Commentary on Laplanche

The Importance of the “Other” in Understanding Psychic Development

As Laplanche mentions in this paper, one of Freud’s great oversights in his theorizing of the psychic apparatus was the absence in his theory of the fact that the child is subject to the influence of the “other” in what Laplanche would come to call the Fundamental Anthropological Position. This term describes the grade of differences between the child and the adult. The adult’s sexuality and repressed unconscious loom over the child and infiltrate the attachment relationship. Compared to other animals, who are hardwired for a lot of what will happen to them, humans are genetically programmed for plasticity in terms of our interactions with the early environment. The fact that the young human is genetically programmed to be helpless, with a readiness to be formed, fits well with Laplanche’s way of describing the importance of the difference between the mental structure of the adult compared to that of the child, who is in the thrall of the adult. The drives arrive in the child as an originary introjection (implantation, to use Laplanche’s term) coming from the force field of sensation/communication/seduction between adult and child.

A particularly important aspect of the absence of a theorizing of the “other” in Freud and Klein is exemplified by Laplanche’s idea of enigmatic messages at the core of the unconscious. A message is something addressed to someone by someone. Laplanche (1999) wrote about this as a third category of reality, that of the “message.”

In order to discuss psychoanalytic interpretation and its status between determinism and hermeneutics, I could not avoid this long introduction to the third category, which I suggest locating in the position postulated by Freud when he speaks of “psychic reality”. Alongside perceptual reality and psychological reality—of which conscious-preconscious fantasy constitutes a major sector—we should place a third reality, that of the message, that is, of the signifier insofar as it is addressed by someone to someone. If we say that this category is practically absent from Freud’s thought, we are also saying that the other, the human other, is also absent from it, as a source of messages. The other—in particular, the parental other—is barely present at all, and then only as an abstract protagonist of a scene or a support for projections; this is the case with Freud but also, and to an even greater extent, with Klein [p. 159].

The great irony here is that even as Klein speaks of “object” relations, actual encounters between the child and the human surround are profoundly minimized in her understanding of psychic formation.

The Radically Exogenous Source of the Drive

In the Standard Edition, for reasons known only to himself, Stratchey consistently translated the German words Trieb and Instinkt by “instinct.” For anglophone readers of Freud, Stratchey’s decision has resulted in a fundamental conceptual error: that of reducing the Freudian drive to the biological. This “mistake” will be corrected in the Revised Standard Edition (see Solms 2018), but the damage has already been done. It is worth repeating: the main consequence of this mistranslation is the fixed manner of seeing what Freud wrote about as “drive” as being equivalent to instinct and thus of biological and endogenous origin. For Laplanche the drive is not instinctual, genetic, or inherited. Rather, it arises from the human surround of the child. The fact that the adults who care for the child possess adult sexuality and a repressed unconscious (which emits enigmatic messages, mostly unknown to themselves) leads to inevitable physical/emotional interactions with the child during which ordinary care of the child’s body carries the seeds of the formation (or implantation) of the unconscious as origin of the sexual drive. This implantation of enigmatic signifiers or messages leaves traces that form psychic reality (Simpson in press). Laplanche, in the paper under discussion, is using this radically different idea of drive to critique Anna Freud: “There is no such thing as an absolute opposition between drives and education, between pure desire and pure law: the most savage prohibitions are rooted in the id, in the sadism of the id. To think purely of education is to fail to consider the risk of establishing a set of prohibitions that are rooted in drives that are not analyzed” (p. 829). This demonic and attacking quality of the drive is emphasized frequently by Laplanche in this paper.

The Importance of Communication, Messages Both Internal and External

Laplanche sees the exogenous source of the drive as a form of communication. The adult’s tone of voice and touch of the child’s body are gestures addressed to the child that leave a residue or trace in a form that is not adult language. These gestures are signs, a semiotic mode of communication. These sensory stimuli addressed to the child carry information to be decoded but also transmit vital forces of excitement or soothing. Communication that is not language as such has been theorized in two main semiotic systems developed by Saussure and Peirce. Essentially a sign is a means of having one thing stand for another. To Saussure we owe the pair signifier/signified. In speech, the signifier is the acoustic image, the sound, which corresponds to a mental idea (the signified) of the external referent in the world. From Peirce we have the idea that there are three kinds of signs—icons, indexes, and symbols. For example, Peirce’s definition of symbol requires that a human group agree that the three letters making up the word “dog” stand for “the four-legged pet animal” who barks. Language is based on such group agreement.

