Book Review: Freud and the Sexual: Essays 2000–2006

The late Jean Laplanche (1924–2012) was one of the leading voices of French psychoanalysis. Trained as a philosopher by Merleau-Ponty, Jean Hyppolite, and Gaston Bachelard before attending medical school, analyzed by Lacan (then still within the fold of the IPA), long-time professor at the Sorbonne and author, along with J.-B. Pontalis, of The Language of Psycho-Analysis, Laplanche was best known for his careful reading of Freud, his reflections on language and translation, and his radical theory of the intersubjective origins of infantile sexuality and the individual unconscious.

The current volume, ably translated from the French by John Fletcher, Jonathan House, and Nicholas Ray, is the first in a projected series of books presenting English-language translations of theoretical and literary works connected to psychoanalysis and philosophy of mind. The book offers readers a broad sampling of Laplanche’s lectures and essays from 2000 through 2006. These cover a wide range of topics and, while ultimately rewarding, may prove difficult for those not already familiar with Laplanche or conversant with the preoccupations and style of French (non-Lacanian) psychoanalytic writing.

At the heart of Laplanche’s thinking, and what I imagine the majority of Anglophone readers will be most curious about, are his concepts of enigmatic messages and their translation, the theory of general seduction (which takes place within what he calls the fundamental anthropological situation), and his expanded understanding of infantile sexuality and its relation to the origins of the individual unconscious.

Given the complexity of Laplanche’s thought and the absence of an editorial consciousness that might structure the diverse writings presented here—each chapter originated as an essay or lecture written for a specific purpose and was not intended as part of a larger, unified work—it is regrettable that the editors have failed to include a synthesizing introductory essay. The task of providing a suitable framework for these chapters, then, must be left to each reader, and for many will present a serious challenge. ¹ However, as I hope to demonstrate, the effort required will prove worthwhile.

In what follows, I will select certain of the texts to illustrate how they may be used to explicate some of what is most central in Laplanche’s writings. In doing so, I will emphasize some chapters and concede that others will be given short shrift, because I have found them too difficult to apply or make use of. Regrettably, Laplanche, in line with his philosophical background and a certain French tradition, did not illustrate his thoughts with clinical examples. As a result, readers will be required to do even more work in thinking through the clinical implications of what he has to offer. With these cautions in mind, let us turn to what Laplanche called the sexual (le sexual).

As the editors and translators are careful to note, Laplanche constructed a neologism by replacing the spelling of the ordinary French word, sexuel, with Freud’s German word, sexual, to create a noun, le sexual, that indicates and refers to infantile sexuality in all of its various manifestations and meanings: “the enlarged Freudian notion of sexuality (le sexual) [in contrast to] the common sense or traditional notion of a genital sexuality (le sexuel)” (p. 1, n. 2).

In contrast to Strachey, who blurred the distinction implied in Freud’s original German, Laplanche maintains the distinction between instinct (Instinkt) and drive (Trieb) and associates the sexual with the latter. “Instinct is relatively fixed within the species, is largely innate, and corresponds to adaptive aims; whereas drive, the model for which remains the sexual drive, is variable from one individual to another, is contingent with regard to its aims and objects, and is emphatically ‘polymorphous perverse,’ at least in proximity to its origins” (p. 32). Central to Laplanche’s theory is the view that with regard to infantile sexuality and the drives, the former “is not innate but . . . like a fantasy, it emerges within a dialogue, an exchange between adult and infant in which the sexual initiative comes from the adult . . .” (p. 139).

It is in the nature of a drive to seek and recruit continual stimulation, increased tension, and excitation (p. 142), rather than aiming for quiescence via discharge. Thus, Laplanche writes that the sexual “seeks excitation [even] at the cost of total exhaustion” (p. 14) and that the pleasure of the sexual “is not the pleasure attendant upon the reduction of tension [e.g., as with hunger] but on the increase of tension. Indeed, there is nothing to suggest that this infantile ‘pleasure-desire’ corresponds to any internal physiological tension and that it requires discharge” (p. 19).

