Essays on Otherness
Key essays introducing Laplanche's theory of the enigmatic message and the other.
Essays on Otherness offers the most original, philosophically sophisticated critical reading of Freud's metapsychology since Lacan.
Essays on Otherness gathers Jean Laplanche's principal papers in English for the first time, edited and translated by John Fletcher and published by Routledge in 1999. The essays set out his revision of psychoanalytic first principles, working through seduction, repression, transference, masochism, and mourning.
Laplanche argues that the infant psyche is founded by the adult who cares for it. The adult transmits messages compromised by an unconscious sexuality the sender cannot decode, and the child cannot translate; these enigmatic signifiers lodge as the unconscious kernel of the other within the self. From this follows his general theory of seduction, which places the primacy of the other, rather than internal drive alone, at the origin of psychic life.
For the clinician, the collection reframes transference as the ongoing pressure of untranslated messages, and it gives the consulting room a rigorous account of why the analytic relation, not simply the patient's past, carries the work.
About the author
Jean Laplanche
Jean Laplanche (1924 to 2012) was a French psychoanalyst and theorist who reworked Freudian thought. With Jean-Bertrand Pontalis he wrote The Language of Psychoanalysis, a reference dictionary of the field. He was known for his general theory of seduction and for the concept of the enigmatic message, which placed the adult other at the origin of the unconscious. He served as a professor of psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VII, and he directed the scientific committee behind a new French translation of Freud.
Details
- 1999
- 1999
- French
- John Fletcher
- Routledge
- Routledge
- 288
- 9780415131087