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.