Life and Death in Psychoanalysis

Laplanche's first major theoretical book, published by Flammarion in 1970 and translated with an introduction by Jeffrey Mehlman as Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). It grew out of the research for the Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse and sets out to 'put Freud to work', reading his texts as psychoanalysis reads its material, for their latent and partly unconscious history. Many critics had resolved the contradictions in Freud by imposing a unified system, even at the cost of discarding metapsychological concepts such as the death drive. Laplanche argues instead that a series of crucial Freudian terms each carries two concepts belonging to rival conceptual schemes, so that the work becomes a structured polemical field. Rather than choosing between the variants, he interprets them together, as the elements of a dream are interpreted, and follows how Freud's most radical discoveries keep escaping him and being rediscovered. The first chapter makes leaning-on (Anlehnung, étayage) the model of how the sexual drive arises: it leans on a vital function such as feeding and then turns away from it.