Freud and the Sexual
Late essays consolidating Laplanche's enlarged Freudian sexual and seduction theory.
Freud and the Sexual collects nineteen essays Jean Laplanche wrote between 2000 and 2006, the closing phase of a project that reworks psychoanalysis from its foundations. Laplanche argues for an enlarged conception of the sexual: the drive as distinct from instinct and irreducible to biological need. He returns to and radicalises Freud's abandoned theory of seduction, rebuilding it as a general theory.
That theory places the adult's enigmatic message at the origin of the unconscious. The infant receives communications compromised by the adult's own repressed sexuality, cannot translate them, and the untranslated residues become the source of drive. Laplanche tests the argument against metapsychology, the Oedipus complex, gender, and the transference.
For the clinician it reframes the analytic situation as a scene of address and translation, where interpretation works on messages never fully decoded. The prose is direct and argumentative, closing thought Laplanche pursued across decades.
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
- 2011
- 2011
- French
- John Fletcher
- The Unconscious in Translation
- The Unconscious in Translation
- 318
- 9780615511146