Concept and Form:
The Cahiers pour l’Analyse
and Contemporary French Thought

This project is funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) research grant and is supported by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) and Kingston University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

A former vice-president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, André Green is a French psychoanalyst and an internationally recognized figure in the field. Born in Cairo, Green came to Paris in 1945 to pursue studies in medicine. In 1955, he met Jacques Lacan at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, where Green was pursuing his psychiatric internship. Shortly thereafter, he met another renowned psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, and began analysis himself with Maurice Bouvet in 1956. Along with René Girard, Michel Serres, and Jacques Derrida, Green developed a special interest in cybernetics and communications theory in the 1960s. In 1967, he broke with Lacan and formed the Institut de psychanalyse de Paris, which he directed from 1970-77. As evident in works such as Le Discours vivant (1973) Green’s theoretical contribution to psychoanalysis is most notable for its emphasis on affect. This investment largely accounts for Green’s distance from Lacan, the latter of whom granted an excessive importance to symbolic and structural form in Green’s view. Green’s assessment of the role of the objet petit a in Lacan’s thought produced in the third volume of the Cahiers is an important article in Green’s own trajectory. In his critical, though generous assessment of the logic of the signifier developed by Jacques-Alain Miller, which ultimately points to the lack of sufficient attention to affects and their signifying role in the latter’s rubric, one can see the framework for Green’s post-Cahiers itinerary as well as an ‘immanent critique’ of the Cercle d’Épistémologie’s project within the Cahiers themselves.