Love and its Vicissitudes, 1st Edition

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Love and its Vicissitudes
André Green & Gregorio Kohon

LONDON AND NEW YORK

 First published 2005 by Routledge 27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex, BN3 2FA
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York,
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© 2005 André Green & Gregorio Kohon
Paperback cover design by Lisa Dynan
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Green, André. Love and its vicissitudes
André Green & Gregorio Kohon.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-58391-744-6 (hardcover)—ISBN 1-58391-745-4 (pbk.) 1. Love. 2. Psychoanalysis. I.
Kohon, Gregorio, 1943-II. Title. BF175.5.L68G74 2005 152.4’1--dc22 2005003044

ISBN 0-203-01212-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 1-58391-744-6 (hbk)

ISBN 1-58391-745-4 (pbk)
 Contents

About the authors vi

Acknowledgements vii
Foreword ix
MARGOT WADDELL

1
PART I To love or not to love: Eros and Eris
ANDRÉ GREEN

30
PART II Love in a time of madness
GREGORIO KOHON

From the analysis of a psychotic young man 31

The heroic achievement of sanity 44
‘Between the fear of madness and the need to be mad’ 59

Index 71
 About the authors

André Green is a Training Analyst and Past President of the Paris Psychoanalytic
Society, and an Honorary Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society. He was
Visiting Professor for the Freud Memorial Chair, University College, London. At present,
he is Honorary Professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, and Member of the
Moscow Academy of Humanities Research. Since his first article written in 1955, he has
published innumerable papers and a large number of books, some of which have been
translated into English, among them Private Madness; The Fabric of Affect in the
Psychoanalytic Discourse; The Tragic Effect—The Oedipus Complex in Tragedy, The
Work of the Negative; Chains of Eros—The Sexual in Psychoanalysis; Time in
Psychoanalysis—Some Contradictory Aspects; and Key Ideas for a Contemporary
Psychoanalysis. He works in private practice in Paris.
Gregorio Kohon is a Training Analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society. In
1988 he co-founded with Valli Shaio Kohon, the Brisbane Centre for Psychoanalytic
Studies, which he directed until 1994. He has published No Lost Certainties to be
Recovered; The British School of Psychoanalysis—The Independent Tradition (ed); and
The Dead Mother—The Work of André Green (ed). He has also published three books of
poetry in Spanish, and his novel Papagayo Rojo, Pata de Palo was finalist in the
Fernando Lara Prize 2001, Planeta, Barcelona. He works in private practice in London.
 Acknowledgements

The two papers included in this book are corrected and extended versions of the original
ones presented at the English-Speaking Weekend Conference on Love, organised by the
British Psychoanalytical Society in October 2000 at Regent’s College, London. We
would like to thank the British Society for having invited us to present our work, and to
the people in the audience who contributed to the discussion.
‘Love in a Time of Madness’ was completed while participating in a Research Group
on Borderline Phenomena (2000–2003), sponsored by the International Psychoanalytic
Association. The members of the group were André Green (Chair), Jean-Claude Roland,
Otto Kernberg, William I.Grossman, Fernando Urribarri, Jaime Lutenberg and Elizabeth
Spillius-Bott. Gregorio Kohon is grateful to them for their comments on this paper during
the discussions.
We would also thank Valli Shaio Kohon and Sebastián J.Kohon for their editorial help
with the text.
André Green
Gregorio Kohon
 Foreword

