Concept
Primal fantasy
Freud's term for a small set of typical fantasies found in all neurotics, among them the primal scene, seduction and castration, which he thought might be a phylogenetic inheritance filling the gaps in individual experience. Laplanche and Pontalis read them as fantasies of origins: each stages an answer to an enigma of beginnings, the primal scene to the origin of the individual, seduction to the origin of sexuality, castration to the origin of the difference between the sexes.
Development
1915
introduced by Sigmund Freud
Freud named the Urphantasien in ‘A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psycho-Analytic Theory of the Disease’ (1915): the fantasies of observing parental intercourse, of seduction and of castration. In Lecture 23 of the Introductory Lectures (1916–17) he suggested they were a phylogenetic endowment.
In Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality (1964);The Language of Psycho-Analysis (1967)
1964
developed by Jean Laplanche
In ‘Fantasme originaire, fantasmes des origines, origines du fantasme’ (1964), Laplanche and Pontalis read Freud's primal fantasies (the primal scene, seduction and castration) as fantasies of origins. Each stages an answer to an enigma of the subject's beginning: the origin of the subject, of sexuality, and of the difference between the sexes.
In Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality (1964);The Language of Psycho-Analysis (1967)
1964
developed by Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
Pontalis wrote the 1964 essay with Laplanche. It treats Freud's primal fantasies as fantasies of origins and as the structure within which the subject's own fantasy takes place.
In Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality (1964)
2000
critiqued by Jean Laplanche
Looking back in 2000 on the 1964 essay he wrote with Pontalis, Laplanche called it the historical unearthing of Freud's concept rather than an endorsement of it. He rejected Freud's grounding of primal fantasies in inherited memory and put in their place codes supplied by culture, among them the Oedipus complex.
In Jean Laplanche: The other within – Rethinking psychoanalysis (2000)
Relations
- 1915 introduced by Sigmund Freud
Freud named the Urphantasien in ‘A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psycho-Analytic Theory of the Disease’ (1915): the fantasies of observing parental intercourse, of seduction and of castration. In Lecture 23 of the Introductory Lectures (1916–17) he suggested they were a phylogenetic endowment.
- 1964 developed by Jean Laplanche
In ‘Fantasme originaire, fantasmes des origines, origines du fantasme’ (1964), Laplanche and Pontalis read Freud's primal fantasies (the primal scene, seduction and castration) as fantasies of origins. Each stages an answer to an enigma of the subject's beginning: the origin of the subject, of sexuality, and of the difference between the sexes.
- 1964 developed by Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
Pontalis wrote the 1964 essay with Laplanche. It treats Freud's primal fantasies as fantasies of origins and as the structure within which the subject's own fantasy takes place.
- 2000 critiqued by Jean Laplanche
Looking back in 2000 on the 1964 essay he wrote with Pontalis, Laplanche called it the historical unearthing of Freud's concept rather than an endorsement of it. He rejected Freud's grounding of primal fantasies in inherited memory and put in their place codes supplied by culture, among them the Oedipus complex.
Works
- 1964
Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality
An essay by Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, first published in Les Temps modernes (no. 215, April 1964), translated into English in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1968 and issued as a book by Hachette in 1985. It starts from Freud's difficulty, in the Wolf Man case, in deciding whether the primal scene had been lived or imagined, a difficulty that led him to seek a foundation beyond both individual experience and imagination in inherited primal fantasies. The authors recover this neglected concept and read the primal fantasies (the primal scene, seduction and castration) as fantasies of origins: like myths, each stages an answer to the enigma of the origin of the subject, of sexuality, or of the difference between the sexes. They describe fantasy as a scenario with multiple entries, in which the subject is present in the scene rather than in a fixed place, and they set Freud's notion beside the Kleinian conception of unconscious phantasy. Laplanche later called the essay the historical recovery of a concept with which he no longer agreed.
- 1967
The Language of Psycho-Analysis
A dictionary of the concepts of psychoanalysis by Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, prepared over eight years at Daniel Lagache's instigation and published by the Presses universitaires de France in 1967, in Lagache's Bibliothèque de psychanalyse. Donald Nicholson-Smith's English translation, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, appeared from the Hogarth Press in 1973. Freud kept revising his theory and never fixed it in a final system, so instead of bare definitions each entry traces how a concept arose and changed in his writings, supports the account with the relevant passages, and sets out its difficulties. The alphabetical entries run from abreaction to working-through and also take in terms of later analysts, such as the mirror stage and the transitional object. Some entries brought neglected Freudian notions back into use, notably après-coup (afterwardsness) and Anlehnung, rendered as étayage (leaning-on). The book has been translated into more than twenty languages and become a standard reference.
- 2000
Jean Laplanche: The other within – Rethinking psychoanalysis
An interview with Jean Laplanche conducted by Peter Osborne and John Fletcher and published in Radical Philosophy 102 (2000). In the first part Laplanche traces how he came to psychoanalysis through his philosophy teachers Ferdinand Alquié and Jean Hyppolite, at first wanting to bring analysis into philosophy rather than practise it. He recalls his year in Harvard's Department of Social Relations (1946–47) on Rudolph Loewenstein's advice, his time in Socialisme ou Barbarie, his analysis with Lacan, and the making of the Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse with Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. He marks his distance from Lacan: already in 1960 he held the unconscious to be a reality in its own right and not simply a deeper meaning, and he rejects short sessions because free association needs time. He describes the 1964 essay on primal fantasy as the historical unearthing of a concept he does not hold, and replaces inherited primal fantasies with codes supplied by culture, among them the Oedipus complex. The second part sets out the general theory of seduction. Sexuality comes from the other, through adult messages that are enigmatic to their senders as well as to the child, and the child's partial translation of them leaves a repressed remainder that forms the unconscious. The founding situation is that of adult and child, not the family triangle. Laplanche also discusses gender as first assigned by the other and the drive as distinct from instinct. He calls the specifically analytic aspect of the cure 'antihermeneutics': analytic theory should explain how human beings use myths to treat the strangeness of the other's messages, not use those myths, such as castration, as keys to interpretation. He compares the state of psychoanalytic theory to a late Ptolemaism heaped with extra hypotheses.
See also
References
- Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality1964Evidence for a relation
- The Language of Psycho-Analysis1967Evidence for a relation
- Jean Laplanche: The other within – Rethinking psychoanalysis2000Evidence for a relation