Freud and the Sexual: Essays 2000–2006

Laplanche's last collection: nineteen essays written from 2000 to 2006, published by the Presses universitaires de France in 2007 and translated into English as Freud and the Sexual (2011), edited by John Fletcher and translated by Fletcher, Jonathan House and Nicholas Ray. The title's 'sexual' names sexuality in Freud's enlarged sense, which Laplanche defends against readings that reduce it. The essays distinguish the drive from instinct and sexuality from attachment. They ask whether chapter VII of The Interpretation of Dreams should be rewritten in terms of communication, and take the fundamental anthropological situation of adult and child as their starting point. Other essays examine failures of translation, displacement and condensation, sexual crime, gender, sex and the sexual, and the three meanings of the term 'unconscious'. The last group treats incest and infantile sexuality and reads castration and the Oedipus complex as codes and narrative schemas rather than founding structures. Further essays defend psychoanalysis at the university, discuss its levels of proof, and set Freud in relation to philosophy and to psychotherapy; one, 'In Debate with Freud', states Laplanche's method of doing justice to a text by restoring its contradictions.