Jean Laplanche’s ‘take’ on psychoanalysis: For and against

For me, the last fifty years or so has offered us only four psychoanalytic commentators of any significant wide‑ranging value: André Green, Jean Laplanche, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. They are each, decisively but in different ways, ‘post‑Lacanian’ ― as I believe can be said of some aspects of my own writing, since my first book which was published in 1984 advanced an appreciative critique of Jacques Lacan’s oeuvre. Perhaps it could be said that each of these four is more relevant to psychoanalysis, as a treatment and as a theory or philosophy of the human condition, than they are to the everyday practice of psychotherapy ― but in this regard, the relevance of each writer must be judged separately. This morning, we shall try to get a ‘take’ on Laplanche.

Laplanche’s importance to the field of psychoanalytic thinking is major, and I have learnt much from his writings. Nietzsche wrote that “one repays a teacher poorly if one remains a student.’ So, this morning we are going to sketch, appreciatively and critically, some of Laplanche’s ideas. We will come to see understand how it is that to grasp Laplanche properly, we must not only know something of Jacques Lacan’s rearrangement of Freudian theory, but we must also know which parts of Freud’s thinking Laplanche intends to amplify and modify ― most saliently Freud’s theory of so‑called ‘primal repression.’ Only then can we assess the value of his claim to have established “new foundations for psychoanalysis” (which is the title of one of his major books, published in 1987). Notice how I say ‘amplify and modify’ in relation to Freud’s ideas, because Laplanche does both ― with what I hold to be varying degrees of success. And, in an interesting manner, he also breaks with his own teacher, Lacan. I am going to try to keep it simple ― this morning’s enterprise is obviously a bit of a fly‑by ― and almost all that I have to say will be schematic. My modest intent being to locate Laplanche in a framework from which details, complexities and nuances may be grappled with later, should one choose to do so. And obviously, what you are getting this morning is Laplanche‑as‑read‑by‑Barnaby, along with my criticisms of his ideas (criticisms that, sadly, he is not here to refute, although Dominique Scarfone and I have had a bit of a tussle over them).

There is a five-part structure to this commentary. First section, Freud ― we are talking about a seemingly small, but actually crucial, piece of his metapsychological thinking. Second section, a detour into Lacan, whose depiction of repression is an important, I believe essential, re‑reading of Freud’s. Third section, we will then get into Laplanche’s interesting ideas about enigmatic messages in infancy, and his rather grandly or provocatively announced ‘General Theory of Seduction’ along with his notion of the ‘General Anthropological Situation’ (which, by the way, we might think of as a label for ‘why we are all fucked up in the way that we are’). Fourth section, I will sketch my own preliminary evaluation and critique of Laplanche’s ideas ― and within this critique will be an account of how Laplanche interprets Freud’s vision of sexuality (a discussion which will invoke the entire controversy about the so‑called mind/body problem). Fifth section, finally, we will circle around to considering the implications of all this for clinical practice ― for the processive method of psychoanalytic treatment and for the interpretive procedures of psychotherapy, which are significantly different in this context (as well, I believe, as all others). So, bear in mind that we are, by and large, dealing with quite high‑level metapsychological debates ― and the positions we discuss may be variously near- or far- in relation to the actual experience of sitting with a patient … this is a matter we will attempt to assess.

I will pause for a couple of minutes at the end of each of the first four sections for questions that are burningly urgent … Mike will guide us. Then after the fifth section, I am hoping I will be speedy enough for us to have almost half‑an‑hour for more general questions and discussion.

1. Beginning with Freud:

Let us consider the first two decades of psychoanalysis, from approximately 1895 to approximately 1915. Twenty years of experimentation with the free‑associative method … years of revolutionary significance from an existential standpoint (and note that I emphasize the notion of ‘existential’ because after 1915 the discipline steadily becomes something rather different ― more scientistic and objectivistic). These were twenty years that changed, or should have changed, the way in which the human condition must be apprehended … and remember here that these are the years before the term Ich or ‘ego’ came to mean the systematic or organized section of the mind ― years in which the word simply indicated the experiential or phenomenological ‘I’ (the existential ‘I’ common to all our lived experience) … also remember these years were long before the superego had been dreamt up, and certainly long before Freud imagined there might be any need to talk about forces ‘beyond the pleasure principle.’

