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Green argues that the dynamic between the intrapsychic and the intersubjective was already present in Freud’s theory through the reference to the object. He joins the critical voices against the American relational paradigm in psychoanalysis, insisting on the fact that it reduces psychoanalysis to the mere mutuality of relationships, and thus transforms it into a ‘cognitive behavioral’ therapy endowed with an experimental science status, granted on the basis of disputable outcome studies. But, at the same time, relying on the work of Winnicott and Bion, Green underlines the necessity to account for the intersubjective in psychoanalysis through an “opening dialectic” based on the relation between drive and object. This dialectic ensures a proper basis for the exploration of the drives as the underground of psychic life. In his paper “Intrapsychic-Intersubjective” from 2000, Green states: “It is in the intertwining of the internal worlds of the two partners of the analytic couple that intersubjectivity takes on substance” (Green, 2000, p. 2). Two fields were thus defined: that of the intrapsychic on the inside, resulting from the relations between the parts comprising it, and that of the intersubjective, between inside and outside, whose development involves a relationship to the other. For where psychic structuring is concerned, the outside is not only reality, but at its heart, symbolizing the object, which in fact refers to the other subject. “The object is thus situated in two places: it belongs both to the internal space on the two levels of the conscious and the unconscious, and it is also present in the external space as object, as other, as another subject” (ibid, p.3). The intersubjective relationship here connects two intrapsychic subjects. Force and meaning are intertwined and combine their effects. During his visit in New York in 2004, Green stressed that when we work with patients, we work to create representations. Representations are not the basic primitive elements of the id; they are the transformations of them found in the ego … The first step is transformation from instinctual impulse to unconscious representation... Transformation is not spontaneous. It operates thanks to the meeting of the instinctual impulse with the object. It is the object that favors the creation of an unconscious representation, a “thing” presentation that will be transformed into a word presentation and give the initial state of the impulse a communicable form through language. Green portrayed the economic scheme of the psyche in which the unconscious consists of a branching network of drive derivatives (as representations of things) seeking a pathway toward discharge. The dynamic nature of these representations that represent a primary form of the drive, move them toward action or consciousness. The moving, dynamic aspect of the body-based drives of the unconscious always seeking discharge and determining the actions of the individual has everyday clinical resonance (Green, 2002). By referring to the unconscious as the “unsymbolized” included in it is what was never symbolized (i.e. the so-called “primitive states” or the contents of “primal repression”) or what was “ de -symbolized” i.e. whose links with the rest of the symbolic network were broken (i.e. what was secondarily repressed). In both cases, what cannot be put into some usage (i.e. become conscious) will work its way toward other channels of expression, with enactment and somatization as the two main classes thereof.
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