To further contrast drive and instinct, Laplanche notes that the object of the latter “is the real object, which is situated at the end of the process” (p. 41)—e.g., the actual breast that offers milk to the hungry infant and thereby satisfies and temporarily extinguishes the desire for food. “The object of the drive [however, is in the realm of the psychic and] is to be situated within unconscious fantasy; it is the exciting object, the ‘source-object,’ of which the real can offer nothing but unsatisfying, though in their turn exciting, effigies” (p. 41). These effigies might be thought of as internal objects of psychic reality, which are “unsatisfying” to the extent that they are incomplete substitutes for and bear the enigmatic and incomprehensible affective traces of the original, stimulating source-objects.

This is a radical assertion. For Laplanche, “the introduction of the sexual element [i.e., infantile sexuality, comes] not from the side of the physiology of the infant but from the [unconscious, sexual] messages coming from the [caretaking] adult” (p. 69). This is what he calls the fundamental anthropological situation. While the drive and infantile sexuality appear with the first object relationship, the sexual instinct does not enter the picture until puberty.

“The fundamental anthropological situation confronts an adult, who has an unconscious that is sexual but essentially pregenital, with an infant, who has not yet constituted an unconscious nor the opposition unconscious-preconscious, in a dialogue that is both symmetrical at one level and asymmetrical at another. The sexual unconscious of the adult is reactivated in the relation with the small infant. The messages of the adult are conscious-preconscious and are necessarily compromised (in the sense of the return of the repressed), by the presence of unconscious scrambling or interference. These messages are therefore enigmatic, both for the adult sender and for the infant recipient” (p. 207).

“The source of the infantile sexual drive [le sexual] is the unconscious [of the caretaking other]” (p. 21). “This drive sexuality is indissociably connected to fantasy as its cause. Repressed, it is what constitutes the contents of the unconscious and is the very object of psychoanalysis” (p. 44). Thus, the origin of the infantile sexual—and hence of the unconscious—does not lie in the body of the infant, but in an intersubjective process marked by enigmatic, unwittingly communicated sexual messages transmitted by the caretaking adult that become embedded in the psyche of the child. The absorption of these enigmatic messages creates and constitutes the infant’s developing unconscious.

Put another way, the “unconscious is not an ‘ancient consciousness’; it is not a memory that one could hope to recover completely. The unconscious is something that has dropped out of conscious experience, that has escaped the domain of ordered memories” (p. 100). It is not “a second meaning subjacent to the ‘official’ and preconscious meaning proposed by the subject. On the contrary, the unconscious is what has escaped from that construction of meaning that I call translation” (p. 209). It is the realm of something other than that of forgotten or unrecoverable memories. ²

The assertion that this process is universal constitutes what Laplanche calls the “theory of general seduction.” This is a reformulation of Freud’s early theory of the origin of neurosis, turned into an account of the origins of the infantile sexual and of the individual unconscious: enigmatic messages derived from unconscious residues of infantile sexual drives (the sexual) of the infant’s caretaker are unconsciously transmitted to the infant, where they continue to agitate, seeking “translation” and comprehension for the rest of the infant’s life.

This theory inadvertently raises the problem of the prime mover, which is familiar in arguments about the existence of God. If the infantile sexual drive of the infant is implanted by the enigmatic sexual message of the caretaking adult, and the latter message exists because when that adult was an infant, an enigmatic sexual message from his or her caretaker was implanted, and so on, then where does the first enigmatic sexual message in the chain originate, and how does it come into being? This is a question that Laplanche does not address in this book and that I have not seen addressed elsewhere.