What did Freud discover in these first two decades of his new discipline? His findings are all to do with repression and with the erotic energies of our embodied experience.

Foremost, experimentation with the free‑associative method demonstrated to Freud the way in which thoughts, wishes and their accompanying feelings, can disappear from the purview of our reflective self‑consciousness that we know as ‘I.’ Thus far, nothing new about that. Because we have a wealth of representations (by which I mean thoughts, wishes and their accompanying feelings that can be articulated) and we could not possible be conscious of them all at once. But, in this moment, they have succumbed to suppression (Freud’s ‘Unterdrūckung’), which is implicated in all the maneuvers we routinely call ‘defense mechanisms.’

Think of what you had for breakfast yesterday, or the name of your kindergarten teacher, or what you recall of the first comments I made at the beginning of this commentary … those were all suppressed until the moment I invited you to call them up. They are recalled as representations, in a form more or less like the representations you had of the experiences when they actually happened (so, before and after the suppression, the ‘I’ can entertain the meaningfulness of the suppressed). Out of the immediate purview of our reflective consciousness, such material is ‘stored’ (although this is the wrong word for the mechanisms involved) in some sort of a state that Freud called ‘pre‑consciousness,’ and you were able to retrieve, recognize, reconstruct or reappropriate the representation of the three experiences I just evoked for you. The ‘pre‑conscious’ has also been called the ‘unrepressed unconscious’ and there are multiple gradations in terms of how strongly its material (for want of a better term) has been suppressed, depending on the whatever attending defense mechanisms may be involved.

Repression (Freud’s ‘Verdrängung’) is quite unlike suppression. Freud demonstrated painstakingly that the effluences of free‑association imply that repressed material must have lost its representational form … because, when it returns to consciousness, it only ever does so in disguise. This is quintessential Freud. Our bodymind is ruptured so dramatically that is as if there is, in Freud’s terminology, a ‘repression‑barrier’ ― the non‑representational repressed on one side, the theatre of representations on the other. Hold this carefully in mind: In the sense that Freud was eventually to call ‘actual’ or eigentlich repression (later misleadingly dubbed ‘secondary repression’ by some commentators), repression involves the decomposition of representations, the destruction of their representational form, as thoughts, articulatable wishes and their accompanying feelings. The representations that Freud apprehended as the ‘return of the repressed’ are only disguisedly and approximatively related to their form prior to repression. As you know from your reading of the Interpretation of Dreams, condensation and displacement (metaphor and metonym) being the operations of disguise (although disguise is an unfortunate term as it implies that there is a representation underneath the manifestation of the return of the repressed ― which there is not. So, once material is repressed, it may impact the representations that are available to consciousness (indeed it always does … so you can never release yourself entirely from your traumas, sorry). But it will never again be represented as it was before being repressed. In short, dynamically repressed material does not cease to exist, rather it governs our lives. Freud showed how the repressed persists ― that is, it does not lose its impact upon us, for it never gets erased (it loses its form but continues to exist). But he also showed how such material insists ― that is, its meaningfulness is always trying to get back into representational form, even disguisedly so. Thus, what is repressed governs us ubiquitously but in and of itself, it remains, in any veridical form, wholly unthinkable. This is quintessential Freud (today pervasively misunderstood by many, perhaps most, so‑called psychoanalysts).

You can see how this theorizing of repression leaves Freud with two conceptual problems. If repressed material persists, perseveres, or is preserved some in a non‑representational form, what is its nature. An important question, since its nature is clearly that of a meaningful force that, so to speak, always pushes to get back into representation (but never fully succeeds). In 1915, Freud wrote a series of papers theorizing what he believed had been discovered in the previous twenty years of experimentation with the praxis of free‑association. Confronting the question regarding the nature of this non‑representational force that is the repressed, Freud could be said ― unkindly ― to fumble about. On the one hand, there might be what he calls ‘thing-presentations’ … rather like images that are not connected to the representationality of language. On the other hand, he later toys with the idea that energies can persist as traces of meaningfulness that was once represented … traces that might be preserved in our erotic embodiment.

