Undoing Psychoanalysis: Towards a Clinical and Conceptual Metistopia

Abstract

It was not exactly Freud’s birthday, but on 27 April 1995 the eminent French psychoanalyst André Green delivered the ‘Sigmund Freud Birthday Lecture’ at the Anna Freud Centre in London under the title ‘Has Sexuality Anything To Do With Psychoanalysis’ (Green 1995). In the opening sections of his paper, Green explained that his provocative question had been prompted by a twofold observation. On the one hand, he had noticed how since the mid 1980s sexuality had all but disappeared as a “major concept” and a “theoretical function of heuristic value” from the psychoanalytic literature, with the exception of “the ever problematic topic of feminine sexuality”. On the other hand, he had ascertained how practicing psychoanalysts, when presenting case material, were more inclined to focus on the ego, inter-subjectivity and destructiveness, for example, rather than the role played by sexuality in the mental economy of their patients. In light of these considerations, and wishing the founder of psychoanalysis well for his birthday, Green went on to emphasize the value and significance of a thorough re-appraisal of Freud’s key contributions to the psychoanalytic study of sexuality—libido, the Oedipus complex, genitality, the vicissitudes of the drives (Eros and Thanatos), narcissism—subsequently responding to his own call in the 1997 monograph The Chains of Eros by newly integrating these and other notions into a hierarchical ‘erotic chain’, starting from the drive and ending in language and sublimation (Green 2000).