Love and its Vicissitudes is a scholarly and courageous revisiting of a subject that lies at
the heart of some of the most exalted and debased dimensions of human experience. The
book is an ambitious undertaking. As Green boldly and rightly says, the title is one ‘that
can summarise the history of psychoanalysis’ (p. 9)—a claim that is borne out as these
pages unfold. Yet this duo of monographs also moves beyond conventional
psychoanalytic discourse and into new territories which defy tidy conceptualisation in
any narrowly defined psychoanalytic terms. In each part, one finds oneself fully engaged
not only with ‘the wreath’d trellis of a working brain’ (Keats, Ode to Psyche, 1.60), with
two minds concentrating intently and brilliantly on their subject. One is also engaged
(and very distinctively so) with two men for whom the subject stirs a sharp and wise
reflectiveness—not only on the nature of psychoanalysis itself (its roots, its nature, its
achievements and limitations) but also on the enthralling and terrifying nature of the
phenomena of love itself. In so doing, they offer a re-exploration and repositioning of
some of the fundamental principles of psychoanalytic theory and practice, reinfusing
them with overlooked or scarce-remembered aspects of the more subversive and
revolutionary dimensions, while also introducing some lesser known aspects of recent
thinking. They grasp the nettle and seek expression for, among other things, the
inseparability of passion from sexual desire, at-oneness, dissolution, loss, destruction,
death, regeneration, madness—all compounded in that one simple word—Love. Each
author engages with the mad-making contradictions of Eros and with the necessity of
suffering it (that is, engaging with it, allowing and bearing it at all) without being cowed
or overwhelmed by it. The two colossal concepts that bestride the book as a whole—each
immanent in ‘Love’—are ‘passion’ and ‘madness’. The nature of passion is
predominantly the preserve of the first part, and of madness the second. There are a great
many common threads which constantly weave between the two.
For each author, to think about Eros is to explore the ability of psychoanalytic theory,
heretofore, properly to engage with a vision of love, or to fail to do so. At one point,
Green, having welcomed Lacan’s crucial, and untranslatable, terms hainamoration (a
statement of fusion, ‘no love without hatred’) and jouissance, regrets the failure to give
us an articulate body of ideas about it. This volume provides the desideration.
As for Part 1, I shall be focusing on the significance of Green’s choice of epigraphs
and of the Addendum. This is not to mistake the part for the whole but rather to attempt
to engage with one of his central tenets: that it is to literature that we must turn for
enlightenment about the nature of Eros, in all its depth and complexity. In framing or
situating his revisiting the place of love in psychoanalytic theory and practice, Green
makes it absolutely clear that we are about to engage with the impossibility of
disarticulating the chains of desire from the thrust towards life and passion on the one
hand, and the concomitant pull towards its contradictory components on the other—
ultimately those of hate, destruction and death. The links cannot be disarticulated because
these polarities and contradictions are of their very essence. The roots of passion
themselves engender, and are engendered by, the dark forces which are marshalled to
oppose development and which forever urge the psyche towards defensive retreat. To
learn from experience is premised on the capacity to have experience—and much of that
sort of learning is akin, as Kohon argues, to a kind of madness.
Green frames his monograph with epigraphs drawn from Racine and Shakespeare and
appends a reading of one of Shakespeare’s most haunting and mysterious poems—The
Phoenix and the Turtle. Each dramatist drew, again and again, on Greek mythology to
encompass the elemental and enduring characteristics of the human condition. But
Shakespeare’s poetic oeuvre, here represented by Venus and Adonis and The Phoenix and
the Turtle (or Let the bird of loudest lay, as it was known at the time) had a number of
very distinctive and primary concerns. Many of them thread their way through the body
of this book, explicitly in Green’s case, implicitly in Kohon’s. In establishing these points
of reference, Green makes it clear that he is relating his own contemplation of love and
its vicissitudes to the inspired modelling by the great poets of such themes as sexual
desire; mixed or reversed gender; sacrifice and self-sacrifice; identity and loss of identity;
enslavement, satiety, want and, ultimately, life and death. The poem may itself be ‘about’
some specific facet or facets of love, but it is also, au fond, so much more than this. For
the rhythm, arrangement, sound and silence evoke what is not, and cannot otherwise be
articulated.
The root of the very word ‘poetry’ is the Greek verb to do or to make. It is
a making in many senses, but perhaps primarily, as here, it is a making of the mind—the
essential nature of development. Process, form and content are inseparable. The aesthetic
dimension is necessary to enable intense feeling to be set before the eye of the mind
sufficiently to be contemplated and for a meaning, always personally unique, to become
available. This is Green’s territory—one familiar to writers, artists and literary critics.
Meg Harris Williams (1985:36) is clear that ‘The structure of an artistic form is such that
it can capture meaning which lies outside its own terms of reference: thus in Book I, The
Dream, Bion describes how a sculpture works on the observer: “The meaning is revealed
by the pattern formed by the light thus trapped—not by the structure, the carved work
itself” (1975).’
It has been suggested that Shakespeare’s poems are not so much offshoots of the
dramatic works, but rather those in which he ‘undertook much of the foundational
thought which underpins his dramatic work’ (Burrow 2002:5). Behind the narrative
poems to which Green alludes, or on which he draws, lies a long tradition, much of it
embedded in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, of exploring the ways in which desire both
transforms, but also warps, those who experience it. The mutuality (and mutability) of
desire is both fundamentally disturbing and also ecstatic, transformational, even
revelatory. The non-mutuality is deadly, destructive, malignantly all-consuming. Either
and both are the stuff of madness; either and both are thoroughly dislocating forces, the
innumerable versions of which are the stuff of great literature. To be able to be at one
with the other, while yet to appreciate the otherness of the other, is a necessary, yet
scarcely, perhaps only momentarily, attainable feat of human development (beautifully
discussed by Kohon). It underlies the fate of Venus and Adonis and of Echo and
Narcissus, sometimes explicitly, sometimes less so. The sense is that sexual fulfilment
famishes the appetite it feeds:
 And yet not cloy thy lips with loathed satiety,
But rather famish them amid their plenty
(Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, ll.19–20)