This links to the second conceptual problem. What is the force that moves representations along a pathway ― as in the chaining of associations ― a force that transforms one representation into the next, but condensation and displacement? Also, what is the force that takes representations and dissolves them ― represses them ― into a mode of meaningfulness that is non‑representational? Through working and playing with free‑associative discourse, Freud became convinced that his findings are only understandable if we allow that there must be energies in our bodymind ― energies flavored with their own mode of meaningfulness, as we shall see. Psychic energy. Call it what you will ― drive, libido and, since Laplanche many of us have started to use the term ‘desire’ ― all these available terminologies are victim of many confusions in the literature. The important issue here is Freud’s convictionthat psychic energy is not to be identified with any biological function (it is not an instinct, not hormonal, not one of the modular action patterns described by ethologists, not an innately constellated neuronal network, and so forth). Moreover, it is not to be identified with anything representational (despite the fact that it accounts for the transformation and transmutation of representations). Quote (and here I paraphrase): “we are compelled” he wrote in 1913, to consider psychic energy as “coming between biology and psychology” ― that is, between the demonstrable functioning of the body and the representational functioning of the mind. He is adamant about the role of psychic energy, which creates a ‘demand for work’ ― and by ‘work’ we may take it that he means the transformation and transmutation of representations.

So now we have a fly‑by synopsis of what Freud discovered in the first two decades of his discipline. Looking back in 1915, he is clear that repression is the cornerstone of his discipline, which is ― in his words from a 1901 text ― the ‘psychology of repression.’ What he will now call ‘actual’ or eigentlich repression (sometimes called ‘secondary repression’), is the process in which an agency ― ‘I’ or ego ― pushes an intolerable thought, feeling or wish, into exile by repression. The unthinkable is cast out of the domain of the representable.

Freud is nothing if not ambitious and thoroughgoing. So, he now asks how this rupturing of the bodymind between psychic energy and representation got started. If there is a representational agency that disintegrates or decomposes representations into a force that is non‑representable ― an agency such as the ‘I’ responsible for so‑called ‘actual repression’ ― where does it come from? How did this division of our being and our becoming (around what he came to call the ‘repression barrier’) get started? Also, if our psychic energy is not identical to our biological functions, where does it come from? In 1915, he suggests ― on a rather ad hoc basis ― that there must have been some sort of a process of ‘primal repression’ or Urverdrängung by which the representable agency of repression is established, and which is thus at the origin of the initial formation of the unconscious. This is where Laplanche intervenes.

But before we proceed, quickly note five things. First, in many respects, Freud is asking how the mind, an immaterial representational system, develops from the materiality of the body. And he takes this question very seriously ― he wants to account for everything about the human condition ― and we can imagine that he would have been scathingly critical of legerdemain ‘solutions’ ― such as Kleinian blather about an ‘archaic ego’ or the inborn mind assumed by self and social psychologies. Second, consider how misleading it is for him to call this initiation of mental life an act of ‘primal repression’ since there is no agency within the infant pressing against anything; rather, there is an external force that causes a rupturing of the infant. With this notion of repression, Laplanche is trying to explain the origin of the unconscious and the earliest establishment of a representational system from which it is ruptured. Third, note how Freud subscribes to modern European philosophy in that he assumes that the mind is an individualized creation ― formed endogenously as if a monad ― and not that our representational capacities might be formed from outside ourselves. He assumes this even as he posits psychic energy as neither representational nor inherently biological (even though it leans on or is propped upon biological functions, as I will mention shortly), and in this respect he breaks with the dualism that had enthralled European philosophy since Descartes. Fourth, only privately did Freud entertain the possibility that psychic energies might move between people; publicly, he insisted that they must be generated and managed within the individual. And fifth, while these issues have profound importance for the way in which one thinks about the human condition, one must question in what way they affect our lived‑experience in that condition. Here Freud remains vague. After the twenty years of experimentation ― I will call it praxis, because it was not theory‑driven ― he quickly moves from theorizing narcissism in 1914 to object‑relations, then to ego functions and signal anxiety … all of which promote psychotherapeutic techniques … but he does not go in the direction that I think is crucially important (and that Laplanche sort of does and sort of does not) which is to consider further the conditions of healing processes that are not the same as therapeutic procedures.

