Textual Practice, no. 1, 2000.Reprinted in Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, volume III, ed. Fred Botting and Dale Townshend, London: Routledge, 2004., 2004
The essay argues takes up Terry Castle’s suggestion in The Apparitional Lesbian that same sex rel... more The essay argues takes up Terry Castle’s suggestion in The Apparitional Lesbian that same sex relations and intensities were represented in spectral form through narratives of the ghostly in cultural moments prior to the formulation and circulation of official sexological discourses on ‘homosexuality’ in the late 19th century. This ‘homospectrality’ is mapped through the historical shifts in meaning around the uncanny (Freud) and as the forms of public male intimacy specified in ‘the early modern closet’ (Stewart) are transformed into the haunted solitude of the Gothic closet. Henry James’s late ghost stories, all written after the trials of Oscar Wilde and in the new post-trial regime of the homosexual closet that resulted from the emergence of a queer stereotype (Sinfield), and that depict the confrontation with spectral figures in closed rooms and closeted spaces at the tops and backs of houses, are read as explorations of the homerotic space of the closet. In particular The Jolly Corner (1908) is read in relation to James’s autobiographical account of his induction into the world of European high art and of a nightmare in that setting that parallels the novella (A Small Boy and Others).
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This essay is a critical reconsideration of Freud’s analysis (1907) of Wilhelm Jensen’s novella Gradiva. A Pompeiian Fantasy (1903). Freud’s interest was aroused by the parallels between Jensen’s presentation of dreams in Gradiva and Freud’s model of dream formation just published in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Freud also acclaims Jensen’s presentation of the formation and ‘cure’ of his protagonist’s delusion about the marble bas-relief of a woman walking. The essay argues for the centrality of the phenomenon of fetishism, briefly considered but excluded from Freud’s analysis. The fantasy of Gradiva as “the necessary conditions for loving” is a key thesis of the essay. It also makes use of the newly translated Freud-Jensen correspondence included as an appendix to the essay.
of the Oedipus and castration complexes, and hence the centrality of the phallus and castration to the necessary symbolisation that constitutes both the ego and the unconscious. The ideological consequences of the latter are that cultural norms that seek to regulate the process of sexuation and normalise its heterosexual outcomes are installed as criteria of sanity and mental health, and the pathologization of sexual dissidence is maintained.
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This essay is a critical reconsideration of Freud’s analysis (1907) of Wilhelm Jensen’s novella Gradiva. A Pompeiian Fantasy (1903). Freud’s interest was aroused by the parallels between Jensen’s presentation of dreams in Gradiva and Freud’s model of dream formation just published in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Freud also acclaims Jensen’s presentation of the formation and ‘cure’ of his protagonist’s delusion about the marble bas-relief of a woman walking. The essay argues for the centrality of the phenomenon of fetishism, briefly considered but excluded from Freud’s analysis. The fantasy of Gradiva as “the necessary conditions for loving” is a key thesis of the essay. It also makes use of the newly translated Freud-Jensen correspondence included as an appendix to the essay.
of the Oedipus and castration complexes, and hence the centrality of the phallus and castration to the necessary symbolisation that constitutes both the ego and the unconscious. The ideological consequences of the latter are that cultural norms that seek to regulate the process of sexuation and normalise its heterosexual outcomes are installed as criteria of sanity and mental health, and the pathologization of sexual dissidence is maintained.
See uploaded text in Book chapters section.