It is enshrined in some of the great stories of literature and mythology.

Such is the classic, narrative poetic genre for those vicissitudes of love which Green
and Kohon are centrally exploring. It draws on a multiplicity of perspectives, and in so
doing provides a model, loosely yet also precisely, for the enormous range of
perspectives on which these authors also draw. Each, with characteristic panache and
learning, challenges theconstructive contributions as well as the limitations of one or
other psychoanalytic tradition. There is a repeated and suggestive tendency towards a ‘so
far so good, yet …’ which continuously opens up further questions and possibilities
rather than foreclosing them (‘La réponse est le malheur de la question’ as Maurice
Blanchot put it) The multiple ways of reading and responding to the internal and external
world are not patient of closure, nor of the confusion, between, for example, a hard,
possessive, fantasising about, and a delicate, tender cherishing of, another; between the
destructive egotism of some forms of grief, and the loneliness of unsharable experience.
Here Eros is a force, incorporating the principles of love and strife. It is organically
linked to its own destructive antagonist, each inseparably inhering, in myriad ways, in the
human psyche.
Green’s assured and succinct ‘basic outline’ and complementary critical analysis of
different psychoanalytic positions, their strengths and shortcomings, yields to a focus on
a difficulty that lies at the heart of psychoanalytic theorising. The fact is that the
conceptual vocabulary of ‘science’ does not easily lend itself to the poetry of the inner
world, especially to the core human experience of love. ‘I think,’ he writes, ‘that art,
mainly literature and especially poetry, undoubtedly gives a better introduction to the
knowledge of love, which we grasp by intuition.’ In Poetic Diction, Owen Barfield put
this same matter particularly clearly. He said that ‘meaning can never be conveyed from
one person to another; words are not bottles; every individual must intuit meaning for
himself, and the function of the poetic (and perhaps also of the interpretative) is to
mediate such intuition by suitable suggestion’ (1928:138). As Green so rightly says,
psychoanalytic models of the mind are rooted in ‘the inspiration of the literary giants of
the past’.
This perspective will briefly be my focus too. Little can be added to the subtlety of
Green’s reading of The Phoenix and the Turtle, nor to how convincingly he supports his
view of what psychoanalysis can learn from poetry. He describes Shakespeare’s
consummate capacity to be inward with, and to find expression for, a level and type of
mental activity which was, 300 years later, eventually theorised as ‘primary process’. On
this occasion, Green has not given explicit emphasis to what undoubtedly underlies his
reading, that is to the nature of the aesthetic dimension itself; to the way in which it could
be possible, precisely because this is poetry and not prose, to evoke the nature and force
of something that would otherwise be inarticulable. The poem defies logical analysis. In
many ways arcane, it remains, despite critical analysis, elusive, mysterious, almost
mystical. The fact that it is possible to recognise in it an expression of the workings of the
dynamic unconscious, of obvious interest to psychoanalysts, nevertheless tells us little
about how it is that poetry alone could achieve this. One is certainly challenged. As
Barbara Everett puts it: ‘the reader halts, never quite sure what it is, to read this poem.
We seem even while finding it exquisite, to lack some expertise, some password’
(2001:13). Ever elusive elements of meaning emerge momentarily from the form.
Perhaps ‘primary process’, or the innermost and largely inaccessible workings of the
