress and to abolish. In this last instance, what is ‘abolished’ inside returns from the external world, for instance, as a hallucination or a delusional idea. This sounds like projective identification except that it was stated much earlier by Freud and was left unnoticed. For Lacan, the difference between the two terms could be interpreted as if in repression processes of symbolisation are at work in the unconscious whereas what is going on in the so-called abolition is a failure of symbolisation. One could also think here of Hanna Segal's symbolic equation (1957).

A third move was made by Freud in 1925 with his paper on ‘Negation’ (Verneinung) in which he defends the idea that this linguistic form is an intellectual substitute for repression (1925, ). To end with, in 1927, Freud describes the splitting of the ego (Ich Spaltung) in his paper on ‘Fetishism’ (pp. 152-7). His own conception of splitting is different from Klein's. He describes it as a disavowal of perception giving birth to a duality of mental mechanisms, one admitting the result of perception (the sight of the absence of penis on the mother's body) and the other denying it. It is as if the patient would say: ‘I know it (that women have no penises), but I can't believe it’. Therefore, the fetish will be the displacement, of the missing penis on to a piece of the mother's garments, for example, to struggle against castration anxiety. Freud has always insisted that splitting is not only a mode of denial but also always includes an acknowledgment, though it is contradicted because of its traumatic consequence.

I have proposed gathering together all these related mechanisms: repression, splitting or disavowal, foreclosure or rejection and negation, in the concept of ‘the work of the negative’. This gathering is justified by the fact that all these mechanisms are elaborations of the prototype of repression. All of them imply a judgment of acceptance or refusal: a question whose answer has to be given in terms of yes and no. This question is posed, as we have seen, in many ways, grounded in different contexts, dealing with various materials (instinctual impulses, affects, representations, perceptions, words, etc.) in Freud's conception. Among the various defence mechanisms described by Freud, Anna Freud and Klein (whose contribution includes denial) etc., this group is different from the others because its constituents directly imply this basic choice of acceptance or refusal in consciousness of derivatives that are rooted in the unconscious or the id.

So it is easy to show that Bion's ideas opposing the ‘no thing’ to the ‘nothing’ are deeply justified and can be related to Freud's elaborations even if one may stress the influence of Melanie Klein between them. Anyhow, strictly speaking, Melanie Klein's conception does not care so much about their structural differences. She invokes the ‘psychosis’ that can be found at the beginning of every development. Interpretations will in all cases have to go that far to bring any significant change. At least, this is my reading of her.

In this discussion of Bion's ideas, what is important is to make the distinction between the absence of the breast and the annihilation of the breast. In the first instance—the absence—which is found in normal and neurotic conditions, this situation leads to representations or, in other words, to fantasies. Freud's framework is applicable here. The other case—annihilation—would be more linked to the psychotic part of the personality and deals with a situation predominantly marked with destruction, a more precise form than abolition. This destruction, which can be understood either along Freud's line of foreclosure and rejection or according to Melanie Klein's annihilating anxieties, results not so much in archaic fantasies of destruction but even more, as Winnicott and I have shown, in a destruction of the psychic activity of representation which creates ‘holes’ in the mind, or feelings of void, emptiness etc. When Freud describes Schreber's delusions, he interprets them as processes of restitution after the withdrawal from reality. In other words, patchworks hiding scars or spaces that show some kind of loss of substance. Bion describes similar occurrences but for him the destruction takes the form of the consequence of excessive projective identification that evacuates the unassimilable contents of the mind: the ß-elements.

Of course, there are differences between Freud's early intuitions and Bion's conceptualisation half a century later although the necessity for differentiating between different modes of defences, which are also modes of thinking, is similar in both works. Contemporary psychoanalysis is in great need of structural differentiations in order not to mix up the material coming from different types of patients in a one and only matrix." (pp. 659-661)

Andre Green (1998). The Primordial Mind and the Work of the Negative. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Vol. 79, pp. 649-665

Kenneth Lambert - Correspondences between Jung and Racker

"I would like to conclude by indicating points where Racker's work amplifies and makes more explicit the formulations of Jung as listed above:

