Unconscious fantasy in context: The work of Jacob A. Arlow.

For Jacob A. Arlow, understanding unconscious fantasies was central to his clinical work. These fantasies are to be found at the core of those eruptions that break without warning into our ordinary lives, whether in the form of hysterical symptoms, daydreams or nightmares.

André Green on the Theory and Treatment of "Non-Neurotic" Patients.

A pivotal turning point in contemporary psychoanalytic practice and conceptualization was the presentation by André Green at the 1975 meeting of the International Psychoanalytical Association. In his presentation Green opened new ways of thinking about non-neurotic patients based on a theory of psychosis that accounts for confusion of subject and object and a mode of symbolization derived from a dual organization of patient and analyst. Green proposed that analysts lend themselves to the fusional needs of their patients while the focus is on the force of the negative-destructive mental states where connection is superseded by disconnections that in turn lead to disorganization resulting in blank depression and negative hallucination.

An empty mirror: reflections on nonrepresentation.

André Green has proposed that when a failure occurs in the process of differentiating from, mourning, and symbolizing the primary object, that is, of representing it, a void is left in the place of a representation. The author considers how such a failure might manifest itself in clinical material and whether an understanding of this theoretical thinking might help us conduct our clinical work. Green's thinking on this subject is summarized, and two detailed case examples are presented to illustrate the clinical application of his ideas.

"In the same way a poem contains the alphabet": the significance of translation in William I. Grossman's Freud.

William I. Grossman's contributions to psychoanalysis have been insufficiently appreciated, perhaps because his writing is concentrated and his meaning consequently difficult to unpack. One of his most important contributions is a remarkable description of the systematic way Freud imagined, thought, and theorized, beginning long before he created psychoanalysis.

Conflict, structure, and absence: André Green on borderline and narcissistic pathology.

The authors understand the work of André Green as addressing unresolved and uncharted issues in Freud's views on the earliest phases of development, particularly as those issues concern the evolution of psychic structure, the development of drive components, and the internalization of object representations. The authors describe Green's conceptualization of primitive conflict and its most deleterious result, absence, or the failure to represent the object. These ideas lead to an original way of imagining the analytic setting and to a modification of the classical stance of analyst with patient.

Spatial metaphors of the mind.

A case in which the author began to understand her patient as "collapsing the space between them," rather than as continuing only to free associate, is the occasion for a contemplation of the way psychoanalytic theory effects a transition between what is inner, or lived, and outer, or experienced. Metaphor is seen as the agent of this transition. The author discusses metaphor in relation to the case described, while also examining spatial metaphors of mind in classical analysis and in Kleinian theory.