new
formations no
48
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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