human mind, might function as just such ‘a password’. It may be that, in part, the
lingering elusiveness referred to resides in the many verbal innovations in the poem
which, in turn, allow the lines constantly to slip not only between different registers (for
example, the theological and the logical) but also between different voices, different
identities, species, genders, possibilities, impossibilities. To generalise from a single line:
‘Two distincts, division none’—here the form, the beat, the weight and sound of the
words allow the poem to weld ‘abstractions within the solid buttresses of “Two” and
“none”’ enabling physical, spiritual, even revelatory to interblend (see discussion by
Colin Burrow 2002:87).
Were Green to have drawn on the poem as a whole and not just on the ‘Anthem’, it
would be clear that the arrangement itself brings into being suggestions of the content,
not only in a line or a verse, but in its totality. For in the original collection, Love’s
Martyr, the final ‘Threnos’ was printed on a new page, with its own title, while yet being
presented as implicitly a continuous, though also separate, part of the voice of Reason. I
find this point of Burrow’s convincing: ‘“Let the bird of loudest lay” is not only about
the dissolution of separate identities into a single whole: it enacts it’ (p. 88). The poem’s
metaphysical meditation on the sacrifices of identity in love and its apotheosis in death
itself, the ecstatic and the deadly power of passion, speaks with an immediacy and with a
kind of melancholy ferociousness to the heart of what Green has been saying and to what
much psychoanalytic theorising has found it hard to keep a grip of. The sweep of Green’s
critique and his originality are rather breathtaking, and in its compact, scholarly and
energetic style moves one’s own thinking forward. The way in which his meaning is
plucked from the lines of one of Shakespeare’s most esoteric and profound works is a
tour de force.
Part II, ‘Love in a Time of Madness’ is a tour de force of a different kind. It focuses on
an extended account of the long (17 years) analysis of a psychotic young man, Tony. The
reader is pitched into the living hell, both of the patient’s madness and also of the
extremes of psychoanalytic commitment and courage that are needed to sustain both
analyst and patient through a treatment of this kind. In their different ways, both of them
have to undergo, with and through the other, the fearful extremities of delusion, idealised
transference-love and terror lest hatred and destruction supervene. Otherwise, the
virulence of the illness ‘of hate and for love’ (to draw on another resonant epigraph)
might triumph and overthrow the necessary capacity to keep faith with the psychoanalytic
method.
This beautifully crafted narrative traces a searingly detailed and moving story of
suffering, of clinical and theoretical discipline, and of virtuosity. It is told by one who, to
borrow from Keats, clearly dwells not in axioms but with the real experience felt upon
the pulses, richly demonstrating the very capacities he is exploring—both for humility
and for suffering.
 While standing wholly independent, the clinical account functions as a kind of
objective correlative for the allusive and elusive Anthem discussed by Green, thus
drawing the two parts of the book together, not only formally in terms of subject, but
more intimately in terms of the emotion underlying the content. There is a sense of shared
meaning and profound accord between the two pieces. In Tony’s delusional states, the
impossibility of simultaneous atone-ness and separateness and the terror induced by such
a contradiction, become all too present a possibility, both inter- and intra-psychically.

(So they loved as love in twain,

Had the essence but in one
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.)