Scarfone (personal communication, 2013) suggests that despite any appearances to the contrary, Laplanche is an empiricist. His starting point is the analysis of the adult, where infantile sexuality is not postulated but is a fact of observation: the perverse elements of sexuality in general are there to be heard/found and do not stem from a developmental theory. Hence Laplanche need not explain the presence of the unconscious in the adult; it is a datum from which to start. From there, he uses the theory of après-coup to postulate that since the adult has an unconscious, he cannot help but affect the infant’s mind in the ordinary situation of care, where one can also observe, in an indirect fashion, the influence of unconscious elements in, for instance, the mother-child interaction (e.g., giving the breast, a very sexual though nurturing—self-preservative—organ).

The agitation produced by the abiding presence of the enigmatic message requires and catalyzes a process of what Laplanche calls “translation” on the part of the infant. However, the word translation may be somewhat misleading in this context (Scarfone, personal communication, 2013). It does not refer to a one-to-one mapping, such as might occur from one language to another (e.g., bonjour in French = hello in English), but a creative act that entails a construction of new meaning. In Bionian terms, the enigmatic message might be analogized to beta elements and translation to alpha function. Translation includes both the creation of a container and the processes through which elements of the enigmatic message are transformed and metabolized into organized entities. This transformation is always partial, approximate, and incomplete, and its product, while responsive to a given set of enigmatic messages, is variable and highly subjective. It takes place and possesses a certain degree of freedom. When such freedom is severely constricted or nonexistent, grave pathology such as psychosis ensues.

To the extent that these messages are unpacked or “translated” by the individual, the potential for so doing will occur only in retrospect (après-coup; Nachträglichkeit), usually after the onset of puberty, when the possibility of instinctual sexual awareness has been added to the sexual. This is because in order to construct a meaning from the enigmatic sexual message, the child must integrate and experience a true sexual instinct, and this is possible only after puberty begins: “drive sexuality, the sexuality that is acquired, comes before the sexuality that is innate. Drive comes before instinct, fantasy comes before function; and when the sexual instinct arrives [at puberty], the seat is already occupied [by the sexual]” (p. 22).

This also means that any translation that occurs must do so après-coup. “The translation of the enigmatic adult message doesn’t happen all at once but in two moments. . . . in the first moment, the message is simply inscribed or implanted, without being understood. It is as if maintained or held in position under a thin layer consciousness. . . . In a second moment the message is reactivated from within. It acts like an internal foreign body that must at all costs be mastered and integrated” (p. 208).

As noted above, however, this mastery, this translation of the enigmatic message, is always incomplete. An important implication of this formulation is that “elements of the unconscious are fragments of a message, signifiers that, having been extracted from their context, acquire a ‘thing-like’ consistency. These ‘designated signifiers’ are entirely different from memories; having lost their links with meaning, their contextual relations in time and space, they quite naturally impose themselves with the force of psychical reality” (p. 71).

Thus, for Laplanche, “the unconscious is what has escaped from the construction of meaning. . . . It isn’t part of the domain of meaning, but is constituted by signifiers deprived of their original context, therefore largely deprived of meaning, and scarcely coordinated among themselves” (p. 209). The not yet translated messages are conceived of as existing in an “enclave.” In the normal-neurotic situation—either the patient or a portion of the mind—the not yet translated inscriptions are “in waiting” (p. 212). “There . . . exist[s], therefore, not only in the infant but in all human beings, a stock of untranslated messages; some practically impossible to translate, others temporarily in waiting for translation. Translation can only be got under way by a reactivation, a reactualisation. The unconscious enclave can therefore be a place of stagnation, but also a place of waiting, a kind of ‘purgatory’ of messages in waiting” (pp. 212–213).

