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.