Guest Editor: John Fletcher
With
the appearance of New Foundations for Psychoanalysis (1987) and the essays collected
in Essays on Otherness (1999) the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche has mounted
a return to Freud's officially abandoned theory of seduction and its reformulation
as a general theory of primal seduction, emerging out of a decades long critical
archaeology of the Freudian conceptual field.
Primal seduction is the fundamental anthropological situation of the human being, and the primacy of the other it entails, Laplanche proposes, is the basis for the formation of the unconscious and the organisation of human sexuality. The essays translated for this special issue give the English language reader some access to the continuing development of the theory of primal seduction by the group of psychoanalysts around Laplanche as a collective project. They address the topics of sublimation and cultural production, psychosis, female sexuality, the function and fantasy of breast-feeding, the structure and cultural effects of fantasy, and the question of hermeneutics. They are striking testimony to the productivity of Laplanche's proposed 'new foundations' as a vital and developing research programme for psychoanalysis.
Contents and Contributors:
John
Fletcher: Editorial : RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE GENERAL
THEORY OF PRIMAL SEDUCTION
Jean Laplanche: NARRATIVITY AND HERMENEUTICS:
SOME PROPOSITIONS
Jean Laplanche: SUBLIMATION AND/OR INSPIRATION
Jacqueline Lanouzière: BREASTFEEDING AS ORIGINAL SEDUCTION AND PRIMAL SCENE
OF SEDUCTION
Dominique Scarfone: ‘IT WAS NOT MY MOTHER’: FROM SEDUCTION
TO NEGATION
Jacques André: FEMALE SEXUALITY: A RETURN TO SOURCES
Guy Rosolato: PRIMAL FANTASIES AND THEIR CORRESPONDING MYTHS
REVIEWS
Matthew Jordan: HOW STANLEY FISH WORKS
Karyn Ball:
POSTCOLONIAL DIALECTICS
Alan Finlayson: BIG A petit a
Graham
Pechey: THE WISDOM OF LITTLE NARRATIVES
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE GENERAL
THEORY
OF PRIMAL SEDUCTION
John Fletcher
This special issue
has been conceived as an attempt to introduce the English language reader to the
more recent work of Jean Laplanche and to those French psychoanalytic writers
who either locate their work on the ground of the ‘new foundations for psychoanalysis’
as proposed by Laplanche in his 1987 book of that title and seek to develop it,
or who, like Guy Rosolato in his essay included here, position their arguments
in some relation to it.
Since the translation of the New Foundations
for Psychoanalysis into English in 1989, Laplanche’s return to and reformulation
of Freud’s restricted (and officially abandoned) theory of seduction as a general
theory of primal seduction has been available to an anglophone audience in a bold
if schematic outline, an outline that was developed and progressively filled in
by the later essays collected and translated in Essays on Otherness in
1999. Here an account of the contradictory dynamics of the Freudian conceptual
field and a critique of the core concepts of classical Freudian metapsychology
were elaborated from a distinctively new point of view. This entailed both a reformulation
of older Freudian concepts together with the formulation of new concepts, not
on a one-by-one basis but systematically, as part of an ambitious ‘return to origins’,
not only in relation to the conceptual foundations of psychoanalytic thought,
but also in relation to the psychic origins of the human subject and the foundations
of the human ‘psychical apparatus’. Core concepts, such as ‘the unconscious’,
‘repression’, ‘transference’, ‘the superego’ and ‘the drives’, were rethought
on the basis of the theory of primal seduction and of a metapsychology that gave
foundational force to the primacy of the (care-giving though not necessarily parental)
other, the adult subject with an already constituted unconscious and sexuality,
in the formation of infantile psychic life.
The work gathered together
here continues the development of this metapsychology of the other and seduction.
It does so by exploring further the implications of Laplanche’s formulation of
what he calls the ‘fundamental anthropological situation’ of the human infant.
He conceives this as a dual situation involving the infant’s need and dependency
on the care and nurture given by the adult other (an inter-subjective situation
marked by bilateral communication as described by attachment theory), on the one
hand, and as well the implantation of enigmatic messages in the primitive body-ego
of the infant via the adult’s gestures of care and expressions of feeling, both
verbal and non-verbal (a unilateral transmission that is enigmatic because derived
from the adult’s unconscious sexuality in a situation of primal seduction), on
the other.
As well as developing this model of primal seduction, the
work of resituating and relocating classical concepts and debates also continues
in these essays: with a path-breaking meditation by Laplanche himself on the theory
of sublimation, unfinished and unsatisfactory in Freud, even in his rich and productive
text on Leonardo and his art; with a reformulation of the problematic of parental
‘primal scenes’ by Jacqueline Lanouzière in relation to the mother-child couple
and the experience of breast-feeding (and an analysis of Giorgione’s enigmatic
painting La Tempesta); with a return to the classical debates on female sexuality
by Jacques André, and a reconsideration of the question of precocious vaginal
eroticism and a critique of the orthodox thesis of phallic primacy, in order to
articulate the presence in Freud’s work of a subordinated counter-thesis that
emphasises a primordial and repressed femininity in what André calls elsewhere
the ‘orifice-infant’ (l’enfant orificiel) in both sexes, legible through the lens
of the theory of seduction and implantation. Laplanche’s short set of theses on
narrativity and hermeneutics reflects on the primal anthropological situation
of the human infant, to emphasise the centrality of interpretation and translation
in that situation, indicating briefly an important affinity with the philosophy
of Martin Heidegger in order to question the retrospective ‘constructivism’ and
relativism of the ‘narrativist’ current in contemporary psychoanalytic thought.
The essay by Dominique Scarfone also elaborates further the understanding of the
primal situation of transmission, seduction and translation between adult and
infant in order to develop Laplanche’s pregnant theses on psychosis and the superego
as psychotic enclave. Finally I have included Guy Rosolato’s return to the problematic
of the ‘primal fantasies’ in Freud, the topic of Laplanche’s early and now classic
essay with J.-B. Pontalis from 1964, a panoptic survey that brings out the structural
homologies between the scenarios of the primal fantasies and a wide range of cultural
formations and myths. Unlike the other writers collected here, Rosolato is of
Laplanche’s generation and of a Lacanian formation, a writer who has maintained
a career parallel to Laplanche’s and an independence in relation to the orthodoxies
and splits of contemporary Lacanianism. He concludes his extensive cultural mapping
by positioning it in relation to Laplanche’s recent work on primal seduction.
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