• The mutual influence of two whole persons in the dialectical procedure. Racker's studies represent a detailed analysis of how the dialectical procedure or the analytic set-up promotes a longitudinal process in the interplay between analyst and patient in transference/counter-transference. The analytic predisposition of the analyst may lead to the patient's positive transferences. This can activate the analyst's positive counter-transference of a concordant type which in turn leads to the patient's risking expression of his negative transference. This may be met by the analyst's complementary negative counter-transference which may be transformed by him into a deeper concordant counter-transference. Gratitude for this can activate in the patient a deeper positive transference leading to therapeutic advance. 
• The transformation of the two personalities resulting from their combining as if two chemical substances were being mixed. Racker shows how the personality of the analyst reverberates to the unconscious drama of the patient both in concordant and complementary counter-transference. His knowledge of the patient in this way is deepened and a creative interpretation can profoundly influence the patient's personality in time. We may add that the potency of both analyst and patient can be enhanced by this creative work. 
• The overcoming of the demon of sickness whereby a sufferer can transmit his disease to a healthy person whose powers then subdue the demon. Racker illustrates this in detail by showing how through identification, introjection, and re-projection the analyst can take into himself the inner drama of his patient, understand it and give it back to the patient in a form whereby he can understand, assimilate and integrate it in a more creative and repaired form.
• The wounding of the physician that gives him the measure of his power. For Jung the subduing of the demon of sickness can take place, ‘but not without impairing the well-being of the subduer’ (1929, p. 72), cp. Adler's note on ‘the wounded healer’ (1961, p. 117). Racker opens the way to a further understanding of how the analyst feels in his own person the impact of the patient's love, greed, hate, aggression and destructivity. It is his reaction to this and his understanding and the overcoming of the talion response that gives him therapeutic potency.
• The intercrossing transference relationship or marriage quaternity. Racker's contribution here may be taken in terms of his analysis of the interplay between concordant transference with its ‘annulment of the object relationship’ and complementary transference which rests upon the presence of object relationships between the analyst and patient all through the analysis. The connection with the marriage quaternio stems from the fact that the interplay between endogamous relationships and exogamous relationships is implicit in the interaction between concordant and complementary counter-transference.
• The activation of incest phantasies between patient and analyst. Racker's analysis goes into considerable detail on how the incest phantasies of infancy and childhood are activated by the analytic set-up so that both patient and analyst are involved. The success of the treatment depends naturally upon the analyst's having been made aware of these processes in his own analysis.

Finally, despite the work done by Racker and the usefulness of it to analytical psychologists, there remain a number of unsolved problems. Perhaps the greatest is to understand the conditions which render nugatory all efforts of the analyst to overcome the working of the talion law and to break into the vicious circle in which the patient has got fixed so that he remains quite unable to distinguish between his inner world and outer reality."
　
　

Kenneth Lambert (1972). Transference/Counter-Transference: Talion Law and Gratitude. Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 17, pp. 31-50

Andre Green Passes Away

Noted French Psychoanalyst Andre Green died in Paris on Sunday January 22nd.  An innovative writer and clinician. Rest in Peace.

Joseph Lichtenberg - 5 Movitivational Systems

"Psychoanalytic theory is not at its core so much a theory of structure as it is a theory of structural motivation. To utilize findings of infant observation and research, psychoanalysts must be open to new conceptions of psychic organization. I propose five motivational-functional systems: the need to fulfill physiological requirements, the need for attachment and affiliation, the need for assertion and exploration, the need to react aversively through antagonism and/or withdrawal, the need for sensual and sexual pleasure. Each is built around a fundamental need; each is based on behavior observable in the neonatal period; each may be the dominant motive expressed by an analysand's wishes during an analytic hour. For each motivational-functional system, affects are central."

Joseph Lichtenberg (1988). A Theory Of Motivational-functional Systems As Psychic Structures. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., Vol. 36S, pp. 57-72

Francesco Bisagni - Analytic Rhythm and Autistic Processes

"The notions of pre-conception (Bion) and of archetype (Jung) are very helpful in working with autistic children and, in general, with those analysands who suffer severe impairments in their capacity for symbolization. These notions actually help the analyst in assuming that some proto-trace of representational potential is always present in the individual, and may be appropriately developed if the object is able to provide its fundamental action as a complex and multidetermined subject, deeply involved as a reclaiming object in the analytic relationship. Such a role is essentially played in the function of transforming adhesive bi-dimensional identifications—that trace back to a flattened nonmental world—into projective tri-dimensional identifications, which result in a move from the use of reality in terms of autistic shapes and autistic objects,towards a more evolved and live symbolic use. Such a transformative action can be defined as the prototypical work of the transcendent function.

The rhythmical element in the analysand-analyst interplay is of paramount importance. The analyst needs to pick up and give value to the various rhythmical expressions in the analysand, distinguishing them from one another, as well as from all other disorganized sounds and movements. The construction of the temporal shapes, the modulation of presence and absence, and the rhythmical absence in the orbit are relevant as regards the capacity to progressively name the external reality as well as the subjective experience."

Francesco Bisagni (2010) Out of Nothingness: Rhythm and the Making of Words, Journal of Analytical Psychology, Vol. 55, pp. 254–272