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Life and Death in Psychoanalysis
Most critics have come to terms with the contradictions in Freud's work by attempting to impose a unified system even at the cost of rejecting crucial metapyschological concepts such as the death wish. According to Jean Laplanche, "such variations or variants deserve better than a choice in favor of one of the they require an interpretation and such as interpretation implies that, as is the case with the analysis of dreams, all the elements be juxtaposed so that nothing be eliminated, that the either / or be retanslatedinto an and ." In a way that Freud plainly does not control, Laplanche argures, there are at work two different concepts corresponding to each of a series of crucial Freudian terms; in each of these conceptual pairs of one of the elements is solidary with a specific conceptual scheme and the other with a second one. The entire body of Freud's work, for Laplanche, is constituted as an elaborately structured polemical field in which two mutually exclusive schemes may be seen to be struggling to dominate a single terminological apparatus. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis is a painstakingly lucid inquiry into the interpretative consequences of the conceptual and terminological difficulties posed by Freud's texts. It is an uncannily precise delineation of the perverse rigor with which Freud's most virulent discoveries perpetually escape him-and are endlessly rediscovered.
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1970
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About the author
Jean Laplanche
74 books35 followersJean Laplanche was a french psychoanalyst.
He studied philosophy under Jean Hyppolite, Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Later he began attending lectures and undergoing psychoanalytic treatment under Jacques Lacan.
He studied philosophy under Jean Hyppolite, Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Later he began attending lectures and undergoing psychoanalytic treatment under Jacques Lacan.
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April 18, 2025Laplanche offers us a “post-Lacanian” interpretation of Freud, one which retains the latter’s critiques of ego psychology and the assimilation of the ego to the function of preserving the (biological) individual (ego as ontogenetic product, motor of the life drive). But he is basically skeptical towards the most radical of Lacan’s insights (until it counts, as we’ll see): the introduction of the symbolic field, construed as as an insurpassable horizon or constraint which sets the vital body adrift in a sea of signifiers, promising no return. This is not a Lacanian work, then, properly speaking. Because of this aversion to Lacan’s “discursive absolutism” as it might be called, Laplanche finds it necessary to dredge up Freud’s scientific bona fides, drawing us a picture of the young Freud’s engagement with biology.
There is a parallel here with Lacan’s “return to Freud”, in which the “linguistic” works are privileged over the later, synoptic summaries of the meta-psychology. But instead of “The Interpretation of Dreams”, Laplanche takes “Project for a Scientific Psychology” as his starting point. He shows that Freud’s earliest uses of neurological models are not properly physiological or behaviorist explanations of generic human functioning, but acted as a meta-psychological superimposition of the physical and the clinical. PfaSP was written contemporaneously with “Studies on Hysteria”, containing an important series of case studies from Freud and Breuer’s clinical work. From these studies came the theory of “abreaction”, which posited that idea, or ideational representative, and affect, were separate or separable elements within the psyche. Laplanche convincingly demonstrates that idea and affect correspond to neuron and quantity within Freud’s “Project” (these are identified with a quasi-atomist Cartesian schema of “figure” and “movement”). Within Freud’s *psychical* model of neurology, the schema of the formation of the ego’s “reservoir” of energy stands for an *ethological* picture of the organism in relation to its environment.
This is one of the many ways that Laplanche indicates that the most physiological of Freud’s models’ always map the anaclitic “propping” of the drive (Trieb), or sexual desire, upon the instinct, or the vital rhythm of the body. It’s in this light of the notion of propping that Laplanche’s reading of primary narcissism holds interest. The *structure* of drive and instinct are basically the same (they both have the component aspects “pressure”, “aim”, “source” and “object”), in other words, they both seek satisfaction, but drive differs by enacting a reflexive redoubling of excitation around the source. There is “too much” excitation (ambiguating the source/object axis: is it the mouth or the teeth which seek milk/nipple?), and (here I’m editorializing a bit) the circuit is only closed by *dissimulating vital satisfaction*. In other words, the lost rhythm of vital enjoyment becomes the meta-object of the partial drives — which from here on out can never obtain “full” enjoyment.
