Laplanche's Theory Research Articles

Afterword: The Unkillable Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory

Abstract: This Afterword takes stock of the antisocial thesis by reconsidering the significance of Jean Laplanche's influence on Leo Bersani's work. Emphasizing the distinctness of Laplanche's theory of sexuality, the essay differentiates among four positions in the antisocial thesis debate: Bersani's, Lee Edelman's, José Muñoz's, and Dean's own. Contending that the death drive does not exist as such, Dean argues that negation involves more than negativity and therefore should be understood not merely as destructive but also as creative. Discriminating among claims that have tended to become conflated, the essay connects Bersani's version of the antisocial thesis to his account of aesthetic subjectivity.

Humankind: A Sick Animal? On the Meaning and Importance of the Primacy of Sexuality in Freud, Fonagy, and Laplanche

AbstractIn this article, I question the actuality of Freud's ideas on sexuality. First, I investigate why Freud thinks that the main psychopathological syndromes are determined by problems related to sexuality. I then show in what sense Freud's theories on sexuality make it impossible to simply think of psychoanalysis as yet another developmental psychology. Then, I turn to Fonagy's recent claim that sexual emotions cannot be mirrored and that this is the reason why sexuality can only be an imposed burden. Or, rather, this impossibility explains why sexuality belongs to the borderline spectrum. Fonagy further links this idea to Laplanche's theory of a generalized seduction that it is meant to explain. I argue that it is the other way around: the theory of a generalized seduction explains the lack of mirroring in the case of sexuality. In my conclusion, I state that although the metapsychological claims of both Fonagy and Laplanche allow us to reaffirm the special place sexuality has in understanding the human being, their theories fall short when it comes to defending an exclusive primacy of sexuality.

Sofrimento psíquico, acontecimento traumático e angústia pulsional

This article discusses the psychological distress triggered by a traumatic event and starts with a historical perspective in which Freud's conceptual contributions to the definition of the traumatic neuroses are presented. Next, the points of view of early psychoanalysts, especially Sandor Ferenczi and Karl Abraham, on the subject are taken into consideration. The contribution of Jean Laplanche's theory of generalized seduction to the understanding of the concept of trauma in psychoanalysis closes the theoretical part of the article. Two clinical reports are presented as illustrations of the main ideas defended by the author, according to which every anxiety created by a traumatic event always brings about anxiety due to the internal violence of the sexual drive. This hypothesis is entirely based on Freud's ideas about anxiety, which have been adopted by Laplanche.

A fantasia inconsciente como metatradução: o psiquismo ligado e desligado

This article aims to discuss how psychic suffering occurs and is maintained by the pulsional dialectics between connection and disconnection. Through the methodology of psychoanalysis beyond walls, we present a literary extract of North American author Carson McCullers to illustrate how a rigid translation can be a barrier to the retranslative process. Therefore, the psychic suffering generated by the disconnected elements of the unconscious would not have the chance to acquire a new translation. As a result and based on Laplanche's Theory of Generalized Seduction, we articulate that pulsional dynamics and disconnected contents invade the own field of translative synthesis, keeping psychic suffering constant.

Recalque originário, gênero e sofrimento psíquico

São propostas, neste artigo, articulações entre o recalque originário, compreendido desde a teoria da sedução generalizada de Jean Laplanche, e o conceito de gênero. O enfoque principal será o papel da alteridade na formação do conflito psíquico em suas relações com o gênero, o sexo e a identificação. Por essas articulações, procura-se demonstrar como o conceito de gênero ocupa lugar fundamental dentro da metapsicologia psicanalítica. Em seguida, serão exploradas as vicissitudes que a identidade de gênero pode vir a assumir na masculinidade e na feminilidade, procurando entender a especificidade do sofrimento psíquico ligado a cada uma dessas categorias.

