Life and Death in Psychoanalysis
Foundational essays reworking Freud's drive theory, sexuality and the death drive.
Laplanche's work is much more accessible than Jacques Lacan's.
Life and Death in Psychoanalysis gathers essays in which Jean Laplanche reads Freud's metapsychology line by line, tracing how a single set of terms carries two competing conceptual schemes that Freud never fully reconciled. Rather than choosing between them, Laplanche holds the contradictions open and works out what each commits Freud to.
The central argument concerns the origin of sexuality. Laplanche separates instinct from drive and develops the idea of propping (etayage): sexuality arises by leaning on the self-preservative functions before detaching into fantasy. On this reading the death drive is not a separate biological force but something bound up with sexuality itself.
For a clinician the book offers a close, sceptical account of where the drives come from and how Freud's texts can be interpreted without smoothing them over. The essays reward slow reading, and they set out the vocabulary Laplanche would develop across his later 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
- 1970
- 1976
- Vie et mort en psychanalyse
- French
- Jeffrey Mehlman
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- 160
- 9780801827303