ABSTRACT
On being invited to contribute to this book, we (the co-authors)decided to try out an experiment. Talya S. Candi (first author)has a solid academic training coming thus from a more scholarly tradition and is a passionate and knowledgeable student of André Green’s work. Elias Rocha Barros (second author) comes from a mostly Kleinian-Bionian clinical tradition but is also deeply influenced by other authors such as Thomas Ogden, Nino Ferro, and André Green. He has been mainly a clinician throughout his life, with some theoretical incursions in attempts to elaborate a metapsychology of the symbolic processes. Given these slight but significant differences in our training and intellectual background, and our friendship and deep respect for each other’s work, we came up with an idea: Elias Rocha Barros would present a case from his day to day practice and Talya S. Candi would explore this clinical material from the perspective of André Green’s concept of the work of the negative. Our common goal would be to try to perceive the work of the negative in action. That is, to see the clinical resonance of a powerful conceptual idea.