Métapsychologie, épistémologie et éthique de la clinique psychanalytique

El presente articulo analiza las diferencias entre psicoterapia y psicoanalisis y situa el cuadro y los respectivos objetivos de sus metodos de acuerdo con los principios de la teoria de la seduccion generalizada de Jean Laplanche. Considera tambien, y como destaque de esta teoria, la vision de emancipacion que le es atribuida al psicoanalisis. Con estos fundamentos, el articulo sostiene que existen lazos estrechos entre teoria y practica, que la practica del psicoanalisis implica en la eleccion de un modelo metapsicologico y que todos los modelos no pueden ser tomados como equivalentes, considerando el objetivo de transformacion inherente a la practica psicoanalitica de nuestros dias

Failed Messages, Maternal Loss, and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's A Mercy

In A Mercy , Morrison frames the psychic damage inflicted by slavery as a series of failed messages between slave mother and slave daughter. Florens's misreading of her mother's message, as she arranged for Florens's sale, becomes the distorting lens through which she perceives the world; and as a consequence of her separation from her mother, her capacity to read the meanings of others' messages is disabled. Jean Laplanche's theory of the enigmatic signifier, which also examines the effects of a parental message that cannot be understood, enables me to clarify some baffling aspects of Florens's actions and of her style as narrator. The narrative structure formally reproduces the thematics of mother-daughter separation.

La Théorie de la Séduction Généralisée et son corollaire, la théorie de la traduction

It is in 1987 when, in the book “New foundations for the psychoanalysis”, Jean Laplanche developed his “theory of the generalized seduction” by taking back what Freud had abandoned in his neurotica of 1897. Laplanche, about the text of Ferenczi on the “Confusion” of the languages between the adults and the child considers that the term of translation would be more suited than that of confusion but also that Freud did not develop the effects of the premature communication and the message. Now it is from the interhuman communication between an adult and a child within the “ Fundamental Anthropological Situation” that the author places the genesis of the psychic device and it, independently of any biological substratum. And so the enigmatic messages which – from the sexual unconscious of the other adult – ask for a work of translation of the infans, for work the not translatable unconscious rests of which will become that Jean Laplanche names the “objects-sources” of the drive at the origin of the repression. The child of the pregenital sexuality is the only one “herméneute”, who has to translate the enigmatic messages compromised with the unconscious of the other adult. From this point of view, the “theory of the generalized seduction” is also a theory of the afterward. We present two clinical cases which show how Jean Laplanche's theory allows us to welcome the clinical material by considering the work of the patient as a event of translation-symbolization from a reopening facilitated by the experiment of the psychoanalytical situation.

Befores and Afters of the Womb: Reply to Commentaries by Jeanne Wolff Bernstein and Dodi Goldman

This reply engages with Wolff Bernstein's and Goldman's rich discussions of Farhi's work. Wolff Bernstein's exploration of the relationship between Winnicott and Susan as a perversion of the phylogenetic shield operative in primal repression furthers our understanding of Milner's treatment of her patient. Following Wolff Bernstein's thoughts of the problems caused by Winnicott's mishandlings of Susan, I suggest that we might consider the referral process itself as an analogue to pre-natal life, the conscious and unconscious significations of which can have an important impact on the qualities of relational bonds to be built with the treating analyst. Goldman's commentary deepens our insight into Milner as a person and as an analyst. At the same time, it also raises an important question about how early in biological life it is logical to assume the possibility of psychic material's registration, which Goldman sees as equivalent to considerations of psychic organization. Seeing the two as temporally distinct, I draw from critical analyses of Laplanche's theory to discuss how experience can be registered as yet-misaligned bits that await a later developmental time before it can become invested with meaning and become psychically organized.

From end time to the time of the end: some reflections about the emergence of subjectivity

In this article, the author presents the first ten years of the analysis of a young patient who just barely escaped an onset of schizophrenia. The patient showed defences of the self that had been frozen with regard to his relationship to time, and had shut him outside of any rapport with time, forcing him to seek-as desperately as unconsciously-a 'time of the end', a present time. He explores different 'lived times': circular and linear times that are both classical in Jungian theory; he then describes what he calls subjective linear 'lived time' as a modality for opening up instinctual objectivity to subjectivity's access to the symbolic. In his theorization of this passage, he uses the Greek notion of Kairos as well as the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche's theory of originary seduction. Finally, he ties this transition to recent theories in physics of complex systems, also called chaos theory, and poses the hypothesis that this model can represent two essential qualities of subjectivity: its non-predictability and its non-reproductability.