While no enigmatic messages are fully translatable, some are more radically untranslatable than others. What distinguishes the neurotic from the borderline or psychotic situation is that in the latter, translation is “radically impossible.” This means that the patient is less able to spontaneously and autonomously make use of the creative opportunity afforded by the psychoanalytic act of the work of unbinding, which aims “to make new materials surface for a profoundly renewed narration” (p. 282). Less able to perform new translations, the psychotic or borderline patient is therefore even more dependent on the activity of the analyst/other for assistance in the performance of this work. In such instances, the analyst’s “‘involvement’ is maximum, to the point that one may wonder whether the reported cases are not unique specimens to which the therapist has devoted the major part of his time and attention. The multiplicity of approaches and theorizations in the published cases shows that most of the time it is the idiosyncrasy of the therapist-analyst that is to the fore—his unconscious underpinnings, his values, his very existence” (p. 283).

But the very act of contact with the analyst as object in this process, perhaps even accentuated by the fact of this extreme dependency, produces a situation in which new enigmatic messages will be encountered and absorbed, giving rise to new inscriptions in the enclave of the untranslated.

This description of the “source-object” of infantile sexuality, the perturbations to which that object gives rise and his formulation of the process through which it becomes implanted in the mind of the infant, are perhaps the most unique and intriguing aspects of Laplanche’s theory. They are linked with both the aims of psychoanalysis and what makes the therapeutic dimension of psychoanalysis possible.

“[W]hat from the beginning is ‘to be bound’, ‘to be translated’, does not come from the depths of an innate [i.e., biologically conceived] id but from the other human, the adult, in the essential asymmetry of our first months. The first attempts at ‘treatment’ are made in order to respond to the enigmatic messages (compromised by sexuality) coming from the adult other. The partial failure of these attempts at translation—by which the ego constitutes itself and begins to represent itself within a narrative—entails the exclusion of real elements, which then become the internal sources of sexual excitation against which the ego must continue to defend itself” (p. 87).

One can see in this last passage that for Laplanche the psychoanalytic situation, as quintessential encounter of the self with the enigmatic other, is a reconstitution, extension, and analog of the fundamental anthropological situation. Transference “fundamentally returns the subject as closely as possible to the enigmas that were presented to him in his childhood” (p. 89). “Freud’s stroke of genius is to trace back the alterity of the unconscious and the alterity of the transference to the alterity of the originary situation of seduction” (p. 101). Thus, the psychoanalytic situation reinstates the object as both enigmatic other and, to the extent that the analyst assists the patient in the translation process, as alter ego, container (Bion 1962) or “similar other” (Green 2005).

“We maintain that to treat means, essentially, to confront the ‘unbound’ in order to give it a form, a meaning, a coherence. This coherence is achieved primarily by means of a putting into narrative; it corresponds to a temporalization, which is usually incomplete, and is carried out according to registers that may well be poorly integrated with one another” (pp. 86–87).

But Laplanche is also careful to insist that treatment, at least in neurotic cases, must occur from within and not be imposed by the other. “Who treats? No one treats anyone but himself, at least on the psychic level. It is the human being who treats and is treated, thereby constituting himself as that always more or less precarious unity that we call ‘me’ or ‘subject’” (p. 87).

Among the areas of interest addressed by Laplanche that are omitted from this discussion are the conundrum of gender and its relation to sex and the sexual and the role of myth and social formations as a set of potential ready-made narrative schemas through which to translate and therefore bind previously absorbed and not yet metabolized enigmatic messages. As indicated above, this is a complex but very rich and rewarding field for readers to delve into.

In the end, one may come away with a renewed appreciation of how breathtaking, radical, and innovative was Freud’s elaboration of the sexual drive and infantile sexuality—at least as explicated by Laplanche in a wonderfully creative reading. Laplanche gives us psychoanalysis as he imagines Freud saw it: “first of all an absolutely new exploratory procedure, which reveals a domain of being (the ‘processes of the soul’) to which barely anything else gave access” (p. 85). A psychoanalysis whose object is “the unconscious, and the unconscious above all the sexual in the precise Freudian sense—drive sexuality, infantile sexuality, pre-, para- or infantile-genital sexuality. It is the sexuality whose very source is fantasy itself, implanted of course within the body” (p. 25).