Every Other Thursday

What this film is

A fiction. Gustav, Mark and Agnes are invented. The ideas are inspired by the French psychoanalyst André Green (1927–2012). It is my reading of his work, not his.

Two ideas from André Green

Green reread Freud's two forces, life and destruction, and gave them new names.

• The objectalising function is his version of Eros. All our lives we create objects: not only people, but an activity, a project, a task. These objects make us. We create some, lose some, find new ones, and that is how a life keeps growing.
• The disobjectalising function is his version of the destructive drive. It works in two stages. First the object loses what made it unique: it becomes interchangeable, one is as good as another. Then it is erased, and whether it stays or goes makes no difference.

The two forces are always in conflict. Green also said that no one sorts this out alone: it takes another person who listens.

Sadness, then an idea

Freud described mourning as letting go of what was lost, after which we are free to care about something new. Switching off is different: nothing hurts, but nothing new can start.

About the three steps

Green gave no practical advice. The three steps at the end are mine. The bar and the notebook come from the practice of a real chief executive. Mark's blackout is fiction: in real life, a blackout is a reason to see a doctor.

Sources

• André Green, « Eros et Thanatos », in the series Les Mots de la psychanalyse, directed by Alain de Mijolla, France 5, 1996.
• André Green, The Work of the Negative, Free Association Books, 1999.
• Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia (1917).