For our purposes, Laplanche’s use of the idea of the “index” is most important. Indexes are signs that point to something but do no more than point. Thus, an index, as such, has an enigmatic quality. Laplanche took from semiotics the notion of the index as a way to explain how the child can receive messages that convey something both about meaning and about excitation, while the ultimate reading or translation remains enigmatic. Language as such is a secondary process, a linear and logical phenomenon, though poetic language feels the pull of primary processes that derange, disperse, and complicate meaning into rich ambiguities with resonances to archaic experience. Layered into the whole process of early development is language acquisition by the child. Learning to speak is to a large extent governed by interaction with parents, including the seductive influences from the adults.

In the paper under study, Laplanche raises the idea that play has to do with communication or discourse. He highlights differences between the approach of Klein and Anna Freud to play therapy: “Play, for Klein, is fully equivalent to free association” (p. 828); “The essence of Klein’s response . . . is that, in analysis, play becomes something other than objectively observed play: it is converted into the equivalent of a discourse. Like the discourse of the analysand, it lends itself to the movement of interpretation, of confirmation, of symbolization: play in analysis is oriented to the analyst” (pp. 828–829). Thus play, in play therapy, is itself a mode of communication that provides the same possibility of yielding forms of play activity capable of being translated, ultimately into translations of enigmatic messages.

Yet there is an irony here. As much as Klein saw play as discourse, we must note Laplanche’s profound critique of Kleinian technique:

it amounts to the imposition of a preestablished symbolic system, completely disregarding the careful, step-by-step process of Freudian analysis. . . . intended to give scope and attention to the primary process. . . . [Klein’s approach leads to] a method that results in the most stereotypical decoding of the meaning of the patient’s utterances or behavior, taking no account of the movement of free association, of historical or individual allusions . . . by which we gauge whether or not we are on the right interpretive track [p. 827].

Laplanche’s view of Kleinian technique is quite pertinent. The following is a quote from a leading contemporary Kleinian theorist:

The patient is driven to know but also does not want to know. To change this is not to uncover truths, nor is it to symbolize what was never known or to learn how to apply symbolization, mentalization, or some other such capacity. Rather, it is to interpret the conflicted dynamic meanings, the underlying motives that stand in the way of knowing, that prevent seeing reality as it is and living in it fully [Blass 2016, p. 314].

Thus, the careful work of following the patient’s associations leading to interconnections not previously available to the patient––or as Blass puts it, “to symbolize what was never known”––is banalized as having nothing to do with “change.” If one has an idea of psychic reality as enigmatic messages, then what is at stake is not, in Blass’s terms, “what was never known” but what was retained but not knowable as conscious mentation. As Loewald put it, “Becoming an idea means that the unconscious structure loses its unitary, instinctual [i.e., drive-related], ‘single-minded’ character and becomes reinserted into the context of meaning, i.e., into a context of mutually reflecting and related mental elements. The linking is no longer one of reproductive action; it is one of representational connection” (Loewald 1976, p. 170). Presumably, the Kleinian analyst somehow knows the “underlying motives that stand in the way of knowing” and can explain these to the patient in secondary process language.

Laplanche Retains the Basic Differentiation between the Ego and the Unconscious

What form does Laplanche’s reformation of psychoanalytic theory take? As we see in his critique of Klein and what Klein took from Freud, the ego for Laplanche retains its importance as that which forms at the same time as, yet in opposition to, the id or psychic reality. The ego functions to maintain an ongoing yet adaptable psychic homeostasis by contending with pressure from the unconscious that aims toward excitation and requires the capacity of the ego to translate enigmatic messages. The ego, by and large, is governed by secondary process, which implies the linear reasoning that also grounds language. The unconscious is governed by primary processes where condensation and displacement indicate how the fluidity of meanings/forces of attraction/repulsion are constantly at play. It is the ego that must contend with the drive as the source of internal attacks. Nevertheless, beyond the contradictions found in their work, Laplanche sees both Freud and Klein as having responded to exigencies that took them to deeper levels:

