Jean Laplanche

Laplanche was born on 21 June 1924 into a family of wine producers who owned the Château de Pommard in Burgundy Forming new knots². In 1940 he moved to Paris to attend the Lycée Henri IV, where he prepared for the philosophy entrance to the École normale supérieure; there he met Pontalis, his future collaborator. He worked with the Resistance in 1943 and part of 1944, then entered the École normale for the year 1944–45. His teachers there included Ferdinand Alquié, Gaston Bachelard, Jean Hyppolite and Maurice Merleau-Ponty Forming new knots². Two of them drew him toward psychoanalysis: Alquié, who was close to the surrealists and was himself in analysis, and the Hegelian Hyppolite. At first Laplanche wanted to bring analysis into philosophy rather than to practise it The other within⁶.

A scholarship took him to Harvard for 1946–47. On the advice of Rudolph Loewenstein he spent the year in the Department of Social Relations, where he met analysts and cultural anthropologists The other within⁶. When he returned to Paris, Alquié recommended him to Lacan. The analysis he began then lasted until 1963 and was later counted as his training analysis Forming new knots². For a time he was politically active in the group Socialisme ou Barbarie, but analytic work gradually took its place The other within⁶.

He passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1951 and resolved to become an analyst. On Lacan's advice he studied medicine and served psychiatric internships. His medical thesis treated schizophrenia and poetic madness in Hölderlin and earned him his doctorate in 1959; he had his analytic supervisions in 1959–60. The thesis appeared in 1961 as Hölderlin et la question du père, in Daniel Lagache's psychoanalytic series at the Presses universitaires de France, which began a lifelong association with that publisher Forming new knots².

Laplanche began teaching at the Sorbonne in 1962. He belonged to the Société française de psychanalyse, which had been founded a decade earlier with Lacan among its leaders and was not recognised by the International Psychoanalytical Association. In 1963 the International Association offered recognition on condition that Lacan be removed as a training analyst. Laplanche sided with the majority, together with Pontalis, Didier Anzieu and Daniel Widlöcher, and broke with Lacan. The society dissolved: Lacan's followers founded the École freudienne de Paris, while the others formed the Association psychanalytique de France, which the International Association recognised. Laplanche was its president from 1969 to 1971 Forming new knots².

His theoretical differences with Lacan had already appeared in 1960, in a paper on the unconscious written with Serge Leclaire Forming new knots². In it he held that the unconscious is a reality in its own right and not simply a deeper meaning The other within⁶. He never accepted Lacan's sessions of variable length. "I am completely against short sessions," he said in 2000, arguing that free association needs time The other within⁶.

The Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse was begun at Lagache's instigation and took Laplanche and Pontalis eight years. It appeared in 1967 Forming new knots² The Language of Psycho-Analysis¹. In 1970 Laplanche became professor of psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VII. After May 1968 he had helped found its centre for teaching and research in the clinical human sciences, and there he started a doctoral programme open to students who were not clinicians. He directed the series Voix nouvelles en psychanalyse at the Presses universitaires de France. He also founded the quarterly Psychanalyse à l'Université (1975–94), which printed work by academics and clinicians together with unpublished texts by Freud and Melanie Klein. His doctoral seminars, held from the early 1970s to the early 1990s, appeared in seven volumes as Problématiques, a term he adapted from Bachelard and Canguilhem Forming new knots².

From 1988 until his death he was scientific director of the Œuvres complètes de Freud published by the Presses universitaires de France. Scattered translation rights had until then prevented a unified French edition, and the project was kept institutionally independent and committed to accuracy Forming new knots². Laplanche divided his life between Paris and Burgundy. He and his wife Nadine owned the Château de Pommard from 1966 and sold it in 2003, but went on living there and taking part in the wine-making. Nadine Laplanche, his wife of sixty years, died in April 2010. Laplanche died of pulmonary fibrosis in hospital in Beaune on 6 May 2012, aged 87 Forming new knots².

Laplanche read Freud's texts as Freud read his patients, looking for what the texts had marginalised or abandoned. The Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse¹ did not simply define terms. It traced how each concept developed through Freud's writings and supported its account with passages from his work The Language of Psycho-Analysis¹ Forming new knots².

Two of its entries brought neglected Freudian notions back into use. The entry on après-coup gathered Freud's scattered uses of nachträglich into a single concept, afterwardsness, for which Laplanche later preferred the English "afterwardsness" to "deferred action". The entry on Anlehnung, translated as étayage, revived the notion of leaning-on The Language of Psycho-Analysis¹.

Vie et mort en psychanalyse (1970) grew out of the research for the Vocabulaire and set out to "put Freud to work" Forming new knots². Many critics had imposed a unified system on Freud, even at the cost of concepts such as the death drive. Laplanche instead examined a series of central Freudian terms, each of which carries two concepts belonging to rival conceptual schemes. He did not choose between them: he treated the variants like the elements of a dream, to be interpreted together Life and Death in Psychoanalysis³. The first chapter made leaning-on the model for the emergence of the sexual drive, which leans on a vital function such as feeding and then turns away from it Life and Death in Psychoanalysis³. Late in life he said that to do justice to a text is "not masking but restoring its contradictions" Forming new knots² Sexual⁷.