The ego psychological mistake is to take this “fullness” of the object to be the aim of analysis, the healthy ego, rather than the “lost cause”, the ego as first hallucinatory object. I find this formulation useful, despite the fact that the main conclusion — that ego must be understood as the original “object choice”, and that the return of childhood narcissism can only be understood as the result of an imperfect repression of an original “bad object choice” — is more convincingly schematized, by Lacan’s objet a.
Returning to the “Project for a Scientific Psychology”: the parallel binaries neuron/quantity and ideational representative/affect stand for a model of the Saussurean signifier for Laplanche. His debt to Lacan is clear here. The problem of deriving the origin of the ego in Freud’s work is given over to Jakobson’s theory of metaphor and metonymy, here usually translated as “resemblance” and “contiguity”. In my estimation, the larger thesis of the book concerns an oscillation in the psychoanalytic literature which switches between treating drive, the psychic model’s ontogenesis in “propping”, as a metaphor or a metonymy of instinct. The metonymical ego is contiguous with instinct: it stands for vital satisfaction, the survival of the “whole organism”, w/o resembling it. Thus, ego psychology’s fixation on the “healthy ego”. The metaphorical ego resembles instinct w/o being contiguous with it: it is “of another order”, a contingent instance which Laplanche calls an “agency”. He identifies this with a traditional philosophical model of freedom from natural cause. In his view, at points invoking Hegel, the dialectic of metaphor and metonymy is essential to prevent the degeneration of psychoanalysis’s research program (I disagree with Laplanche that Lacan collapses the difference between the two).
I won’t go into the chapters on Aggression and Sadomasochism and the Death Drive. It should suffice to say that, on the one hand, Laplanche makes a distinction between sexual and non-sexual aggression to salvage continuity for Freud’s theory of primary masochism; and on the other, through a rather technical exposition of Helmholtz’s thermodynamics, he argues that in the economics of the death drive, principles of energy conservation undergo a psychic inversion: the internalization of the “idea of organism” precipitates the secondary economic function of homeostasis (life drive, as opposed to the primary function of the return to zero, or death drive).
To conclude, a few thoughts on the notion of affect/quantity as “signifieds” of the signifiers ideational representative/neuron. Laplanche is fascinated by Freud’s quantitative treatment of affect, at some moments construing it almost as a “floating point” in relation to representations. It sometimes seems that, for Laplanche, pure affect, or vital satisfaction, is like a pure slippage of signifieds. This is the strict inverse of Lacan’s def of metonymy, which is the slippage of signifiers over the signified. If this holds, it appears that the structure of metonymy is a mirroring of pre-linguistic somatic affect, prior to the formation of the ego. Although he affirms the dialectic of metaphor and metonymy against the ego-psychologist’s one-sidedness, Laplanche’s allergy to the full consequences of structural linguistics, and his privileging of biology as primal scene of Freud’s meta-psychology, prevents him from understanding the full, culturalist implications of Freudianism. His critique of Lacan rests on the idea that the latter *drops the referent*, and thus makes it impossible to distinguish between different domains of resemblance in metaphor. But he missed the important status of *self-reference* in Lacan’s use of metaphor. There is no external, biological domain to point to, bc the psyche is the body’s *pointing to itself* — the unary trait. Thus, *Laplanche*, not Lacan, is at risk of blurring the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, due to the imaginary mirroring which he stages between the “floating signified” of affect and “floating signifier” of metonymical slippage. What he misses is metaphor as *quilting point*: the way that the Signifier qua unary trait is the origin of affective separation.
The insidiousness of Laplanche’s model is that it *appears* to dialectically overcome the relationship between culture and biology by showing the former’s constitution of the latter; but it only points to a remaining *gap*, thus remaining more Kantian than Hegelian. Moreover, it shies away from the culturalist, and I think formalist, implications of Lacan’s thought (its latent Platonism), by suggesting that a rapprochement between psychoanalysis and the biological sciences is the most promising future for the Freudian research program. This is a view which persists today (looking at you, Adrian Johnston).