The central exigency is the recognition of the unconscious world, which is something wholly other than a forgotten residue of our childhood. It is the recognition of the truth of the drive, beyond any biologizing analogies that make the drive a variety of the instinct or of adaptive processes (even if an inadequate or deficient one). The truth of the drive, its constitution, in my view, is inseparable from what I call the “auto” moment: the moment of turning-around on the self, which at the same time constitutes the internally attacking object [p. 832].

In my reading of Laplanche, I interpret that an aspect of this “auto” moment is the phenomenon of repression and the constitution of the difference between the id, as the “truth of the drive,” and the ego.

The Inside/Outside and Internalization/Projection Dialectic

Laplanche moves beyond Klein’s conception of introjection/projection as simply defensive maneuvers to a fundamental rethinking of the origin of the psychic apparatus. In his theory of ordinary seduction, the primary and major form of introjection, designated implantation, is the process whereby the unconscious itself is deposited, as it were, from the outside and forms a “foreign” body on the inside.

As a primordial formation, this “foreign body” constitutes the sexual drive as psychic reality. In a second phase, these traces of introjected sexuality become the id, as psychic reality, with the concomitant development of repression and the ego. The concept of repression is critical here. I find Loewald’s way of talking about the repressed and the ego very helpful and compatible with Laplanche:

Freud increasingly insisted on the ego’s character as a coherent organization. In his later writings, he more and more tended to the view that the main characteristic of the repressed is that it is excluded from the coherent ego, i.e., excluded from an overall context of meaning, thereby regressing toward primary process, toward a non-diacritic, nonrepresentational form of mentation. As such, the repressed is a reservoir of primary memorial processes . . . [Loewald 1976, pp. 169–170].

In Loewald’s notion of ego-reality integration (Loewald 1951), it is not some form of objective external reality that the child lives in. The child must adapt to the human environment around him, both in the sense of conscious attachment to the parents and more deeply; as Laplanche makes clear, the child is the passive recipient of the external libidinal reality of the parents, whose ordinary seduction of the child leads the formation of the child’s drives. Laplanche states that “introjection is something quite different from a defense mechanism, even if, at a secondary stage, it can seem like a defense mechanism and thus participate in a certain symmetry with projection”

(p. 834). In this light, it seems to me that the famous Kleinian term “projective identification” can be unpacked a bit more. Projective identification need not be thought of in a fixed way, like a reflex. Many modes of projection/introjection/identification can take place in human experience. The Kleinian analyst’s claim that people projectively identify things into others and make them accept the projection as their own certainly is confirmed in clinical practice. However, it is not the only explanation of confusions of inside and outside. Trying to ascertain whether an experience is internal or external is one of a complex array of tasks required of the ego. Implicit in the process of judging reality is the need to determine the location of personal experience. And as Loewald points out, the earlier the experience, the less likely the child will know what is projected and what is introjected.

The Good/Bad Dialectic

Klein’s good and bad objects indicate something constitutionally inherited in the child and relatively unconnected to the early environment. Laplanche shifts the terms of this good/bad opposition. When one really thinks about the terms “good” and ‘‘bad,” these are terms related to morality in some way. And so there is, one supposes, a kind of Kleinian battle between good and evil. However, in a more general way for Laplanche, what is at stake when “good” interacts with “bad” is the transformation of the repressed (bad) by the ego’s capacity for synthesis (good). He suggests that “good” for the human organism means the capacity to take from the “bad” or disruptive quality of the drive some of its power. The ego needs the energy of the id but certain forms of unrepressed id can lead to unthinking action or massive anxiety. It is the ego’s capacity for synthesis that counts here.

Another angle on the “badness” of the bad object appears later in the paper. “Conversely, anxiety that is entirely depressive, bound up with the loss of the object, is never defined as pure emptiness, pure loss: there is no symbolization of absence that doesn’t first have to confront the return of the object in the form of a bad object” (p. 835). Thus, “badness” that is experienced can be about what is missing as an absence of care experienced as the oppressive presence of deprivation. This is to say that badness and goodness can arise in various contexts. One might even say that what Freud was talking about when he spoke of the “shadow “of the object was a kind of “badness” related to the object.