The essay he wrote with Pontalis in 1964, Fantasme originaire, fantasmes des origines, origines du fantasme, recovered Freud's notion of primal fantasy. It read the primal scene, seduction and castration as fantasies of origins, each staging an answer to an enigma: the origin of the subject, of sexuality, and of the difference between the sexes Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality⁸. Laplanche later described the essay as the historical unearthing of a concept rather than an endorsement of it: "I don't agree with the concept of primal fantasy." He rejected Freud's grounding of the primal fantasies in inherited memory. In its place he put codes supplied by culture, and he counted the Oedipus complex among them The other within⁶.

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 Nouveaux fondements pour la psychanalyse⁴. Nouveaux fondements pour la psychanalyse (1987) drew together the research of the Problématiques seminars, a moment of which Laplanche wrote, "Now the moment has come to show how my positions are connected with each other." It was the first major statement of the general theory of seduction New Foundations for Psychoanalysis⁴. As Nicholas Ray stressed, the theory had nothing to do with the therapies of recovered memory. It moved seduction from the origin of a pathology to the foundation of every psyche Forming new knots².

In the ordinary care of the infant, the adult addresses messages to the child in words, gestures and bodily care. These messages are enigmatic to their sender as well as to their receiver, because they are compromised by the adult's unconscious sexuality New Foundations for Psychoanalysis⁴. The founding situation is therefore the universal one between adult and child, not the family triangle. "A child can become human and be educated without parents, but not without receiving adult messages," Laplanche said, and the adult's own unconscious is the third term in the situation The other within⁶. The ego, the unconscious and the superego form secondarily, out of the infant's partly failed attempts to master, symbolise and translate these inscriptions Forming new knots². Primal repression is the failure of that translation: what cannot be translated is left behind as the first unconscious contents New Foundations for Psychoanalysis⁴.

On this basis Laplanche extended Freud's translational model of repression into a translational model of afterwardsness, of trauma and infantile sexuality, and of the constitution of the human being as a self-narrating, self-theorising creature. He later also called the founding situation the fundamental anthropological situation New Foundations for Psychoanalysis⁴ Freud and the Sexual⁷. In the same spirit he came to regard leaning-on as a prop by which Freud avoided what seduction had revealed. Sexuality, he concluded, comes from the other The other within⁶.

The essays collected in La révolution copernicienne inachevée (1992), written between 1967 and 1992, take their title from an essay of 1992. For Laplanche the unconscious is neither inborn nor the expression of an instinctual id. It is an alien within the subject, formed from the untranslated remainders of the other's messages. Freud had decentred the subject toward the other but repeatedly fell back on endogenous and phylogenetic explanations The Unfinished Copernican Revolution⁵. In 2000 Laplanche compared the state of psychoanalytic theory to "late Ptolemeism: an accumulation of extra hypotheses" The other within⁶. The same collection includes essays on transference as provoked by the analyst and on masochism and the general theory of seduction The Unfinished Copernican Revolution⁵. In one of them, "Time and the Other" (1991), he glossed analysis as an unweaving, "a disentangling to allow the formation of new knots" Forming new knots².

His last essays, collected in Sexual (2007), distinguish drive from instinct and sexuality from attachment. They also treat gender, sex and the sexual, and read castration and the Oedipus complex as codes and narrative schemas Freud and the Sexual⁷. In these years he was working on primary identification as identification by the other. The gender of an individual, he argued, is first assigned by the adults around the child, and the assignment carries their unconscious with it The other within⁶.

The Vocabulaire was quickly translated into English and now exists in more than twenty languages Forming new knots². Its English publisher presents it as an established classic for students and researchers The Language of Psycho-Analysis¹. Laplanche's own theory drew strong interest in continental Europe, Latin America and Canada Forming new knots².

In English, Vie et mort en psychanalyse appeared in Jeffrey Mehlman's translation in 1976 Life and Death in Psychoanalysis³, and Nouveaux fondements in David Macey's translation in 1989 and Jonathan House's in 2016 New Foundations for Psychoanalysis⁴. Sexual was translated by John Fletcher, Jonathan House and Nicholas Ray as Freud and the Sexual Freud and the Sexual⁷.

Introducing their interview with him in 2000, Peter Osborne and John Fletcher called him the most original and philosophically informed psychoanalytic theorist of his day The other within⁶. In his obituary, Ray described Laplanche's whole project as a lifelong analysis of Freud, undertaken in the service of Freud's own Copernican demand. He closed with Laplanche's call to analyse and to mourn, figured in Penelope's weaving and unweaving as the prototype of analysis Forming new knots².

Laplanche's principal books include Hölderlin et la question du père (1961). With Pontalis he wrote the essay Fantasme originaire, fantasmes des origines, origines du fantasme⁸ (1964) and the Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse¹ (1967). His other books include Vie et mort en psychanalyse³ (1970), the seven volumes of Problématiques drawn from his seminars, Nouveaux fondements pour la psychanalyse⁴ (1987), the collection La révolution copernicienne inachevée⁵ (1992), Entre séduction et inspiration: l'homme (1999), and his last collection, Sexual: la sexualité élargie au sens freudien⁷ (2007) Forming new knots².