2. Lacan on the formation of the unconscious:

Laplanche addresses what Freud called Urverdrängung and regrettably he, like Freud, retains the terminology of repression. Unlike Freud, he does not think that the rift within our being‑becoming ― our bodymind ― is endogenously created. Like Lacan, his emphasis is on our psyche being formed from outside. But unlike Lacan, he highlights not the structuring of the Symbolic Order into which we are inducted, but the seductive violence of messaging that comes from the unconscious of our caretakers.

In the Lacanian model, there is no need to specify how an agency within the individual comes to repress certain representations and make them unthinkable, because for him such censorship results from the structuring of the Symbolic Order and this is an order that pre-exists and then governs what we commonly think of as the individual mind. For Lacan, the ego is not an organization, as it became for Freud after 1915 and certainly after 1923. Rather, the ego as ‘I’ is merely a signifier that bounces along chains of signification without having any agential power (and indeed he says that ‘the ego,’ as a sub‑system of self‑representations, is a paranoid construct that crystalizes from the voices that surround us). We do not learn language, rather language creates us from outside us. So, as the toddler is inducted into the Symbolic Order (which can loosely be read as the entire system of possible representationality ― languages generically speaking), she or he encounters the symbolic ‘no’ and the linguistic system makes some things unthinkable. The pathways of the ‘I’ signifier are established accordingly. This makes sense of Lacan’s aphorism “the unconscious is structured like a language” because language makes some meaningfulness impossible. The Symbolic Order also makes possible triangulated thinking, which is central to the toddler’s struggle with oedipal complexes and the incest taboo (that is, the primordial ‘no’ ― all of which you may know from my 2019 paper on oedipality). In short, Lacan recasts the advent of actual repression in terms of the toddler’s entry into the linguistic arena and her or his accommodation to oedipality ― for the moment let us set aside the way in which Lacan claims not to need a notion of psychic energy.

3. Central contributions of Laplanche:

Hopefully, we have now situated Laplanche’s originality. In relation to Freud’s rather inchoate theorizing of ‘primal repression’ (let us keep the term, despite its misleading implications), Laplanche can rightly claim to have built‑upon ― amplified ― the 1915 speculations. But against Freud and following Lacan, he understands the constitution of the representational theatre (or mind) as governed by forces or structures outside the individual. He insists on the primacy of otherness. But then, against Lacan, he positions the crucial events of repression in infancy, rather than at the oedipal juncture in which the toddler is inducted into symbolic language. Indeed, as I shall mention shortly, in certain specific ways he dismisses certain of Lacan’s insights in a manner that can only be called cavalier.

Laplanche advances a theory that counters Freud’s alleged though abandonment of seduction (as the adult’s sexual activities that cause neurosis), by reasserting the significance of a different sort of adult seductiveness directed toward the infant. Seduction is now a universal phenomenon ― a trauma ― that determines the infantile formation of mental life from out of our biological inheritance. In one way, we could say that the mind is born of a certain sort of violence ― or better, violation. He calls this the ‘fundamental anthropological situation’ ― a necessary and distinctive structuring feature of the human condition.