Moments in Laplanche's Theory of Sexuality

This paper is a brief introduction to some of Laplanche's thinking, as well as a commentary on his essay that is published here. Some salient issues in Laplanche's theory are introduced, such as the decentering of the subject and the prioritizing of the other, the postulation of the “reality of the message,” in which gestures from the other both signify and excite/seduce, and an enlarged meaning of seduction. The child's translation of the enigmatic messages conveyed by the adult is a process of being seduced into building interiority and subjectivity. In effect, the present paper proposes not only that “otherness” constitutes the subject, but that an “asymmetrical intersubjectivity” is what enables the transition from instinct to drive and the creation of paradoxical human sexuality. In a meditation that illuminates significant issues in American feminist and psychoanalytic theory, Laplanche's essay analyzes and distinguishes three interrelated terms, gender, sex, and “the sexual” (“le sexual”), or so-called “infantile sexuality”, the latter documenting a Freudian and French emphasis on an additional, counter-realistic, counter-adaptational, and counter-social conception of sexuality. What stands out in this paper no less than “le sexual” is the use of the term “gender” by a French psychoanalyst, who is at once nodding in acknowledgment to contemporary American thinking, and enlisting the concept of gender to reaffirm its “intimate enemy,” infantile sexuality, “le sexual.” Laplanche sees the American-conceived couple sex/gender as a “formidable tool against the Freudian discovery.” Formidableness is what is common to gender and to infantile sexuality, in that both concepts resist and destroy the clear-cut biological/anatomical “destiny” of sex. Both pertain to cultural/acquired/constructed aspects of sexuality; both are phantasmatic and both subvert sexual role divisions. But gender is organized by, hence possibly subordinate to, sex. Laplanche acknowledges gender yet at the same time he makes it dependent on sexuality and thereby “downgrades” it in favor of the inarticulate, perverse, subversive, untameable aspect of human sexuality—“le sexual”, infantile sexuality—which remains outside and in excess of gender.

Signifying contortions: disavowal, the enigmatic signifier, and George W. Bush's credibility after 9/11

Abstract“Signifying Contortions” attempts to account for Bush's credibility by reflecting on three psychological processes that lead people to tolerate the misleading and contradictory discourse of a leader. Laplanche's theory of the way children process the “enigmatic signifiers” coming from their parents explains why an authority figure's verbal fumblings and contradictions would evoke in his followers not only tolerance, but a deep attachment to him. Through a process of disavowal, the paper argues, certain signifiers related to 9/11 – such as “World Trade Center” – have been emptied of their meaning; President Bush's words serve as a fetish that seals over the gap made by these collective disavowals. Freud said that members of a group see in their leader the embodiment of each member's ego ideal; I claim that Bush both defends and embodies not the ego ideal described by Freud, but the nation's collective ideal ego, as that is described by Lacan. The three modes of contorted signifying function to preserve the idealized self‐image of the all‐good, all‐beneficent USA, which came under attack on 9/11. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The alienness of the unconscious: on Laplanche's theory of seduction.

In this paper the author uses a clinical example as a focus for an exploration of his thesis that the parent is the 'other' who implants his or her unconscious message into the child by means of seduction. As the other is alien, the unconscious of the child cannot any longer be considered the centre of the person but is decentred by the implanted alienness. The author draws on Laplanche's seduction theory to argue that the unconscious message of seduction by the other is exclusively sexual and that it cannot be translated nor symbolized because an interpretative system shared by subject and object is lacking. The decentred alterity of the unconscious allows for comparison with a third object and hence a structural triangulation of the mind which is a prerequisite for symbolization. The role of the analyst in permitting a transference enactment and so facilitating the beginning of sexual symbolization is discussed in relation to the clinical example given at the start of the paper.