FREE ASSOCIATION LISBON

In 2025, the Free Association Lisbon celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of André Green’s talk on changes in psychoanalytic theory and practice. Entitled “The Analyst, Symbolization, and Absence in the Analytic Frame,” the talk was given at the 1975 IPA London Congress. The principal changes that André Green highlighted in what became known as the London Report include those related to the analyst's challenges when taking on borderline patients. The difficulties were so great that they led him to declare that the psychoanalytic movement was undergoing a profound crisis.

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Half a century later, on October 18, 2025, the Free is organizing the yearly Living Theory Conference on the legacy of the London Report online. We want to give analysts and candidates alike a place to think together about how the London Report has affected how we conceive and practice psychoanalysis today. Treading on the heels of André Green, we need to ask, How do we “extend the limits of the analyzable”?

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In addition to hosting the conference, we are making available to the participants of the conference a fresh English translation of André Green’s report, revised after its publication in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1975. This new translation by Steven Jaron takes into account the definitive French version, published for the first time in 1990.

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What impact has the London report had on how we conceive our clinical work with non-neurotic patients or mind states? What modifications might be made to take on an analysis or psychoanalytic therapy with these patients? How may such treatment be approached, for example, in terms of the frame, analytic listening, and attitude toward the patient? How might the psychosexuality of borderline patients differ from that of neurotic or psychotic patients? What of the drives and the question of representation? How do we understand our countertransference in the course of working with non-neurotic patients? What constitutes a good-enough process when treating them? In what ways, then, has clinical practice evolved from working primarily with neurotic patients to that of patients presenting a borderline mental state or, as Green put it, a non-neurotic structure?

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These are some of the great many questions that André Green’s London Report raises. And so, where do we stand fifty years on?

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Four paper presentations will be given, with ample time for discussions. Howard Levine, Judy K. Eekhoff, Rodrigo Barahona, and Ruggero Levy are invited speakers.

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The conference will be recorded, and the recordings will be made available to the participants after the conference.​ AI-assisted automatic subtitles will be available in most of the languages.