élargie au sens freudien, his work from 2000 to 2006. Clear and direct,
often witty, this volume is a pleasure to read and represents the culmination
of his work. It includes:
1. Drive and Instinct: distinctions, oppositions, supports and intertwinings
2. Sexuality and Attachment in Metapsychology
3. Dream and Communication: should chapter VII be rewritten?
4. Countercurrent
5. Starting from the Fundamental Anthropological Situation
6. Failures of Translation
7. Displacement and Condensation in Freud
8. Sexual Crime
9. Gender, Sex and the Sexual
10. Three Meanings of the Term ‘Unconscious’
11. For Psychoanalysis at the University
12. Intervention in a Debate
13. Levels of Proof
14. The Three Essays and the Theory of Seduction
15. Freud and Philosophy
16. In Debate with Freud
17. Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy
18. Incest and Infantile Sexuality
19. Castration and Oedipus as Codes and Narrative Schemas
Seductions and Enigmas is a volume dedicated to the implications of Laplanche’s thought for reading and interpretation. It collects papers that elaborate Laplanche’s unique method for the interpretation of Freud, with its attention to the decentering and recentering movements of thought that structure the psychoanalytic field, and explore how the metapsychological developments arising from the implementation of that method open up new horizons for the psychoanalytic reading of other texts and oeuvres in the cultural domain. The volume comprises essays by Laplanche as well as by clinicians and scholars whose work takes inspiration from his research. Authors variously establish, develop or consolidate Laplanche’s critical methodology as such, or work through aspects of his major theoretical innovations as points of departure for the reading of cultural works of different kinds: fiction, drama, painting, visual and sound installations, and film. These theoretical innovations cover a breadth of topics including seduction, sublimation, gender, femininity, the functions of binding and unbinding, masochism and the role of the enigmatic.
In their range, the texts brought together here are a testament to the vitality and fertility of Laplanche’s theoretical endeavour, for anyone concerned with the re-reading of Freud or with continuing to recalibrate and advance the parameters of critical interpretation in light of Freud’s legacy.
Contents:
Introduction
Seductions and Enigmas: Laplanche, Reading, Theory - John Fletcher and Nicholas Ray
Reading and Interpretation: Laplanche and the Case of Freud
Interpreting (with) Freud - Jean Laplanche
Exigency and Going-Astray - Jean Laplanche
Sublimation and/or Inspiration - Jean Laplanche
Seduction, Sexuality, Gender
Primal Femininity - Jacques André
Seduction, Gender and the Drive - Judith Butler
Seductions, Enigmas, Literary Texts
Culture, Cognition and Jean Laplanche’s Enigmatic Signifier - Allyson Stack
Gothic’s Enigmatic Signifier: the Case of J. Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla - Mike Davis
The Ides of March: from Mastery to Vampirism - Éric Toubiana
The Scenography of Trauma: a ‘Copernican’ reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King - John Fletcher
Seduction and Infraction in the Visual and Aural Fields
Breast-Feeding as Original Seduction and Primal Scene of Seduction: Giorgione’s La Tempesta - Jacqueline Lanouzière
Femininity and Passivity in the Primal Scene - Jacques André
Seduction, Receptivity and the ‘Feminine’ in Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book - Nicholas Ray
Bruce Nauman, Jean Laplanche and the Art of Helplessness - Josh Cohen
Laplanche’s thought is pertinent to the activity of cultural reading and interpretation for two essential reasons. First, as a teacher and expositor of Freud, Laplanche has himself formulated a sophisticated and innovative interpretative methodology vis-à-vis Freudian textuality. At once rigorously psychoanalytic and refreshingly free of the ‘biographical’ imperative that characterises much ‘revisionist’ Freud scholarship, Laplanche’s critical methodology has governed his decades-long re-reading and translation of Freud’s oeuvre, as well as his systematic mapping of the Freudian conceptual field, set out in several works that have become classics of psychoanalytic exegesis. Second, in the development of his own ‘metapsychology’ Laplanche has placed at the centre of psychic life a particular model of enigmatic signification and its various forms of transmission and reception. As well as offering an important model of inter-human communication in the broadest sense, Laplanche’s account of the ‘enigmatic message’ provides a radically new psychoanalytic framework for thinking critically about cultural texts and aesthetic objects – one that eschews the problematic extremes of ‘psychobiography’ and ‘symptomatic interpretation’ that have often orientated psychoanalytic reading.