Key here is the idea that caretakers impress enigmatic messages upon the infant. These messages hit the infant around its innate repertoire of purely biological functions (such as reflexes); as they are implanted into, pushed into, or imposed upon, the infant. Such messages produce ‘drives’ or desires, as forces differentiated from biological operations (by contrast with needs and instincts, drives are not biological, although they lean on or are propped upon biological operations. Representations are born of the investment of these drives in an effort to cope with the infant’s confusion in relation to the enigmatic quality of the messages it helplessly receives. Our representations, from start to finish, are efforts to translate the enigmas within us. Let us quickly look at two concrete examples.

The first is Laplanche’s. The infant is born with a biological function, the sucking reflex. We could call this an ‘instinct’ ― a term Freud avoided, using it only five times in his entire collected writings, and being at pains to emphasize that instincts are purely biological and are not equivalent to drives. Rather, he said, drives lean on or are propped upon biological functions (they come into being in infancy, and are not genetically endowed). Parenthetically, Freud’s term, much used by Laplanche, for this leaning on or propping upon is Anlehnung, which was very badly translated by Strachey in the Standard Edition as ‘anaclisis’ (the meaning of which has devolved into the child’s dependence on the caretaker). Back to the sucking reflex (and skipping over the variations of caretakers who are not cis‑gendered women, the use of bottles, etc): With this inherited modular action pattern ― the sucking reflex of instinct if you will ― the nipple is introduced, the infant sucks. However, that is not all that occurs. The caretaker, offering her nipples, brings to the encounter not only her sensations of pleasure and pain, but also all her feelings and fantasies, conscious and unconscious, relating to the sensuality or sexuality of her sensations ― in one way or another, an entire history of erotics around the mother’s breasts and teats are brought to bear upon her infant’s experience of suckling (although traditionally, in polite society, speaking of this as a erotic encounter has been strenuously avoided). According to Laplanche, the infant cannot but absorb ― again, in one way or other ― the mother’s feelings and fantasies as messages coming from the caretaker; they are messages of which the infant, initially lacking any capacity for representation, cannot possibly make sense.

A second example comes from one of Avgi Saketopoulou’s books. A man changes a baby’s nappy (the example also works with a woman caretaker; and you can imagine the baby to be either sex). If hygiene is to be properly observed, the anal sphincter has to be cleaned. Does the man do a very cursory wipe, avoiding stimulating an area so densely endowed with nerve endings? Does he wipe extra forcefully? Does he attend to the baby’s reactions or try to ignore them. And so on … And what is going on inside him, consciously and unconsciously, as he undertakes any of these actions? You can multiply this example for yourself for there are an inordinate number of ways in which the man’s entire history of anal eroticism can come into play in the course of this simple act. Whatever way it goes, messages are being received by the infant from the feelings and fantasies ― conscious and unconscious ― of the caretaker.

According to Laplanche, what is crucially important about these messages that are implanted into, pushed into, or imposed upon, the infant is that they come from the ‘sexuel’ unconscious of the caretaker. As Jonathan House explained, Laplanche coins the neologism, sexuel, to denote something that is not gender, not sex, and not limited to what we ordinarily think of as ‘sex acts.’ The term more or less denotes what we commonly think of as the infantile sexuality that pervades our entire erotic embodiment. Importantly, it seems that Laplanche can only think of this as consisting of a chaotic substrate of signifiers. Take note of this because I think it may be the Achille’s heel of his theorizing. To continue: That the messages dispatched from the caretakers unconscious indicates that the caretaker transmits them without awareness … I think this point may be more complex than Laplanche proposes, and I will return to it shortly. The salient feature of the infant’s bombardment with enigmatic message is precisely that they are enigmatic for the infant. She or he experiences them and may variously have pleasure or unpleasure associated with them, but is utterly confused by them, cannot make sense of them.¹ The infant is seduced, but in a sense quite violently so ― receiving signifiers that as yet cannot be integrated into any pattern of cogent or coherent representation, even imagistically.

Thus, the bombardment of enigmatic messages ― signifiers, according to Laplanche ― is the origin of the unconscious and of the inchoate representations that are formed to manage, by translation, the incomprehensibility of these messages that have been pressed into the infant.

