Concept
Seduction theory
Freud's hypothesis of the mid-1890s that hysteria and obsessional neurosis go back to sexual experiences imposed on the child by an adult, which become pathogenic only when a later event revives their memory after puberty. Freud gave it up in 1897 and turned to the part played by infantile fantasy and the child's own sexuality. Laplanche later took up the abandoned theory and generalised it.
Development
1896
introduced by Sigmund Freud
Freud set out the seduction theory in his papers of 1896 on the aetiology of hysteria and on the neuro-psychoses of defence, and told Fliess in September 1897 that he no longer believed in it.
In Forming new knots: Jean Laplanche, 1924–2012 (2012)
1987
reworked by Jean Laplanche
Laplanche held that Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory in 1897 was a going-astray. He took the theory up again but detached it from actual abuse and from pathology, so that seduction by the adult's messages becomes the ordinary origin of every psyche.
In Forming new knots: Jean Laplanche, 1924–2012 (2012);New Foundations for Psychoanalysis (1987)
Relations
- 1896 introduced by Sigmund Freud
Freud set out the seduction theory in his papers of 1896 on the aetiology of hysteria and on the neuro-psychoses of defence, and told Fliess in September 1897 that he no longer believed in it.
- 1987 reworked by Jean Laplanche
Laplanche held that Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory in 1897 was a going-astray. He took the theory up again but detached it from actual abuse and from pathology, so that seduction by the adult's messages becomes the ordinary origin of every psyche.
- 1987 gave rise to General theory of seduction
The general theory grows out of Freud's seduction theory of the 1890s. Freud's version explained a particular pathology by actual sexual trauma; Laplanche's makes the adult's unconsciously compromised messages a universal condition of the child's development.
Works
- 1987
New Foundations for Psychoanalysis
Published by the Presses universitaires de France in 1987, and translated into English by David Macey (Blackwell, 1989) and by Jonathan House (The Unconscious in Translation, 2016). Laplanche draws together research going back to Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, to his earlier work with Jean-Bertrand Pontalis and Serge Leclaire, and to the first five volumes of his Problématiques seminars, to show how his positions connect. The book gives the first major statement of the general theory of seduction, which he refined for the rest of his life. Holding Freud's abandonment of the seduction theory in 1897 to have been a going-astray, he generalises seduction from a pathogenic event into the founding situation of every human being. The adult addresses to the child enigmatic signifiers, compromised by the adult's own unconscious, which the child must try to master and translate. Primal repression is the failure of this translation, and its untranslated remainders form the unconscious. On this basis Laplanche extends Freud's translational model of repression into a translational model of après-coup, of trauma and infantile sexuality, and of the constitution of the human subject as a self-narrating, self-theorising creature.
- 2012
Forming new knots: Jean Laplanche, 1924–2012
Nicholas Ray's obituary of Jean Laplanche in Radical Philosophy 174 (2012) combines a biography with an account of Laplanche's thought. It follows his life from his birth in 1924 into the family that owned the Château de Pommard in Burgundy. It covers the Lycée Henri IV, where he met Jean-Bertrand Pontalis; the Resistance; the École normale supérieure, where his teachers included Alquié, Bachelard, Hyppolite and Merleau-Ponty; a year at Harvard; his analysis with Lacan until 1963; and his medical thesis on Hölderlin. Ray describes the split of 1963, Laplanche's presidency of the Association psychanalytique de France, his chair at Paris VII from 1970, the journal Psychanalyse à l'Université, the seminars published as Problématiques, and his direction of the French complete works of Freud from 1988. On the work, Ray presents the Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (1967) as a historical dictionary of Freud's concepts and Vie et mort en psychanalyse (1970) as the start of a project to 'put Freud to work'. He presents the general theory of seduction, first set out in Nouveaux fondements pour la psychanalyse (1987), as a move of seduction from the origin of a pathology to the foundation of every psyche, owing nothing to the therapies of recovered memory. Ray reads Laplanche's whole project as a lifelong analysis of Freud in the service of Freud's own Copernican demand. He ends with analysis as an unweaving, like Penelope's, that allows new knots to form.
See also
People
References
- Forming new knots: Jean Laplanche, 1924–20122012Evidence for a relation
- New Foundations for Psychoanalysis1987Evidence for a relation