There is a parallel here with Lacan’s “return to Freud”, in which the “linguistic” works are privileged over the later, synoptic summaries of the meta-psychology. But instead of “The Interpretation of Dreams”, Laplanche takes “Project for a Scientific Psychology” as his starting point. He shows that Freud’s earliest uses of neurological models are not properly physiological or behaviorist explanations of generic human functioning, but acted as a meta-psychological superimposition of the physical and the clinical. PfaSP was written contemporaneously with “Studies on Hysteria”, containing an important series of case studies from Freud and Breuer’s clinical work. From these studies came the theory of “abreaction”, which posited that idea, or ideational representative, and affect, were separate or separable elements within the psyche. Laplanche convincingly demonstrates that idea and affect correspond to neuron and quantity within Freud’s “Project” (these are identified with a quasi-atomist Cartesian schema of “figure” and “movement”). Within Freud’s *psychical* model of neurology, the schema of the formation of the ego’s “reservoir” of energy stands for an *ethological* picture of the organism in relation to its environment.
This is one of the many ways that Laplanche indicates that the most physiological of Freud’s models’ always map the anaclitic “propping” of the drive (Trieb), or sexual desire, upon the instinct, or the vital rhythm of the body. It’s in this light of the notion of propping that Laplanche’s reading of primary narcissism holds interest. The *structure* of drive and instinct are basically the same (they both have the component aspects “pressure”, “aim”, “source” and “object”), in other words, they both seek satisfaction, but drive differs by enacting a reflexive redoubling of excitation around the source. There is “too much” excitation (ambiguating the source/object axis: is it the mouth or the teeth which seek milk/nipple?), and (here I’m editorializing a bit) the circuit is only closed by *dissimulating vital satisfaction*. In other words, the lost rhythm of vital enjoyment becomes the meta-object of the partial drives — which from here on out can never obtain “full” enjoyment.
The ego psychological mistake is to take this “fullness” of the object to be the aim of analysis, the healthy ego, rather than the “lost cause”, the ego as first hallucinatory object. I find this formulation useful, despite the fact that the main conclusion — that ego must be understood as the original “object choice”, and that the return of childhood narcissism can only be understood as the result of an imperfect repression of an original “bad object choice” — is more convincingly schematized, by Lacan’s objet a.
Returning to the “Project for a Scientific Psychology”: the parallel binaries neuron/quantity and ideational representative/affect stand for a model of the Saussurean signifier for Laplanche. His debt to Lacan is clear here. The problem of deriving the origin of the ego in Freud’s work is given over to Jakobson’s theory of metaphor and metonymy, here usually translated as “resemblance” and “contiguity”. In my estimation, the larger thesis of the book concerns an oscillation in the psychoanalytic literature which switches between treating drive, the psychic model’s ontogenesis in “propping”, as a metaphor or a metonymy of instinct. The metonymical ego is contiguous with instinct: it stands for vital satisfaction, the survival of the “whole organism”, w/o resembling it. Thus, ego psychology’s fixation on the “healthy ego”. The metaphorical ego resembles instinct w/o being contiguous with it: it is “of another order”, a contingent instance which Laplanche calls an “agency”. He identifies this with a traditional philosophical model of freedom from natural cause. In his view, at points invoking Hegel, the dialectic of metaphor and metonymy is essential to prevent the degeneration of psychoanalysis’s research program (I disagree with Laplanche that Lacan collapses the difference between the two).
I won’t go into the chapters on Aggression and Sadomasochism and the Death Drive. It should suffice to say that, on the one hand, Laplanche makes a distinction between sexual and non-sexual aggression to salvage continuity for Freud’s theory of primary masochism; and on the other, through a rather technical exposition of Helmholtz’s thermodynamics, he argues that in the economics of the death drive, principles of energy conservation undergo a psychic inversion: the internalization of the “idea of organism” precipitates the secondary economic function of homeostasis (life drive, as opposed to the primary function of the return to zero, or death drive).