4. Evaluating Laplanche’s key contributions:

Now let us both appreciate and raise some critical questions about Laplanche’s ideas and his place in the history of psychoanalytic thinking.

Point One. Let us praise the boldness of his originality. Freud’s 1915 retrospections raised the fascinating question about how the immaterial mind ― our theatre of representations that is housed in a material body with which it is not identical ― could have been initiated within the individual. Laplanche takes up that question by amplifying and modifying Freud’s rather tentative notion of infantile events called ‘primal repression.’ The vast majority of psychoanalysts have simply steered clear of this question, either answering it dishonestly (I mentioned both the Kleinian and the self‑psychological or relational schools), or declining the challenge to give an answer (adopting an attitude sort of like ‘well, we have a mind, and that’s what we work with as therapists, so why does its origin matter…’). … There is only one theorist who tackles the issue with anything comparable to Laplanche’s tenacity, acumen and knowledge of Freud’s writings, and that is the famous Hungarian‑American psychoanalyst, David Rapaport, who was a close associate of my quarrelsome friend Merton Gill. Rapaport was an ego psychologist, and his model of the earliest representational formations was based on Freud’s tenet that, for example, when needing food but experiencing the absence of a satisfactory nipple, the baby hallucinates the breast. Frustration with external reality creates our internal psychic reality. Obviously, this is an endogenous model, with no reference to the thoughts, wishes and associated feelings of the caretaker, only to the provision of what is needed. Frustration may stimulate hallucinatory representations, but Laplanche’s emphasis on otherness now seems indispensable; for him, representations are always attempts at translation of the enigmatic signifiers within ― translations that are always, inevitably, insufficient and inadequate.

Point Two. The notion of enigmatic messaging, passing from caretaker to the hapless infant, is surely compelling. But note, before we get misled, the infant is only the hapless recipient in this one respect. As we know, infants bring to their earliest interactions wide variations in their endowment of instincts, their biological repertoire. There are temperamental differences, differences in the strength of various modular action patterns, differences in neuronal sensitivities, and so on. But these have nothing to do with the genesis of drive, as Laplanche defines it. In a published debate with Laplanche, Daniel Widlöcher tried to argue that infants come into the world with different drive endowments ― but this is a major misunderstanding of the way in which drive must be distinguished from instinct, and Laplanche nailed him for it.

Point Three. The brilliance of the notion of enigmatic messaging is not only that it is intuitively compelling that caretakers shape the child in ways that are not only gross, but also powerfully subtle. Subtle messages are enigmatic, leaving the child confusedly trying to make sense of the signifiers they receive. It is also that this tells us so much about intergenerational transmission of traumas ― its power and its hidden character. If my infantile sexuality is ― unconsciously ― that of my parents, reflecting that of their parents, then an essential dimension of our human condition is elucidated, and Laplanche is singularly important in explaining the mechanisms that make this intergenerational transmission so powerful, yet non-obvious.

Point Four. The theorizing of enigmatic messages also tells us so much about our genderization ― here is a model of the earliest development of our representational theatre that demonstrates how our sense of our own gender is established before we represent the anatomical differences between the sexes. Freud, of course, thought that experiencing male/female differences in genitalia was of fundamental and traumatic significance. But according to this model that cannot be the case ― my maleness and my femaleness were foundationally established before I was cognizant that there are ― supposedly ― just men and women populated the world. This is hugely significant for our understanding the journeys of transgendering.

Point Five. But now let us think more critically about Laplanche’s use of his own ideas about enigmatic messages. He says rather definitively ― at least in my reading ― that they come from the ‘sexuel unconscious’ of the caretakers. And he repeats this so often that I am inclined to believe that he thinks such messages come solely from the ‘sexuel unconscious.’ And, in his writings, such messages seem, at least in the few concrete examples he offers, to be transmitted via tactile contact. But why just that? There would seem to be all sorts of messages that are not unconscious and, for that matter, not transmitted by touch. Think about the caretaker who says, while unwrapping a nappy, ‘Oh my darling what a beautiful poo you’ve given me’ or ‘Oh for god’s sake child, you smell disgusting.’ And what about the caretaker who is actually conscious of, for example, his wish to stimulate or to avoid stimulating the infant’s anal sphincter while changing the nappy … versus the caretaker who stimulates or avoids stimulating while consciously thinking about last night’s soccer game? I think I understand why the ‘sexuel unconscious’ is so emphasized by Laplanche, because the caretakers unconscious is nothing but ‘sexuel’ having been formed in her or his own infancy. But why does Laplanche write as if that is all that can be at issue?

