Abstract
If one is offering an analytical review of the literature—say, a survey of research on sexuality since Freud—then one might conceivably advance arguments predicated on logic alone. However, if one is formulating a new set of normative claims—say, “a consistent, nonnormative theory of sexuality”—then one needs to back them up with evidence, drawn from one’s own research or that of others. Jean Laplanche seems a good example of the latter. Despite his complaints about the “imperialism” of “English empirio-clinicalism” (Laplanche 1989, p. 153), he was clearly devoted to the importance of the case study. Throughout his writing he “put Freud to work” by making Freud the object of analysis, presenting closely detailed rereadings of his clinical research, and using the master’s tools to remodel the master’s house. For example, much of his work on anxiety (l’angoisse), comprising the first volume of his Problematiques, may be read as an extended riff on Little Hans. In other writings, Laplanche draws on the clinical findings of Klein, Winnicott, Schafer, Rank, Rosolato, and others—including Lacan, who counseled Laplanche to go to medical school in order to have closer access to psychotics (what wonderful avuncular advice!). His first book was an extended case study of the poet Hölderlin, and the centerpiece of one of his earliest essays was a lengthy analysis of a dream prepared by his collaborator Serge Leclaire. His lectures on castration (Problematiques 2) are rich with examples drawn from anthropology reported by Bettelheim, Róheim, and Herodotus. Elsewhere he supports his theoretical insights with discussions of myths, jokes, the biography of Leonardo da Vinci, and the cartoons of Saul Steinberg. Grounding one’s arguments with concrete examples drawn from clinical, extraclinical, or historical experience—whether one describes these examples as evidence or illustration—is a necessary guard again solipsism and invention. Doing otherwise is—as Laplanche would say—“ipsocentrist.”