Person
Jean Laplanche
French psychoanalyst and philosopher who was in analysis with Lacan, broke with him in 1963 and was among the founders of the Association Psychanalytique de France. With Jean-Bertrand Pontalis he wrote the Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (1967), and from 1988 he directed the French translation of Freud's complete works. Reading Freud against the grain of his own texts, he turned Freud's abandoned seduction theory into a general theory of seduction, in which the child's unconscious forms around enigmatic messages from the adult.
- Born
- 1924
- Died
- 2012
- Known for
- Influenced by
developed
- Primal fantasy 1964 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.
- Afterwardsness 1967 The Vocabulaire's entry ‘Après-coup’ drew Freud's scattered uses of nachträglich into a single concept and made it central to Freudian thought. Laplanche later proposed the English ‘afterwardsness’ in place of ‘deferred action’ and read the term in the light of the general theory of seduction.
- Leaning-on 1970 The Vocabulaire (1967) translated Freud's Anlehnung as étayage and brought the term back from obscurity. In the first chapter of Vie et mort en psychanalyse (1970), Laplanche makes it the model of how the sexual drive arises: it leans on a vital function such as feeding and then turns away from it. He later judged leaning-on insufficient without the adult's seduction.
introduced
- General theory of seduction 1987 Nouveaux fondements pour la psychanalyse (1987) draws together the Problématiques seminars and sets out the general theory of seduction systematically for the first time. It remained the core of all of Laplanche's later writing, collected in La révolution copernicienne inachevée (1992) and Sexual (2007).
- Enigmatic message 1987 In Nouveaux fondements Laplanche speaks of the adult's enigmatic signifiers, compromised by the adult's unconscious, as what the child must try to master and translate; in later essays he prefers to speak of enigmatic messages.
reworked
- Seduction theory 1987 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.
- Primal repression 1987 Laplanche ties primal repression to the general theory of seduction. The child tries to translate the adult's enigmatic messages, and primal repression is the failure of that translation: what cannot be translated is left behind as the first unconscious contents.
- Unconscious 1992 For Laplanche the unconscious is neither inborn nor the expression of an instinctual id. It is formed from the untranslated remainders of the adult other's messages, an alien within the subject. He calls Freud's discovery an unfinished Copernican revolution: Freud decentred the subject toward the other but repeatedly fell back on endogenous and phylogenetic explanations.