André Green (psychoanalyst)

André Green (French: [ɡʁin]; March 12, 1927 – January 22, 2012) was a French psychoanalyst.

He epitomized on an international scale the spirit of independent thought, while still engaging with current developments in almost all spheres of psychoanalysis and contributing more widely to culture at large.

André Green was born in Cairo, Egypt, to non observant Jewish parents. He studied medicine (specialising in psychiatry) at Paris Medical School and worked at several hospitals. Then, in 1965, after having finished his training as a psychoanalyst, he became a member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society (SPP), of which he was the president from 1986 to 1989. From 1975 to 1977 he was a vice president of the International Psychoanalytical Association and from 1979 to 1980 a professor at University College London. He died, aged 84, in Paris.

André Green was the author of numerous papers and books on the theory and practice of psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic criticism of culture and literature, many of which have also appeared in English translations.

In the early 1960S, Green could be found attending Lacan's seminar, without abandoning his affiliation to the SPP - a bold decision which for some time enabled him to straddle the competing strands of French psychoanalysis from an independent position. As the decade progressed however, he moved further from Lacan, and finally broke with the latter in 1970 by criticising his concept of the signifier in a powerful work for its neglect of the affect.

By doing so, he replaced the SPP's normally defensive approach towards Lacanism with a direct theoretical confrontation. Most tellingly, Green points out that whereas "Lacan is saying that the unconscious is structured like a language...when you read Freud, it is obvious that this proposition doesn't work for a minute. Freud very clearly opposes the unconscious (which he says is constituted by thing-presentations and nothing else) to the pre-conscious. What is related to language can only belong to the pre-conscious".

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