Point Six. This brings us to the next point. Once the infant’s unconscious is formed, with a corresponding representational repertoire motivated by inevitably unsuccessful efforts at translation … is that it? I do not find in Laplanche much, if any, concession to the possibility that we are bombarded with enigmatic messages for the remainder of our lives, even if our capacity of represent what is evoked within us increases with age such that the margins of enigma perhaps shrink. Of course, such a possibility contests the customary platitude that the unconscious, once established, is unchanging ― but I think possibly Laplanche endorses this tenet.

Point Seven. This then brings us to the way in which Laplanche breaks, perhaps rather disrespectfully, with Lacan. What Freud calls ‘actual repression’ (and what Lacan interpreted as the way in which the structuring of the Symbolic Order keeps somethings unrepresentable) seems to disappear from Laplanche’s theorizing. Indeed, at one point he refers to that which is repressed by eigentlich repression as the ‘pseudo‑unconscious’ ― an aspersion that might reasonably be applied to the unconsciousness of suppressed material, but certainly not to the process that we all experience once we have entered the ‘I-ness’ of language, in which a representation or possible representation loses its representational form as it is, so to speak, pushed beyond the repression barrier. No, surely from our vantage point this morning, we would be better thinking of the human condition as constituted by two major normative traumas. The first occurs with the seductive imposition of enigmatic messages in infancy, which is a trauma that has been more sketchily considered by theorists well before Laplanche, although in a very different manner (for example, think here of Sándor Ferenczi’s confusion of tongues or of his student Michael Balint’s notion of the ‘basic fault’). The second trauma is that of oedipality, which necessitates actual repression and which is integral to the induction of the subject, the ‘I,’ into the pre‑existing pathways of language.

Point Eight. Here is what I would like to think of as my central criticism, my coup‑de‑grace. In what sense is the ‘enigmatic message’ actually a message? Laplanche contends that what the caretaker implants within the infant, forming her or his unconscious, are signifiers. But they are experienced as a cacophony of signifiers that the infant is not capable of organizing into a configuration of signifiers, a representation. They are enigmatic because the infant cannot make sense of them and thus they form the ‘sexuel,’ the libido or infantile sexuality, that is the origin of the unconscious. But signifiers are discrete, like phonemes, yet they only make sense if coordinated with other signifiers … for this reason, Laplanche sometimes lapses into calling the consistency of the ‘sexuel unconscious’ as that of ‘de‑signified signifiers’ ― which makes no sense.

Indeed ― for those of you who know Lacanian thinking ― this is rather like the objet petit a which is not a signifier but accounts for the movement of the subject from one signifier to the next, which is a momentum that we might think of as drive or desire. Both notions, the de‑signification of a signifier and the objet petit a seem, to me, to be like ad hoc solutions for a major theoretical problem, which is that of the force that fuels representation and moves our inner theatre from one representation to the next. As far as I am concerned, the rabbit limps out of the hat.

Laplanche and Lacan are both under the spell of the signifier, which has dominated French intellectual life ever since Ferdinand de Saussure gave some highly influential lectures in 1911. All we can ever know, or experience, of the universe is only available as signifiers … we never know or experience anything else. Whatever is signified is unavailable to us. So far so good (I can answer questions about the Lacanian ‘Real’ with a capital ‘R’ another time). Since the mid‑twentieth century, all we can talk about are signifiers, their structuring, their momentum, and the way we live within them ― think of Martin Heidegger’s aphorisms, ‘language is the house of being’ and ‘language makes us.’

