New Foundations for Psychoanalysis

by Jean Laplanche, The Unconscious in Translation (Editor)

The appearance of New Foundations for Psychoanalysis in 1987 marked the beginning of five years that may be the period of Laplanche's greatest synthetic creativity during which he articulated the central concepts of his thinking. Along with New Foundations this period saw the seminar on après-coup of 1989-1990—later published as Problématiques VI; the seminar of 1991-1992 published as Probléma­tiques Le fourvoiement biologisant de la sexualité chez Freud and, in an English translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith, as The Temptation of Freud's Theories of Sexuality and much else.
New Foundations is a synthesis of Laplanche's conceptual research going back to Life and Death in Psychoanalysis of 1970 and, before that, to works co-authored with J.-B. Pontalis and with Serge Leclaire. Referring to Problématiques I through Problématiques V (1970 - 1984), Laplanche writes, "Now the moment has come to show how my positions are connected with each other." He certainly does just that and, most importantly, New Foundations was the first major presenta­tion of the General Theory of Seduction (GTS) that guided his work for the rest of his life even as he continued to refine it.
Later, from a different angle Laplanche refers to the GTS as the Funda­mental Anthropological Situation. The GTS will provide the basis for unearthing and extending Freud's translational model of repression leading Laplanche to propose "a translational model of après-coup and, more generally, a translational model of the theory of seduction and even a translational model of the constitution of the human being." He will speak of translational theories of psychic trauma, of infantile sexu­ality, and ultimately, of translation as a mechanism at the origin of the human subject as a self-narrating, self-theorizing creature.

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Theory

199 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Jean 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.

Reviews

[Shulamith Farhi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Laplanche works through pa's relationship to its others (biology, linguistics, anthropology) to refound psychoanalytic theory on the basis of his theory of enigmatic signifiers (when we encounter something that we know is meaningful but we do not have the resources to understand what it means). The core of the book is the novel approach to the seduction controversy, which Laplanche recategorizes into a sequence of infantile (pedophilic father) -> precocious (perverse mother) -> primal (passive child). Laplance approaches activity/passivity through an ultimately unsubstantial reference to continental thought, connecting the child's passivity in the face of enigmatic signification to Spinoza's idea (3D2) of an "inability to control something that takes place within us." The text is peppered with witty observations, as in his comment on the Lacanian blindspot concerning containment:

"I must at least give Winnicott and Bion credit for the idea of a 'container'. To take up the tub schema again, I compare the holding environment to a cyclotron in which particles are accelerated by being bombarded with huge amounts of energy. A cyclotron which is not contained becomes an H-bomb. The major failing of Lacan and the Lacanians is perhaps their inability to grasp the notion of 'containing'. Regular sessions of standard length and- a constant environment are important factors in containing, but its most important feature is the attention, or attentions, of the analyst. All analysts sometimes give in to the temptation to open a letter or to answer the telephone, but a
systematic lack of attention destroys the essential element of holding: limits disappear, and the session is dissolved. And the presence of limits is all the more necessary in that we encourage or induce an unbinding discourse."

Unfortunately, Laplanche's theories lose their shine on second thought. Especially disturbing are Laplanche's ideas concerning the existence of a "normal" unconscious and regressions to pre-Freudian ideas about the essence of adulthood. What remains is a theory of the archaic claiming to go beyond Freud without specifying exactly what the archaic is founded on, leading us to the conclusion that we are here once again on Fichtean grounds, with the unconscious as non-consciousness. Nevertheless, the idea of an enigmatic message has had an interesting afterlife in queer theory and I hope to be proven wrong in engaging with Morel's usage of his ideas.

[Micah · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the thicket of psychoanalytic concepts and narratives, what is essential and what can be dispensed with? Is psychoanalysis a developmental psychology, or something more, or in fact less? Laplanche adamantly states that psychoanalysis is about sexuality and the unconscious - which necessarily lead to the "primal," the clash of child and adult worlds, and a logic of untranslatable messages. Influenced, I think, by Lacan, Laplanche argues that the drive is nothing without the signifier: sexuality is only introduced to the child by adults who do not understand it themselves. Starting from the enigma, we elaborate a theory of ourselves.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 3 out of 5]

This call for a renewed emphasis on the pre-verbal instead of a focus on the verbal to its detriment is done much more rigorously in Kristeva. Lacan is often deployed as the foil here, for unclear reasons. As a mere setting of "foundations", the project here is meant to be more preliminary than anything, and often amounts to little more than reading and interpreting Freud, intervening when deemed necessary.