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 (Paris: 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 psychoanalysis 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 Jacques Lacan 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 psychoanalytic theory 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 psychosexual development 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 repression, 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, metapsychology 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 Training Analysis: 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