Jean Laplanche > Quotes

“The psychoanalytic method, in its originary moment, works not with keys but with screwdrivers. It dismantles locks, rather than opening them. Only thus, by breaking and entering, does it attempt to get at the terrible and laughable treasure of unconscious signifiers.”
― Jean Laplanche

“There is a tendency to treat them as though they were acting, not from the inside, but from the outside, so that it may be possible to bring the shield against stimuli into operation as a means of defence against them.”
― Jean Laplanche, The Language of Psychoanalysis

“In the Schreber case-history projection has a very different role: it is described as occurring during the period of ‘symptom-formation’*. This approach tends to bring the mechanism of paranoia closer to that of the neuroses: in a first phase, the intolerable feeling (homosexual love) is said to be repressed inwards, into the unconscious, and transformed into its opposite; a subsequent phase sees its projection into the outside world. Projection here is the way in which what has been repressed into the unconscious makes its return. This”
― Jean Laplanche, The Language of Psychoanalysis

“Far from offering us a Copernican recentering, it is quite clearly a Ptolemaic recentering that Kant wishes to effect—far from intuition on one side and concepts 'conforming to the object' on the other, he would rather turn things around and claim that it is the object which 'conforms' to the 'constitution of our faculty of intuition' and our 'a prior concepts.' I do not wish to discuss here the significance of Kantian idealism, but I cannot fail to be troubled by the fact that a movement of radical decentering is being invoked to a support a no less radical recentering.”
― Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness