Jean Laplanche and the Unfinished Copernican Revolution
grappling with that most troubling of Freudian concepts -- the theory of general seduction
Jean Laplanche’s importance to contemporary psychoanalysis cannot be overstated. His reputation in the Anglophone world rests on The Language of Pyscho-analysis (1967), written with Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, which still stands today as the standard reference work for Freudian terminology. In France, he is best known as the director of the French translation of Complete Works of Freud, and as a teacher of analysts. His fanatical return to the letter of the Freud’s writings sometimes earns him the label of “Freudologist,” but these exegeses—always in conversation with clinical experience—have produced one of the most radical theoretical interventions to strike the field in the past half-century: what Laplanche calls the theory of general seduction.
Laplanche’s early career as an analyst passed, like that of so many others, under the shadow of Jacques Lacan. His relation to the master followed a path not uncommon in that circle—from analysand, to collaborator, to apostate. Without recounting the court drama that followed Lacan wherever he went, we can say that Laplanche’s allegiance was never as strong as Jacques-Alain Miller’s, who would famously go on to marry the king’s daughter and take sole responsibility for the publication of his seminars. Nor was his break as dramatic as Guattari’s, who would join Deleuze and Foucault in shattering the intellectual grip that Oedipus held on the ’68 generation of French intellectuals.
Still, I’m tempted to argue that Laplanche was the most profoundly Lacanian of all Lacan’s high-profile critics, save perhaps Kristeva. More than any analyst of his generation, Laplanche heeded Lacan’s call to return to Freud, to linger with the words of Freud’s text as one would with the words of an analysand in the throes of breakthrough, and by an explication du texte to become more Freudian than Freud himself, to uncover and develop the radical insights that the founder could not avow. Jean and Jacques were, we might say, interlocutors in the proper Lacanian sense: two subjects knotted together in dialogue, such that an adequate reading of either requires that one trace the topology of the knot that they make, in which the points of closest contact are also those of highest tension.
The essays of Laplanche’s long middle period (1967-1992) are collected in The Unfinished Copernican Revolution (1992). There, he articulates the consequences of the seduction theory for the practice of analysis, and for our conception of the subject as such. In the title essay, he takes up Freud’s statement about the three great narcissistic wounds that modern humanity has inflicted upon itself: Copernicus’s discovery that the earth is not the center of the cosmos; Darwin’s discovery that man does not hold a special place in nature; and Freud’s own discovery that man is not master in his own house—that the conscious mind is under the sway of the unconscious, subjected to the obscure workings of an internal other. To these three we might add the discovery of quantum theory and the elements of uncertainty that were thrown into the orderly Newtonian universe by Schrodinger and Heisenberg, those elements which so disturbed Einstein.
In what sense, then, is the Copernican Revolution unfinished? For Laplanche, the heliocentric model represents not simply a change of center (from the earth to the sun), but the possibility of a universe without a center, thus opening up "a world of quasi-infinite distances,” a “decentered and infinite world.” This is the universe of infinite distances that so terrified Pascal in the Pensées, invoking the image of man as a speck of dust in the cosmic wind. “But,” Laplanche writes, “the Copernican revolution is perhaps still more radical in that it suggests that man, even as subject of knowledge, is not the central reference-point of what he knows… that man is no longer the measure of all things. Thus the decentering and the infinity of the universe would herald an infinity of knowledge, as well as an epistemological decentering much harder to accept.” Within the Copernican insight, then, is contained all the subsequent revolutions.
So the revolution is unfinished both in the sense that its consequences have not been (and perhaps cannot be) fully developed, and in the sense that even its adherents are constantly attempting to close the wound that it once opened, to retrench themselves in the comforts of a finite cosmos of one kind or another. Just as the ancient astronomers who had to keep adding epicycles to the orbits of planets in order to synthesize the geocentric universe with their minute empirical observations, Darwin retreated (especially in his later years) from his own non-teleological account of evolution to a distinctly teleological Lamarckian position, when it suited his religious sensibilities. Einstein was, perhaps, more intellectually honest; when presented with the evidence of quantum indeterminacy, he did not presume to draw some new epicycle himself but simply held out hope that a causal explanation would emerge. “God does not play dice.”