Instead of talking of the traumatic transmission of energies, why not talk in terms of psychic energies. The notion of psychic energy has been effectively expunged from the theoretical lexicon of Lacan and Laplanche. Yet, interestingly, again and again the notion of psychic energy slips into the writings of Laplanche, or Dominique Scarfone, of Avgi Saketopoulou, and of other aficionados of Laplanche’s theorizing ― as if in a Freudian slip.

Now we are all aware of the truism that ‘information is energy and energy is information.’ That may be, but as conceptual tools for our theorizing, signifier and energy have somewhat distinctive connotations. At least in my mind. Signifiers are like discrete entities, even though they only make sense in conjunction with each other. The idea of subtle energies that can express their own somewhat esoteric meaningfulness seems to connote something more fluid. Are we open to the idea that the infant is bombarded with subtle energies coming from the caretakers and that this bombardment comprises the first of two normative traumas, as the origin of the non‑representational unconscious and of the representations that are formed to counter it? And that the second normative trauma of oedipality begins a process of ‘actual repression’ by which the unacceptable character of some possible representations causes them to be dissolved into non-representational traces of meaningful energies within us. Are we open to the idea that subtle energies impinge upon us, outside of the purview of our reflective self‑consciousness, throughout our lives.

This is not such an outlandish idea ― but it has, since 1915, been consistently and strenuously rejected by psychoanalysts on both sides of the Atlantic. Think about prāna or ch’i or the notion that is endorsed in every culture, except those on either side of the Atlantic with a commitment to the quasi‑scientific ideology of logical empiricism. Enough. In the Spring, I am planning to give a seminar on which energy talk must be re-introduced into psychoanalysis, if the discipline is to survive.

5. Implications for clinical practice:

So, allow me to conclude with a couple of inadequate comments on what this all amounts to as we sit with our patients. There is a sense in which it might be legitimate to say, as I lampooned it earlier, ‘well this is all about how the mind was formed, but I work with it as having been formed already, and so I interpret matters to my patient in ways that help them understand themselves and then perhaps live their lives more adaptively … theories of primal repression are irrelevant to my psychotherapeutic practice.’ I think if you understand psychotherapy (as Laplanche seems to, and as I do) to be a work of understanding, a contained economy in which representations are bartered, interpretations and insights formulated and exchanged, toward the end of the patient’s greater adaptation, then this attitude is fine and dandy. But from the standpoint of post‑Lacanian psychoanalysis it is misguided … conflating psychotherapy with counseling.

What Laplanche says about ‘transference’ is key here. He contrasts psychoanalysis with psychotherapy as I have just caricatured it, because in psychoanalysis what counts is not what the practitioner understands or says to the patient. In fact, rather the reverse. For Laplanche, psychoanalytic work is distinctive in that it creates a ‘space’ (an overworked term that I would have preferred to avoid) in which the infantile situation is revived. Thus, it is the presence of a silent practitioner that calls up the transference because she or he becomes an enigma for the patient. The psychoanalyst’s absent‑presence, so to speak, the psychoanalytic attitude and the refusal of the patient’s enticement to ‘be real’ is a hollow that the patient then fills. The patient can fill it in a hollowed‑out manner (en creux) or an embossed, filled‑in (en plein) manner. Embossed is the traditional understanding of transference in which the patient compulsively repeats patterns that have already been translated ― i.e., were represented in childhood ― but have been repressed, or perhaps only suppressed. The hollowed‑out transference is more fundamental, distinctive of psychoanalysis, when the treatment becomes the site of the infantile trauma of enigmatic messaging. This allows for current representations to be, so to speak, de-translated in order that, with working‑through, they may be re‑translated. And note that movement of de‑translation and re‑translation occurs without the psychoanalyst’s labor … but only with the peculiar absenting of his presence engaged with the patient.

Here I think Laplanche is onto something important ― the distinction between the procedures of psychotherapy and the processes of psychoanalysis.