The Unconscious and the Id
Volume IV of Laplanche's Problematiques lectures, on the unconscious and Freud's id.
This is the fourth volume of Laplanche's Problematiques seminars, delivered in Paris and published in French in 1981, translated into English by Luke Thurston and Lindsay Watson in 1999. It works as a sustained rereading of two Freudian texts set side by side: the 1915 metapsychology paper on the unconscious and the 1923 essay on the ego and the id. Laplanche traces the strain between Freud's first topography, with its systematic unconscious, and the second, which folds that unconscious into a biologically weighted id.
His argument is that both terms survive only once they are rebuilt on the general theory of seduction. The unconscious forms through the repression of enigmatic messages addressed by the adult to the child; the id is not an instinctual cauldron but the residue of those messages left untranslated. For the clinician, it locates the origin of the unconscious in the other rather than in endowment, with direct bearing on how transference is read.
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
- 1981
- 1999
- Problematiques IV: L'inconscient et le ca
- French
- Luke Thurston and Lindsay Watson
- Rebus Press
- Rebus Press
- 290
- 9781900877039