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.