Cont Philos Rev DOI 10.1007/s11007-016-9383-3

BOOK REVIEW

Jean Laplanche: Between seduction and inspiration: man. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman The Unconscious in Translation, New York, 2015, pp. xxi + 304, $68.50 (hbk), ISBN 9781942254041, $48.50 (pbk), ISBN 9781942254058

Lucas Fain1

Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Originally published as Entre se´duction et inspiration: l’homme (: PUF, 1999), the present volume is the most recent title by the late French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche (1924–2012) to emerge from the aptly named press: The Unconscious in Translation. In accordance with Laplanche’s lifetime wish to make all of his writings available in English, this volume follows as part of a plan to release translations of Laplanche’s complete works in more or less reverse chronological order. The present volume was preceded by the publication, in 2011, of Freud and the Sexual: Essays 2000–2006 and, in 2015, The Temptation of Biology: Freud’s Theories of Sexuality.1 In the collection under review, Laplanche assembles his ‘‘principal writings’’ from the years 1992 to 1998 (3). The essays do not develop thematically, but according to Laplanche they share an ‘‘overriding motif,’’ namely, ‘‘the fundamental anthropological situation,’’ or the asymmetrical relation between infans and adult, which designates the real point of departure for Laplanche’s entire oeuvre: that of putting upon ‘‘new foundations’’ through a strenuous and highly critical return to Freud (3). Since the lack of complete and easily accessible translations has so far prevented Laplanche’s work from obtaining a larger audience, I will first make some preliminary remarks about the significance of this volume to the wider scope of Laplanche’s thought before commenting more directly on why this collection should be of interest to philosophers today. Of the thirteen essays contained in this volume, seven were previously translated into English. Three of these are contained in John Fletcher’s edited collection, Essays on Otherness (New York: Routledge, 1999), while the remaining four

1 Originally Sexual: La sexualite´e´largie au sense freudien: 2000–2006 (Paris: PUF, 2007) and Proble´matiques VII: Le Fourvoiement biologisant de la sexualite´ chez Freud, suivi de ‘‘Biologisme et biologie’’ (Paris: PUF, 2006).

& Lucas Fain [email protected]

1 University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA 123 L. Fain appeared in more difficult to obtain journals or edited books. With regard to issues of translation, the most significant difference is that under the general editorship of Jonathan House more rigorous attention is now being paid to ensure terminological consistency across Laplanche’s writings. Important terms such as e´tayage, apre`s- coup, and the neologism e´trange`rete´ are rendered respectively as ‘‘leaning on,’’ ‘‘apre`s-coup,’’ and ‘‘strangerness.’’ These decisions are not without controversy, as there has been substantive debate about the rendering of e´tayage (Freud’s Anlehnung, Strachey’s ‘‘anaclisis’’) as ‘‘propping,’’2 and Laplanche himself had recommended ‘‘afterwardsness’’ as the best English translation for apre`s-coup— itself a rendering of Freud’s German term: Nachtra¨glichkeit.3 For readers already attuned to Laplanche’s sensitivity regarding issues of psychoanalytic terminology— as first indexed by Laplanche’s authorship, with J.-B. Pontalis, of the incomparable Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris: PUF, 1967)—the editorial notes included on Laplanche’s terminological apparatus are highly appreciated (xix–xxi). This volume also carries the distinction of having been translated (with an autobiographical Preface) by Jeffrey Mehlman, the eminent traducteur of Vie et mort en psychanalyse (Paris: Flammarion, 1970), who was among the first to recognize the seminal importance of Laplanche as both a reader of Freud and a vital correction to the authoritarian influence of in academic appropriations of French psychoanalytic thought. Indeed, Laplanche refuses not only the authority of Lacan, but that of Freud as well. What Mehlman wrote in his Introduction to Vie et mort therefore applies with equal force here, for ‘‘what has authority in this reading is, in the final analysis, the perverse rigor with which a certain bizarre structure of Freud’s text persistently plays havoc with the magisterial pronouncements—or authority— of Freud.’’4 At the crux of Laplanche’s critical return to Freud is his recovery of Freud’s abandoned seduction theory of 1895, and his further development of a ‘‘general theory of seduction,’’ which concerns the concomitant origins of and the human subject. With respect to Freud’s initial theory—which Laplanche calls the ‘‘restricted theory of seduction,’’ in phrasing that deliberately recalls the distinction between Einstein’s general and restricted theories of relativity—the aim was to explain the origin and genesis of the psychoneuroses: most especially, hysteria and other neuroses of defense. After realizing, however, that some of his patients were reporting fantasies of seduction instead of actual events of sexual assault, Freud abandoned his seduction theory in 1897, and subsequently replaced it with a quasi-universal theory of human sexual develop- ment, famously structured by the schemata of Oedipus and Castration. For Laplanche, this shift designates, perhaps, the most egregious instance of Freud’s numerous ‘‘goings astray’’ (fourvoiements), as it effectively marginalized the primacy of the adult other in Freud’s account of the of

