Love and its Vicissitudes

by André Green

In Love and its Vicissitudes André Green and Gregorio Kohon draw on their extensive clinical experience to produce an insightful contribution to the psychoanalytic understanding of love. In Part I, 'To Love or Not to Love - Eros and Eris ', André Green addresses some important What is essential to love in life? What, in the psychoanalytic method, is related to it? Should we understand love by referring to its earliest and most primitive roots? Or should we take as our starting point the experience of the adult? He argues that while science has made no contribution to our understanding of love, art, literature and especially poetry are the best introduction to it. In Part II, Love in the Time of Madness, Gregorio Kohon provides a detailed clinical study of an individual suffering a psychotic breakdown. He describes how the exclusive as well as the intense lasting dependence to a primary carer create the conditions for a "normal madness" to develop. This is not only at the source of later psychotic states and the perversions but also at the origin of all forms of love, as demonstrated in its re-appearance in the situation of transference. Love and its Vicissitudes moves beyond conventional psychoanalytic discourse to provide a stimulating and revealing reflection on the place of love in psychoanalytic theory and practice.

124 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

André Green was a French psychoanalyst. He 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.

Reviews

[Servabo]

Ultimately, the experience of love teaches us that it is linked to illusion - and is eventually capable of turning into a delusion.

Chance enough to become destiny.

Madness is the most personal characteristic of a human being. If the subject is to feel alive, if he is to experience passion and be creative, then it might be necessary for him to accept that he will be forever caught in a conflict, nicely balanced between the fear of madness and the need to be mad.

Paradox is the nature of the beast, the very subject of psychoanalytic inquiry.