The Partial/Total Dialectic

In the partial/total pair, Laplanche makes a linguistic move to indicate that there need not be some simple formula like total = sum of parts: “The part is not part of a whole: it belongs to another dimension than it. It is an element, most often a metonymic one, taken as a sign or index. But there is nothing to stop a body in its entirety being itself taken as an index” (p. 835). Here again the “index” from semiotics provides a way to think about the possible movements of fantasy between the body as whole and body parts. Laplanche has emphasized that the disruptive/excitative force of the drive is what makes fantasy the force that it is. Here metonymy is not just a figure of speech; rather, “part for the whole” is one of the myriad ways in which the erotic universe of the body can be played with by unconscious primary process forces of displacement and condensation.

The Paranoid/Depressive Dialectic

Laplanche’s work on the paranoid/depressive pair leads us to another angle of viewing the profound ramifications of the phenomenon of repression. He appreciates Klein’s idea of “position” as something not pinned to a specific chronology. This is impressive in Klein, even though there is little appreciation in her work of the ramifications of “deferred action” or “après-coup” or “afterwardsness” (Laplanche’s choice as the best English translation) of the German Nachträglichkeit. So rather than something that happens in sequence, one can see a dialectical movement between paranoid and depressive “positions” over time. If one takes the paranoid position as a means to an end, then the goal is to retain a sense of internal goodness by experiencing disruption and badness coming from outside the subject. However, the problem of constituting a sense of the person as a coherent totality comes to a crossroads with the experience of absence or loss. “If, finally, we turn to Klein’s internal world,” Laplanche writes, “we find again the same introjection of the lost object, in the form of attacking object, internal persecutor. For Klein, at least in the initial stages of psychical life, there is no way of symbolizing absence. The absence of the object of satisfaction lays down a divided, attacking, bad double in the subject” (p. 833).

My sense of Laplanche here is that the absence or loss of the object of satisfaction leads to the internalization of a sense of being attacked. From a paranoid “position,” this attack would be from the outside. However, when Laplanche talks about the “auto” moment as a turning around on the self, we get an idea of an alternative to the paranoid position. The shift to a depressive position involves an experience of what is demonic, attacking, and destructive (the result of the implantation of enigmatic messages creating the drive) as coming from inside rather than outside. Then, in another register, we have the conditions that lead to the founding of repression and the creation of the unconscious as psychic reality as enigmatic interior. The ego struggles to maintain a sense of coherence for the individual in the face of this “demonic” presence of the drive within. As Laplanche says:

let there be no doubt that the demonic, attacking, destructive aspects of sexuality are clearly present at the origins of Freudian thinking. It is this scandalous dimension of sexuality that tends to be constantly covered up in the development of psychoanalytic thought. Hence these moments of resurgence, each one more explicit than the last: from the death drive, which for me should be called the “sexual death drive,” to the death-dealing internal objects of Klein (p. 833).

With the depressive position, loss manages to be taken into account and the shadow of the lost object falls upon the ego. The experience of disruption as badness is struggled with internally. Laplanche implies that the process of repression and the concomitant constitution of the unconscious is the movement that anchors the subject, qua subject, as the dynamic interaction of ego and repressed psychic reality. Thus, even the idea of the “subject” is more about an ongoing process than a static structure.

The Love/Hate Dialectic

Although Laplanche did not deal with this pair explicitly in this paper, he refers elsewhere to Klein’s view of love/hate (Laplanche 2015). Here he puts forward that Klein has used love and hate to replace binding and unbinding of the sexual drive.

What is more, what ultimately loses any real place with the antagonistic pairing of love and aggression is sexuality. As with the Freudian conception of Eros, the sexual becomes totalizing, synthesizing love. As for unbound and unbinding sexuality, it takes every ounce of good will on our part to discern it at work tucked away in the Kleinian system, lurking behind the mask of destructiveness, as for example in the paranoid position or in the bad, aggressive part-object [p. 110].