Time and again, in this powerfully written clinical story, we become preoccupied, aghast
even, at being pulled so near to the edge, as observers of, yet almost too as participants
in, both murder and self-immolation. Just as, in the Phoenix and the Turtle, the
quasimetaphysical evocation of passion and destruction, of fusional unity and dislocation,
is framed and contained by the poem’s structure, rhythm and language, a similar
evocation is framed and contained in the account of Tony’s treatment (to the extent that
such states can find any expression at all). This occurs both as a consequence of the
reliability of the setting and of the analyst’s capacity to stay with the psychoanalytic
method. It is also the consequence of the patient’s own capacity to write down verbal
expressions of his fractured mental states and, eventually, to dream. Here too, then,
symbol and metaphor enable the expression of meaning not otherwise articulable or
accessible, thus marking ‘the before unapprehended relations of things’ (Barfield
1928:67).
Central to each part is the absolute significance of infantile experience. Each author
draws on the mother/baby relationship for the origins of the kind of passion and madness
immanent in Love. At the same time, both of them contest the limitations of those
theories that either stress the non-sexualised exclusiveness of such a couple, or draw on it
as a primary model for the psychoanalytic encounter. They also contest the separation of
the sexual mother and the feeding mother, the ongoing relationship between the two
being rather a predicament, not only for the baby, but for the adult sexual being as well—
and remaining so, in different manifestations, throughout life. Certainly the respective
accounts, both of early experience and of analytic experience, persuasively move forward
the debate on these matters.
For Tony, condemned early on by a mad mother to live with her (or in her) in a kind
of delusional unity, his world wholly constructed for him by her, this meant that he had
had no experience of the force which enables ‘division’—that of the ‘word of the father’.
His life was a perversion of love, the destructive negation of Shakespeare’s celebratory
and elegiac poem. As Kohon says, ‘He was a Royal prince, with no father.’ He was left in
a tormented confusion of gender and generation, of self and other, of sanity and madness.
Stunningly, at one point, he receives a letter from his mother which begins, ‘DANGER!!
Jocasta calling!!’ Traumatised because helplessly in the grip of such madness, Tony
himself succumbed.
 The absolute necessity in infancy of being enabled by another’s mind to bear the
extremes of love and hate as a ‘normal’ condition, a condition which generates the
‘ordinary madness’ of the infantile state, is described with exceptional vividness and
sensitivity by Kohon. He shares Green’s earlier view (1980) that this kind of ‘madness’
has a continuous presence in adult life. It infuses emotional experience in multifarious
ways. It lies at the root of the capacity for passion and is linked to the vicissitudes of
primordial Eros (p. 69)—‘madness’ here, as described by Kohon, being distinct from
psychosis and covering, as he points out, ‘a multiplicity of phenomena, from insanity to
rage, anger or violence’. ‘To be mad,’ he suggests, ‘could cover being stupefied by fear
or suffering; being carried away by enthusiasm or desire; infatuated; wildly excited;
extravagant’ (p. 70). Somehow, in his description of all this, Kohon manages to breathe
life into the theories; he writes with an immense eloquence and clarity of thought and
expression about the trauma of having no choice but to occupy a meaningless universe.
There was no choice for Tony because no meaning had been reliably available of a sort
that could distinguish love from hate, life from death, self from other, good from bad,
sanity and madness. For, in turn, such a mind would have, enough of the time, to have
been genuinely able to bear the distinction between, for example, love and possession—
the origin of the state of “ontological contradiction” in which Kohon describes his
patient, as the infant soul, to be living much of the time.
One further, significant characteristic of the complementarity of the two parts of the
book is the common ease with which, enquiring rather than asserting, each author moves
this way and that across the familiar, or traditional, boundaries of partisan
psychoanalytical thinking. Clearly, their shared commitment to the search for a more
proximate understanding of their central concept ‘Love’, of the psychic phenomena
involved, and of the various ways of managing them with as much insight as possible,
brings more closely together all those similarly involved themselves in such a quest.
Partisan labels drop away and the truth of the experience of simply doing the thinking
and doing the work speaks out. The richness of these reference points, as they are brought
together to help understand such profoundly problematic areas of ‘thought and work’
imbues both parts with vivacity, warmth and a passion which is a rarity in psychoanalytic
writing.
In the end, it becomes clear that what both Green and Kohon are grappling with is the
nature of becoming more fully human, what constricts or liberates that process, the life
conundrum that lies at the heart of much great literature, as of much philosophical
discourse. It is the tragic predicament of being responsible yet not free, and the perennial
conflict, defined by Winnicott (1963[1974]), and from which Kohon takes his point de
départ, of being balanced between the fear of madness and the need to be mad. One
cannot but feel that there is an appetite for life and learning on the part of each author (in
their ways, poets both). By focusing their thoughts on Love, they speak to the analytic
community while at the same time opening up, or shedding further light on, the nature of
the human endeavour.
Margot Waddell
Psychoanalyst, Child Analyst and Consultant Child
and Adolescent Psychotherapist
Tavistock Clinic