According to Laplanche, the great Freudian project gets properly underway in Sigmund’s letters to Wilhelm Fliess, exchanged between 1887 and 1904. In this correspondence, particularly in the mid-1890s, Freud dares to name the unconscious in its true Copernican radicality as “das Andere, the other thing in us: this is the unconscious as it is discovered before 1897 and as it will re-emerge at numerous points in Freud’s work.” Laplanche’s most crucial intervention is to develop the early Freud’s suggestion that this other thing is put into me—indeed is “in” “me” before there is even a “me” to speak of, before the emergence of interiority and exteriority as such and certainly before what Lacan would call the mirror stage and the formation of I-function—by the other person in the scene of seduction.
Let’s take a step back. In his letters to Fliess, Freud reported memories surfacing in his hysterical patients of sexual abuse suffered at a very young age, often at the hands of parents or caretakers, and he traced their psychic symptoms to this origin point. According to the standard narrative, Freud first attempted to confirm the external fact of this abuse but, failing to do so for reasons that might be assumed, he began to conceive of the seduction as a fantasy, a shared fantasy among hysterics, and a purely internal event. This tale was a flashpoint of the so-called Freud Wars, in which the Great Charlatan was accused of covering up real abuse (perhaps even in exchange for bribes) by obscuring it behind a wall of impenetrable jargon.
Laplanche, following Lacan, rejects both the purely exterior and purely interior accounts of the seduction scene. For him, “seduction” in the analytic has almost nothing to do with adult genital sexuality, though he of course admits the common reality of abuse within the household. He locates the source of seduction and its ensuing trauma, rather, in the vagaries of signification. “Can one affirm here, with Lacan, the priority of language?”
Language begins, for Laplanche as it did for Lacan, for Freud, for Rousseau, and for countless others, with the cry:
“Unable to provide on its own for its needs, the nursling organism is faced with an unbearable build-up of tension, comparable to the rising level of a reservoir… What characterizes helplessness is precisely the infant’s inability to undertake for itself the action which could empty the reservoir in a lasting way. All it can do is cry, and its cries are themselves, moreover, nothing but the purely mechanical expression of a non-specific overflowing. It is the cries which arouse ‘foreign aid,’ the mother’s activity, which first of all consists in the offering of nourishment.
“What then follows is a specific sequence of satisfaction: a series of acts of feeding leading to a prolonged relaxation. But just as important as this, according to Freud, are the anemic traces, the inscribed images…”
The hungry infant’s cry is itself a purely mechanical reflex-activity and not an act of consciously attempted communication—not a cry “for” the mother, but a pure overflowing of tension—nonetheless summons the mother (or the caretaker), who provides milk (or nourishment). But, as Klein will teach us as well as Skinner, the mother does not simply provide milk. She brings the breast. The warmth of the caretaker’s body, the skin-in-skin contact that the behaviorists found so crucial to early development, is bound up inseparably with the experience of eating. But Freud, Klein, Skinner, and even Lacan do not go far enough when they paint this primal scene, because they fail to see that the breast is not all the mother brings. She brings her desire, her fantasy, her unconscious into contact with the infant.
In feeding, in play, in bathing, in all the acts of care that pass from parent to child, the desire of the parent is always present as a supplement. In the body of the parent, the child encounters signifiers for the first time—though not, at this point, as signifiers. Tremors when the child latches onto the nipple, unexpected roughness in play or in bathing, the sudden departure of one or the other parent, and eventually words and glances exchanged between parents distinguished from the forest of confused sensation that defines earliest infancy. All of these are signifiers. For Laplanche, the child finds itself addressed for the first time when it encounters the parents as desiring beings. I become “me” for the first time when the other wants something of me. I become a subject only through the mediation of the other’s desire.