To conclude, a few thoughts on the notion of affect/quantity as “signifieds” of the signifiers ideational representative/neuron. Laplanche is fascinated by Freud’s quantitative treatment of affect, at some moments construing it almost as a “floating point” in relation to representations. It sometimes seems that, for Laplanche, pure affect, or vital satisfaction, is like a pure slippage of signifieds. This is the strict inverse of Lacan’s def of metonymy, which is the slippage of signifiers over the signified. If this holds, it appears that the structure of metonymy is a mirroring of pre-linguistic somatic affect, prior to the formation of the ego. Although he affirms the dialectic of metaphor and metonymy against the ego-psychologist’s one-sidedness, Laplanche’s allergy to the full consequences of structural linguistics, and his privileging of biology as primal scene of Freud’s meta-psychology, prevents him from understanding the full, culturalist implications of Freudianism. His critique of Lacan rests on the idea that the latter *drops the referent*, and thus makes it impossible to distinguish between different domains of resemblance in metaphor. But he missed the important status of *self-reference* in Lacan’s use of metaphor. There is no external, biological domain to point to, bc the psyche is the body’s *pointing to itself* — the unary trait. Thus, *Laplanche*, not Lacan, is at risk of blurring the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, due to the imaginary mirroring which he stages between the “floating signified” of affect and “floating signifier” of metonymical slippage. What he misses is metaphor as *quilting point*: the way that the Signifier qua unary trait is the origin of affective separation.
The insidiousness of Laplanche’s model is that it *appears* to dialectically overcome the relationship between culture and biology by showing the former’s constitution of the latter; but it only points to a remaining *gap*, thus remaining more Kantian than Hegelian. Moreover, it shies away from the culturalist, and I think formalist, implications of Lacan’s thought (its latent Platonism), by suggesting that a rapprochement between psychoanalysis and the biological sciences is the most promising future for the Freudian research program. This is a view which persists today (looking at you, Adrian Johnston).
November 22, 2020
Laplanche, unlike a certain other, more well known, French psychoanalyst, is eminently clear in his writing. The masterful manner by which he unwinds and explicates the workings of psychoanalytic concepts, tracing their emergence and progression through the history of Freud's thought and writings, is perhaps unparalleled in the field. In addition, Laplanche's association of psychoanalytic operations as essentially bound to metaphor and phantasmic mise en scène add a rich linguistic twist to analysis without the often excessive flood of obscurantism handed down by certain other figures.
Laplanche traces sexuality and the "life" of the ego as it erupts and fragments itself upon the chiasmic intersection of a double movement, of life and death, binding and unbinding, accretion and expulsion. It is at the (unplacable) point of this intersection, perhaps, that we might mark the "primal scene" of the ego - its constitution which is doubly marked under the sign of its effacement, its destruction, and its loss of itself. The "scene" of origin which never appears, and thus in its elusion refuses presentation in representational scene production, haunts this ego at a loss in relation to "itself" in its grounds. It demands the repeated search for itself, its fundamental essence, ever fugative. Thus its life is bound up with its death, chasing itself, wasting away, repeating its destruction and loss which was never properly its own. Like Narcissus, the ego longs for itself, caught in the intersection of an endless self-reflection, the distance of which holds it in suspension, in a paralytic doubling of life and death which repeat and cancel each other out in a dialectics ceased up and jammed. Life - a scene repeated, of dying, searching, with but the ultimate penury of the self, of the ego, perhaps, as its metaphorical interpretation.
Laplanche traces sexuality and the "life" of the ego as it erupts and fragments itself upon the chiasmic intersection of a double movement, of life and death, binding and unbinding, accretion and expulsion. It is at the (unplacable) point of this intersection, perhaps, that we might mark the "primal scene" of the ego - its constitution which is doubly marked under the sign of its effacement, its destruction, and its loss of itself. The "scene" of origin which never appears, and thus in its elusion refuses presentation in representational scene production, haunts this ego at a loss in relation to "itself" in its grounds. It demands the repeated search for itself, its fundamental essence, ever fugative. Thus its life is bound up with its death, chasing itself, wasting away, repeating its destruction and loss which was never properly its own. Like Narcissus, the ego longs for itself, caught in the intersection of an endless self-reflection, the distance of which holds it in suspension, in a paralytic doubling of life and death which repeat and cancel each other out in a dialectics ceased up and jammed. Life - a scene repeated, of dying, searching, with but the ultimate penury of the self, of the ego, perhaps, as its metaphorical interpretation.