2 See Jeffrey Mehlman’s Preface to this volume: ‘‘Interpreting [with] Laplanche,’’ ix–x. See also Jeffrey Mehlman, ‘‘Verweile doch!: pour l’e´tayage’’ in Colloque international de psychanalyse: Jean Laplanche (Paris: PUF, 1994). 3 Discussed in Article 2: ‘‘Notes on apre`s-coup.’’ 4 In Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, Jeffrey Mehlman, trans. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1976), ix. 123 Jean Laplanche: Between seduction and inspiration: Man… the individual. Thus, beginning from the fundamental anthropological situation, Laplanche invokes a ‘‘general theory of seduction,’’ which finds the ultimate realism of the unconscious in the young nursling’s inevitable failure to translate the ‘‘enigmatic messages’’ it receives from the adult for whom such messages are also enigmatic and unconscious. Primal , the process by which the uncon- scious is produced through the interpersonal genesis of the human psyche, is accordingly understood to result from an originary failure of translation in the communication between infant and adult. The articles contained in the present volume presuppose significant familiarity with Laplanche’s intellectual development through his landmark works in Vie et mort, Nouveaux fondements pour la psychanalyse (Paris: PUF, 1987), and the title essay from La re´volution copernicienne inacheve´e: Travaux 1967–1992 (Paris: Aubier, 1992). These texts are all available in English, with the last having been included in the aforementioned assemblage by John Fletcher. (The collection itself is expected to appear in a forthcoming translation by Luke Thurston, another of Laplanche’s experienced translators.) Nevertheless, readers unfamiliar with Laplanche should not avoid the essays in this book for reasons of technical complexity or theoretical obscurity. More than most in this field, Laplanche is concerned with the lucid explication of complex psychoanalytic concepts and ideas. Moreover, Article 7: ‘‘Psychoanalysis in the Scientific Community’’ presents Laplanche’s theoretically grounded views about the scientific character of psychoanalysis and its appropriate relation to the university. First, concerning the scientific character of psychoanalysis, Laplanche argues: ‘‘There is thus, in the first place, in psychoanalytic science, itself: a model attempting to account conjointly for the unconscious and the method allowing access to it’’ (149). What accounts for the scientificity of psychoanalysis is therefore the ‘‘inseparability of the method and its object’’ (149). Here Laplanche defends the rightful place of psychoanalysis in the academy, in step with the demands for reproducibility found in the physical and human sciences, while at the same time he avows the need for psychoanalysis to maintain a certain, crucial, ‘‘extraterritoriality’’ in tension with the university as a regulative institution (154). Related comments are also found in Article 4: ‘‘The : A Psychoanalysis ‘on Command’,’’ which summarizes Laplanche’s critique of the ideological indoctrinating power of psychoanalytic training institutions. At bottom, Laplanche argues that the therapeutic and professional goals of psychoanalysis are simply in contradiction with each other, for the process of analysis—which ‘‘attempts asymptotically to make once again ‘our own’ (eigen) what is most foreign in us’’—is itself diametrically opposed to the normative controls of institutional professionalization (106). Throughout this volume it is possible to identify a broad set of concerns regarding ‘‘two levels’’ of psychoanalytic theory: ‘‘On the one hand, metapsycho- logical theory taken in the broadest sense; on the other, ‘psychoanalytic’ ideologies,’’ which presuppose a metapsychological theory that can account for the appearance and function of the second level (148). Laplanche here distinguishes the formalization of psychoanalytic theories—and their elevation to mythological status—from the spontaneous self-theorizing activities of the individual, as in the 123 L. Fain example of Little Hans, who offered to Freud the theory of castration (the ‘‘joint theory of Hans and Sigmund’’) as an expression of his youthful attempt to master the enigma of gender (209, 223). Whereas Lacan would later raise the theory of castration to the signifier of metaphysical ‘‘finitude’’ (210, 228), Laplanche shows how such mythosymbolic expressions function to bind, and ultimately repress, the enigmatic messages proffered to children by the adult world. This means, accordingly, that ‘‘the unconscious is not a hidden meaning to be deciphered’’ (241), and that the function of metapsychology is not to supply a ‘‘key’’ for the interpretation of unconscious data (216, 249–250). Rather, a properly psychoan- alytic metapsychology ‘‘gives itself the means to account for the function of mythic constructions in the constitution of the human being’’ (243). The ‘‘constitution of the human being’’ is of paramount importance to Laplanche, and to that end he ranks among the most philosophically informed psychoanalysts of the twentieth century. In fact, Laplanche was formally schooled in philosophy at the E´ cole Normale Supe´rieure in the 1940s, where he studied under , Maurice Merleau-Ponty, , and Ferdinand Alquie´. He received training and support from Lacan until his formal break in 1964, and his writings display familiarity with the history of philosophy from Plato to Heidegger, as well as Wittgenstein and later philosophy of the twentieth century. Without, therefore, wishing to impose a false—mythological—unity upon the essays in Laplanche’s me´lange, I shall concentrate the remainder of this review on the specific relevance of this collection to several issues of contemporary philosophical interest. These are: hermeneutics; areas in ethics, including theories of ethical responsibility and narrative agency; and work concerning the division between human beings and animals. Beginning with the last of these, a major component of Laplanche’s contribution to psychoanalysis has been the restoration of Freudian , in opposition to dominant trends toward desexualization in (represented, diversely, by Klein and Winnicott), attachment theory (guided by Bowlby), and Lacanian structuralist theory. A key to Laplanche’s reading of Freud is thus the identification of a distinction in Freud’s terminology between ‘‘drive’’ (Trieb) and ‘‘instinct’’ (Instinkt). This distinction has been persistently covered over by inaccuracies in the standard French and English translations, which have tended to emphasize Freud’s own, paradoxical, appeals to the biological character of ‘‘instincts.’’ The Vocabulaire initially brought attention to this issue, and Laplanche further clarified those observations in the theory of leaning on, discussed in Vie et mort, where he showed how the sexual drive ‘‘leans on’’ and is ‘‘derived from’’ the instincts of self-preservation. In later works, Laplanche further argued that the theory of seduction ‘‘carries the truth of leaning on.’’5 While two of the relevant essays in this volume—Article 2: ‘‘Notes on apre`s-coup’’ and Article 3: ‘‘A Brief Treatise on the Unconscious’’—were included in Essays on Otherness, the present collection brings together two related essays—namely, Article 5: ‘‘Forces at Play in Psychical Conflict’’ and Article 8: ‘‘The So-called : A Sexual Drive.’’6