“But Freud is never to suspect this idea—that the primal scene only has its impact because it bears a message, a giving-to-see or a giving-to-hear on the part of the parents. There is only the reality of the other ‘in itself,’ forever unattainable (the parents and their enjoyment) together with the other ‘for me,’ existing only in my imagination; there is also—primordially—the other who addresses me, the other who ‘wants’ something of me.”
As Freud discovered, a trauma requires two moments: the initial event, and then a later invent in which the original event is re-inscribed as trauma. Hence the case of Emma, described to Fliess, who at a young age was assaulted in a shop but only began experiencing neurotic symptoms years later, when she overheard an obscene conversation in another shop and came suddenly to simultaneously recognize and repress the initial assault, which until that moment had not held any meaning for her. Such is the retroactivity of trauma.
Laplanche paints another scene, one which may seem strange to us today. He recounts an event probably common in the countryside of Freud’s time and of Laplanche’s own childhood: the young child of 3 or 4 is taken out into the field by a parent and made to watch animals copulate. Freud recounted such scenes in his study of the Wolf-man and others, but he missed their key meaning. The spectacle of animal coitus is not the primal scene itself, but the second scene, which activates the trauma of the first seduction. The content of the act itself is clear enough even to a child, and cannot be traumatic on its own. Rather, what disturbs the child and provokes symptoms is the mystery of the parent who has presented the act as “a making-see, an exhibition.” The child asks, “What is it this father wants of me in showing me [this]?”
The exhibition in which everything is laid bare reactivates and rewrites the earlier mysteries—the strange sensations associated with care in the fourth-trimester, the affective intensities that traverse the bodies of parent and child in the act of breast-feeding, written about so beautifully by Klein and Irigaray. It it rewrites them, for the first time, as signifiers—but it rewrites them precisely as enigmatic signifiers, the meaning of which is unattainable.
In addition to the classical Freudian structure of repressed event and retroactive signification, (what Lacan would call S1 and S2), Laplanche posits the necessity of third term, the message. The message consists in its own unknowability, in nothing but the sense that the other is trying to tell me something, that the other’s unconscious is “speaking” to me, that there is something in excess of the meanings I apply to the act, and furthermore in excess of the other’s own conscious meaning.
The encounter with the other is primary. This is true not simply in the sense that the parents were there first, or that the infant is primordially helpless in those earliest months of life. Laplanche is not interested in platitudes (such as those indulged by Nancy, for example) about the need for reciprocity, or whatever. There is no reciprocity in this scene. There is something like mutual infection. The adults who care for the child, simply because they themselves bear an unconscious within them as well, give the child an unconscious through their address, which necessarily says more than they mean it to.
The address bears not only a signification but a “message,” and that message always reaches its destination. But it reaches that destination as an enigma, an enigma that the child cannot metabolize like it metabolizes milk, extracting the nutrients and passing the rest out as excrement. This enigmatic signifier instead sticks in the child’s throat like a bone. In order not to choke, in order to relieve itself of the unbearable pressure of the enigma, the child represses it. This act produces the unconscious, and it rips the child from a purely biological existence into the life of the human subject. I am a subject only insofar as I desire, and I desire only as an effect of the address of the other, which always passes just over my head.
Confusion is at the heart of the analytic experience. Think of the patient who suffers from symptoms that destabilize his or her tenuous sense of self; the analysand who utters a profound slip on the couch and cannot despite all conscious effort trace out its meaning; the successful men and women of the world who have achieved everything they set out to achieve, but still feel an intense sadness for which they cannot account. Laplanche’s key insight is that every such scene of confusion throws us back into that original Hilflosigkeit, helplessness. But after the child’s introduction into language, this helplessness is linked indissolubly to a question: “What do you want from me?”
The question is fundamentally unanswerable, but the child and the adult nonetheless spend their lives formulating answers in the form of fantasies, the function of which is to repress the original and originary enigma, which never stops erupting back into the present.
Thank you! I enjoyed this v much. I walk around with a lot of Freud and a bit of Lacan in my head, and somtimes I reflect on it. This gives me more--and and also intriguing--material to mull. Perhaps I should also do some reading.