January 26, 2019
Good research on Freud's theory of life and death instincts.
October 6, 2008
French Psychoanalyst and student of Lacan attempts to reconcile a number of crucial contradictions in Freud's oeuvre in this complex and important text. He deals primarily with temporal perspectives on issues such as masochism and sadomasochism, the ego and narcissism, seduction theory, and most importantly the death drive. Laplanche is most interested with the economic paradoxes of constancy that are inherent in Freud's theory of the death drive, and the life drive. For Laplanche, the death drive is always imbued with libidinal energy, "born of a formalistic concern for symmetry, the term 'destrudo,' once proposed to designate the energy of the death drive, did not survive a single day. For the death drive does not possess its own energy. Its energy is libido" (124).
Life and Death in Psychoanalysis is a tremendously important work on Freud and his thought.
Life and Death in Psychoanalysis is a tremendously important work on Freud and his thought.
March 5, 2015
A terribly close reading of Freud that focuses on the tensions in his thought. Freud's discourse is presented as caught between a view of the human as merely another biological being and the human as a being that in some sense transcends the biological. Laplanche shows how many of Freud's terms go both ways. Freud relied on many contradictory metaphors throughout his career. Ultimately, Laplanche sees Freud's fundamental insight concerns how humanity breaks free from the vital order, although never completely and not without loss. In a nice closing metaphor, the struggle between Freud's biologism and his -- let's say, with some reservations, "structuralism" -- is itself compared with that fundamental conflict, the struggle of the human to separate itself from the biological.
February 20, 2015
Laplanche offers an interpretation for many of the controversial Freudian theories. This book was very helpful especially when it comes to explaining the Infantile Sexuality theory.
September 14, 2025
ja men så den hör ju absolut hemma bland de texter där man på 60 och 70talet försökte återvända till Freud för att renodla begreppen liksom. psykoanalysens biologiska grund osv osv
nån spårning av den begreppsliga ekonomin i freuds metapsykologi (särskilt den glidning som sker när biologiskt laddade termer som trieb, lustprinzip och todestrieb används i psykoanalytiska sammanhang) och typ hur dessa bara kan förstås inom en logik av fördröjning, översättning och omväg, där driften inte längre är en instinkt men istället en struktur av inre differentiering som pekar mot en primär excentricitet i subjektet (dess beroende av den andre) och där den freudianska polariteten mellan liv och död därför avslöjar psykoanalysens grundläggande spänning mellan biologisk metaforik och en genuint symbolisk ordning.
kul läsning men jag vet inte om det var värt tiden egentligen
nån spårning av den begreppsliga ekonomin i freuds metapsykologi (särskilt den glidning som sker när biologiskt laddade termer som trieb, lustprinzip och todestrieb används i psykoanalytiska sammanhang) och typ hur dessa bara kan förstås inom en logik av fördröjning, översättning och omväg, där driften inte längre är en instinkt men istället en struktur av inre differentiering som pekar mot en primär excentricitet i subjektet (dess beroende av den andre) och där den freudianska polariteten mellan liv och död därför avslöjar psykoanalysens grundläggande spänning mellan biologisk metaforik och en genuint symbolisk ordning.
kul läsning men jag vet inte om det var värt tiden egentligen
August 1, 2018
I first read this text to get a better sense of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principal. What I'll always remember from this book, though, is how it interprets Freud's three essays on sexuality. Absolutely ingenious take on the what is commonly portrayed as a conservative and regressive text.
November 13, 2024
french psychoanalyst’s idea of elucidation seems to be further obfuscation, but this one was constructive
June 22, 2025
Read lacan to understand Lacan, Laplanche to understand Freud
Want to read
August 8, 2025Now THIS is what I call a 'Return to Freud'
August 25, 2025
dense lol
February 13, 2017
makes you think...
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews