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 Probléma-tiques VII: Le fourvoiement biologisant de la sexualité chez Freud and, in an English translation by Donald Nicholson-Smith, as The Temptation of Biology: 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 presenta-tion 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 Funda-mental 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 sexu-ality, and ultimately, of translation as a mechanism at the origin of the human subject as a self-narrating, self-theorizing creature.
"Starting from radical, violent challenges to established themes inevitably leads to a new theme with new patterns, new concepts or a new framework for the concepts that emerge. My positions on drive, narcissism, language, and many other topics are precise, but in the Problématiques they appear in a scattered form. Now the moment has come to show how my positions are connected. Will this entail schematization and oversimplification? To some degree that is inevitable, and from the beginning of this presentation I unhappily feel that weight, which is to say the necessity to cover the theme of foundations and the desire to get to my conclusions. So, in this text, I am in a race against the clock and my approach will be less that of the flaneur and less in the form of a "spiral development" of ideas, than was my approach in the Problématiques."
-Jean Laplanche
LaPlanche, Jean: - Jean Laplanche (b. 1924-d. 2012) was a French psychoanalyst and vintner. Among the most innovative and theoretically rigorous thinkers of his generation, his work is characterized by a return to the letter of Freud's text, a method of reading Freud according to Freudian principles, and a complete rethinking of the foundations of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Under the Vichy regime, he joined the French Resistance in 1943. The following year, he entered the École Normale Supérieure where he studied philosophy with Jean Hyppolite, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, and Ferdinand Alquié. In the years 1946-1947, he received a scholarship to Harvard University where he developed an interest in psychoanalysis through the interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations. Upon returning to Paris, he became a founding member of the revolutionary group Socialisme ou Barbarie. In this same period, he entered into analysis with Jacques Lacan, who remained his mentor until 1963. Laplanche signaled his formal break with Lacan in 1964. However, his intellectual break was well underway when, at the historic Bonneval conference of 1960, in a paper with Serge Leclaire, he directly opposed Lacan's theory of the unconscious "structured like a language." In 1967, with J.-B. Pontalis, he published The Language of Psychoanalysis, today the definitive encyclopedia of Freudian thought. The fruits of this project were distilled in Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (1970). A book of extraordinary insight, Laplanche showed how Freud's thought is structured by the rhetorical figure of chiasmus, wherein the repression of the sexual unconscious is itself the object of repression. This critical return to Freud was intensified through a series of lectures published as Problématiques. Lessons from the first five volumes are condensed in New Foundations for Psychoanalysis (1987). Whereas Life and Death showed how the sexual drive "leans on" vital instinct, thus restoring the rightful place of sexuality in the psychoanalytic understanding of the human being, New Foundations presents nothing less than a refounding of the entire psychoanalytic enterprise. From a recovery of Freud's famously abandoned seduction theory, Laplanche developed a "general theory of seduction," which explains how the situation of primal seduction, the primacy of the other in the transmission of enigmatic messages from adult to infant, is simultaneously the irreducible foundation of psychoanalysis and human subjectivity. With career achievements as co-founder of the Association Psychanalytique de France, professor of psychoanalysis and founder of the Center for Psychoanalytic Research at the Université de Paris VII, founder of the journal Psychanalyse à l'université, and scientific director of the translation of Freud's complete works into French, the magnitude of his thought is only now starting to penetrate Anglophone audiences.