5 Jean Laplanche, Proble´matiques IV: L’Inconsient et le C¸a (Paris: PUF, 1981), 69. 6 The former appears here for the first time in English. The latter was translated by Luke Thurston in Rob Weatherill (ed.), The Death Drive: New Life for a Dead Subject (London: Rebus Press 1999). 123 Jean Laplanche: Between seduction and inspiration: Man…

In the latter, Laplanche condenses his metapsychological drive theory and addresses the problem of human versus animal aggressivity through an examination of Freud’s use, in Civilization and Its Discontents, of the Hobbesian adage ‘‘homo homini lupus.’’ At stake for Laplanche is a question concerning the ‘‘naturalness’’ of human aggressiveness, and he argues, first, that for neither wolf nor man is the wolf ‘‘a ‘wolf,’ in the sense of Hobbes’s hideous monster.’’ This leads him to conclude: If ‘‘Lupus’’ designates the ‘‘emblematic figure of Hobbes,’’ then ‘‘It is man alone who is a Lupus for man’’ (178). Shortly stated, Laplanche does away with any biologizing reduction of the drive and, consequently, any biologizing of human cruelty. This topic is briefly taken up again in Article 6: ‘‘Responsibility and Response’’ (139). However, this essay is uniquely significant for its engagement with Emmanuel Levinas. Given their shared interest in themes of alterity, it is surprising that Laplanche and Levinas did not correspond during their lifetimes. In fact, Laplanche goes so far as to state that Levinas bore no influence on his thinking (135). While, as a student in the 1940s, he admits to familiarity with Levinas’s first book on Husserl from 1930, he claims to have found Levinas insufficiently ‘‘Copernican,’’ and he professes not to have followed Levinas’s record of publication (135–136). Ironically, Laplanche also recalls, only a few pages earlier in this same article, that ‘‘Freud’s relation with Nietzsche consists of scotomization: ‘not wanting to know’ that quite often Nietzsche had already said what [Freud] would rediscover’’ (126). However this may apply to Laplanche as a reader of Levinas, what is significant here concerns Laplanche’s radical Copernicanism along with the assertion of his ‘‘major difference’’ with Levinas: ‘‘the Copernican decentering is valid,’’ he writes, ‘‘not only for the subject self-centered perceptually and for the cogito but for the subject self-centered in time as well’’ (136). For Laplanche, this criticism applies just as much to Levinas as it does to Heidegger, for both thinkers failed to consider how ‘‘the primacy of childhood in Freud decenters us irreparably’’ (136). In the realm of Levinasian ‘‘ethics as first philosophy,’’ such decentering prioritizes ‘‘response’’ over and against ‘‘responsibility,’’ as the transmission of enigmatic messages from the adult other demands, foremost, a response—an attempt at translation—that is always inadequate (137). It is the inevitable failure of translation that, subsequently, links Laplanche’s brief comments on Levinas to contemporary issues in hermeneutics and narrative conceptions of agency. Two previously translated essays are of particular interest here: Article 10: ‘‘Psychoanalysis as Antihermeneutics’’ and Article 12: ‘‘Narra- tivity and Hermeneutics: A Few Propositions.’’ In the latter, Laplanche offers a critique of the thesis—variously articulated by Serge Viderman, Donald Spence, and Roy Schafer—that narrativization, as the joint creation of the analysand and the analyst, must be considered the ‘‘motor of analytic treatment’’ (246). Ideas concerning the therapeutic action of narrativization entered with the ‘‘hermeneutic turn’’ in psychoanalysis; and its key is the notion, bolstered by Heidegger, that there is ‘‘a primal moment of Verstehen, which can be understood as a protocompre- hension or way in which being-there (Dasein) gives meaning to its initial situation, to its thrownness (Geworfenheit)’’ (248). Again, for Laplanche, this thesis is not radical enough. Whereas the therapeutic work of narrative is thought to organize ‘‘a 123 L. Fain

‘prereflective’ experience that is itself ‘patterned and full of meaning’,’’ the fact of primal repression makes any such ‘‘interpretation’’ impossible (248). There is, in other words, no ‘‘original’’ meaning—neither ontic, nor ontological—to be interpreted, recovered, or alternatively organized. Instead, what is called proto- comprehension must be understood as an activity of translation, which is primordially the effort to translate messages transmitted to the child by adults. The function of ‘‘narrativization’’ is, accordingly, defensive. It amounts to the ‘‘warrant and seal of repression,’’ of which it is the aim of analysis to ‘‘detranslate’’ (250–251). Laplanche continues this line with detailed comments on the aim of analysis in Article 9: ‘‘Goals of the Psychoanalytic Process’’ and Article 13: ‘‘Sublimation and/ or Inspiration.’’ Whereas the latter was previously available in English, the former is translated here for the first time. For the purpose of this review, I will not develop the argument of these texts, except to say that Laplanche outlines a therapeutic arc that involves the reconceptualization of sublimation as a form of ‘‘inspiration,’’ which, in turn, seeks to maintain a certain openness to the originary wounding by the other. For philosophers who are concerned with theories of narrative agency, however, Laplanche’s conception of psychoanalysis as antihermeneutics may be of particular significance. For example, there is a debate about whether ‘‘narratives are the product of agency,’’ as Gregory Currie has argued, or whether ‘‘agency is a product of narratives,’’ as Allen Speight conversely suggests.7 Within this debate there are also questions about whether, in the words of David Velleman, the narrative basis of agency results from a ‘‘biologically programed’’ need for the ‘‘resolution of affect.’’8 Without attempting to resolve these debates, it is easy to see the relevance of Laplanche’s account of human psychosexual development, which dislocates the work of translation from any biological need, while additionally challenging the notion that ethical agency must be founded on some form of narrative closure. Rather, in the shift that displaces ‘‘responsibility’’ onto the question of ‘‘response,’’ the ethical itself becomes a question of responding to the ‘‘strangerness’’ within, on the basis of the ‘‘strangerness’’ in every message emanating from the other. Finally, I would like to make a few critical remarks about the quality of publication. The Unconscious in Translation is a fledgling press, which has received support and financing from the Fondation Jean Laplanche at the Institut de . Its relative freshness may explain the occasional typographical error. However, the bibliography contains a serious misattribution to Dominique Scarfone of works that are, in fact, by Jeffrey Mehlman—the translator of this volume. While the text also contains a helpful index, it is arguably lacking several important terms, for example: inspiration, repression, seduction, and translation. These comments to one side, this volume is an invaluable contribution to the wider dissemination of Laplanche. Psychoanalytically engaged philosophers,

7 Gregory Currie, Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1; Allen Speight, ‘‘The Narrative Shape of Agency: Three Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives’’ in Narrative, Philosophy, and Life, Allen Speight, ed. (New York: Springer, 2015), 49. 8 David Velleman, How We Get Along (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 195; cf. Speight, op. cit., 54 and 58. 123 Jean Laplanche: Between seduction and inspiration: Man… clinical practitioners, and scholars across the humanities and human sciences will all benefit from this wide-ranging addition to the canon of Laplanche’s works now available in English.

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