Essays on Otherness

by Jean Laplanche, Luke Thurston (Translator), John Fletcher (Editor)

Essays on Otherness presents for the first time in English many of Laplanche's key essays and is the first book to provide an overview of his work.

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Psychology, Theory, France

288 pages, Paperback

First published December 10, 1998

About the author

Jean Laplanche was a french psychoanalyst.
He studied philosophy under Jean Hyppolite, Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Later he began attending lectures and undergoing psychoanalytic treatment under Jacques Lacan.

Reviews

[danny · Rating 4 out of 5]

actually incredible stuff, will be thinking about and revisiting these essays for a long time. laplanche looks to get psychoanalytic theory out of certain deadlocks (such as the question of Nachträglichkeit; the perversion of the adult; etc) through the introduction of the ‘third term’ of the other’s enigmatic message, and i feel he’s oftentimes really successful in doing so … this is overall some of the most readable analytic theory i’ve encountered, it humanizes the mechanisms of thinkers like lacan.

especially interesting for ppl who are curious about thinkers like levinas, butler, derrida, etc who are highly focused on the role of the other in subjectivity.

[Isabel J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly accessible, Laplanche sheds light on Freudian psychoanalytic theory, opening its possibilities, which remain relevant to the past, present, and future.

[Maxwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this collection of essays, written in the early 90s, Laplanche makes a series of interventions into psychoanalytic theory that privilege the enigmatic message of the other in the theory of seduction. Using the metaphors of Copernicus and Ptolemy as figures of de-centering (Other-centering) and re-centering (self-centering) Laplanche sees himself as picking up the Copernican torch to keep fidelity to the original de-centering event of psychoanalysis, the introduction of the unconscious wherein we are not masters within our own house. He suggests that Freud (and psychoanalysis as a whole) has always been oscillating between progressive Copernican and reactionary Ptolemic forces: that Freud would introduce a traumatic otherness in his theories only to subsequently recenter and close the subject covering back over this otherness. Laplanche in a way analyzes the history of analysis as being something that reproduces in its metatheories the symptoms and movements we experience individually as self-theorizing beings. We begin in an initial Copernicanism, as other-orienated children receiving messages from adults speaking an enigmatic language beyond us (enigmatic because it is enigmatic to they themselves), being driven to theorize in order to bind the anxiety produced by the enigmatic address we close in on ourselves over time into adult Ptolemies, stuck in our ego formations and ideologies.

Laplanche takes major beef with a series of ways he thinks psychoanalysis has gone astray:

-In assuming the subject to begin as a closed monad and then attempting to theorize how such a closed psyche would come to open to otherness over time.
-In biologizing the drives, seeing them as immanent to the subject.
-In becoming trapped in either deterministic (Freudian the past is determining, the unconscious as a seed that holds the truth of everything that follows) or hermeneutic (Jungian the past is determined by the present, everything is open to interpretation rendering meaning arbitrary and freely assigned) models.

All these issues focus on ways theory has removed the presence of the other leaving the subject a narcissistic closure and then flounders to explain from within this closure our psychical experiences (relying on concepts like introjection, projection, etc that presume such an isolated subject).

Ernst Bloch in one of his texts asked the question of how a closed circle can become an open spiral. Laplanche also uses the image of the spiral, the repetition of the drive circling around fixed unconscious material, but with each turn of the spiral there being a window, an opening. Returns to the place of the enigmatic message give us the opportunity to introduce difference, change. To unweave and reweave, to detranslate and retranslate, to deconstruct and reconstruct.

"Are human beings once and for all closed in on themselves? Are they irremediably Ptolemaic, centered on themselves? So one might believe without psychoanalysis, and sometimes even within psychoanalysis itself, when we observe its ridiculous efforts to reconstruct the outside, objectivity, on the basis of the inside. Some psychoanalytic constructions of object-relatedness lack nothing to rival the most complex, and precisely the most delusional systems of the great idealists, Berkeley, Fichte, or even Hegel. The last mentioned represents perhaps the most radical attempt to conjure the other out of the hat of the same. The basic idea is alienation (Entfremdung) or externalisation (Entausserung). But, however peremptory this 'external' entity, this 'alien,' the situation is ultimately not as serious as all that. In the last analysis, I create the alien in order to recognise myself - in order eventually to reappropriate him for myself.

Unlike these self-centered delusions, psychoanalysis in spite of everything carries within itself the germ of a break with Ptolemaism. The germ of this break is sent in Freud's seduction theory, and in the transference."

[Shreya · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm robbed.

[Amel El-Rayis · Rating 1 out of 5]

not what I expected