ABSTRACT
Jacques Lacan had attempted what he called a "return to Freud" through the reading of Sigmund Freud's writings in a new way, which was informed and heavily influenced by certain philosophical and linguistic concepts rooted in French thinking. Lacan's work had a tremendous impact on French psychoanalysis at that time, and his dictum that "the unconscious is structured in the most radical way like language" led to a widely held belief in linguistics as the only route to the unconscious and to mental functioning. In addition to the particular concern with affects as a response to Lacan's theory, another direction inspiring Andre Green's interest in the subject of affects has been the perennial discontent of psychoanalysis with existing affect theories. Green's main interest and the thrust of his work have been to give affects the same representational status that accrues to ideas and, concomitantly, to preserve and strengthen the notion of the unconscious in psychoanalytic theory.
