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Green was introduced to Lacan in 1958 and he very quickly became “seduced” by his brilliance, kindness, and ultimately, his perversity. He found himself caught in triangular relationships set up by Lacan, with Green often being the preferred object. However, he was able to extricate himself, finally rejecting Lacan by 1967. One of his biggest criticisms of Lacan is that he was intellectually dishonest in his claim to represent a return to Freud, “ [He] cheated everybody… the return to Freud was an excuse, it just meant going to Lacan” (p. 24). 

It was in the cauldron of French psychoanalytic thinking and politics and against a Lacanian backdrop, that Green laid the groundwork for his own enduring imprint on the changing map of psychoanalytic ideas. His independence of thought was demonstrated early on when, building on Diatkine, he boldly criticized Lacan for the damage done to psychoanalytic theory by insisting that the unconscious is structured as a language. Green’s interest in preserving the essential nature of the drives in human psychology led him to develop these ideas into a book, Le Discours vivant, enraging Lacan in the process. This book on affects was the beginning of Green’s growing and rich body of work in which he pushes the envelope of psychoanalytical critical thought. 

He believed that “something had to be done” given that psychoanalysis was heavily under the sway of American ego psychology with its emphasis on adaptation. Green offered a focused rebuttal, by replenishing our appreciation of the Freudian imperatives of drives, negation, sexuality, and object relationships. The “biological roots of the mind” are the underpinnings of Green’s work as he repeatedly confronts the restrictions of narrowing schools of thought, especially the destructive impact of Lacan’s psychoanalytic nihilism, which threaten to ignore these sina qua non of Freudian psychoanalysis. Yet all the while, Green responds to and capitalizes on emerging ideas as dialectical mechanisms for his own Freudian elaborations. Two English (rather than French!) analysts are essential mainstays of these developments—Bion and Winnicott. 

Green avers that psychoanalysis is based on the negative, that which is absent, that which is lost, and that which is always latent, much like the unconscious itself. Repression and representation are critical variables and in this way, Green enfolds Freud’s basic elements and actions of the mind to explain his own model. For Green, the negative is a normal, necessary aspect to development, likening his thinking to Winnicott’s interest in the absence of the mother in ordinary ways and Bion’s use of the representation of the maternal container to master separation.