Seductions and Enigmas seeks to represent and explore Laplanche’s distinctive critical approach to textuality and interpretation as well as the fruitfulness of his metapsychological theory for broader cultural reflection and analysis.
This book is a study of the central role of trauma in Freud’s thought and in the development of psychoanalysis as a distinctive field of inquiry and clinical practice. It argues that it is Freud’s mapping of trauma as a scene, the elaboration of a scenography of trauma, that is central to both his clinical interpretation of his patients’ symptoms and his construction of successive theoretical models and concepts to explain the power of such scenes in his patients’ lives. This attention to the scenic form of trauma, and its power in the determination of neurotic symptoms, presides over Freud’s break from the neurological model of trauma he inherited from Charcot. It also helps to explain the affinity that Freud and many since him have felt between psychoanalysis and literature (and artistic production more generally), and the privileged role of literature at certain moments in the development of his thought.
A number of alternative theoretical models are to be found in Freud’s work: traumatic seduction, screen memory, inherited primal fantasy (Urphantasie), the individually constructed originary fantasy (ursprüngliche Phantasie). All of them involve the analysis of sequences of scenes layered one upon another in the manner of a textual palimpsest, with claims to either material or psychical reality. The notion of a ‘primal scene’, a central term for this project, designates the site of a trauma that deposits an alien and disturbing element in the witnessing subject, signifying traces of the seductive or traumatising other person that resist assimilation and binding into the ego’s narcissistic structures; they function as an internal foreign body and so give rise to deferred or belated after-effects. Trauma, involving the breaching of psychical boundaries by an excessive excitation and leading to an unmasterable repetition, characterises both Freud’s first encounter with sexuality under the sign of seduction and with the death drive under the various forms of the compulsion to repeat, from the negative clinical transference to shell-shock and war trauma.
The book begins with the figure of Charcot and the role of key psychological elements in his predominantly neurological model of trauma and traumatic hysteria. It was Freud’s encounter with Charcot and his treatment of hysteria, in Paris in 1885-6, that turned him from a career that had been based on laboratory dissection, the anatomy of the brain and its relation to the spinal cord and central nervous system, to a concern with hysteria as a psychological condition based on traumatic shock and the operation of unconscious ideas. Freud breaks from Charcot to develop a properly psychological theory of hysteria (and by extension all psychopathology) as based on the operation of traumatic memories and affects. The problem both clinical and theoretical that confronted Freud was the status of the ‘scenes’ that his patients reproduced, either through recall and association or through acting out. His model of traumatic causality gains in complexity in the texts of 1895-6, especially through the elaboration of a traumatic temporality through the concept of Nachträglichkeit (deferred action / afterwardsness). At the same time it is progressively narrowed to a sexual aetiology of seduction/abuse in childhood, Freud’s notorious ‘seduction theory’. Along with the problems of his clinical practice, the development of a concept of fantasy internal to the model of traumatic seduction precipitates the crisis or turning point of September 1897, in which Freud privately rejects his seduction theory in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess. Freud falls silent in public but, in his correspondence with Fliess and his self-analysis, he oscillates between the model of traumatic memory and its repudiation in a turn to an emergent model of infantile sexuality. Here he proposes as a “universal event” an emotional configuration that is not till 1910 labelled the “Oedipus complex,” but which in the crisis months of late 1897 is traced through a brief reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This turn to tragedy as a model of male subjectivity is more fully elaborated in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). It crystallises a shift in focus from symptom to subjectivity, from the narrower field of psychopathology to a concern with psychical structure and a developmental model of sexuality-as-such in the Three Essays of 1905.
The book also examines a second crisis or turning point, that of 1919-20. Here the turn to literature (E.T.A. Hoffmann and the associated aesthetic question of the uncanny) accompanies the return of trauma under the rubric of the compulsion to repeat and the death drive. At both moments of theoretical crisis and change (1897 and 1919) Freud turns to literary texts that exemplify a repeated pattern of traumatic scenes and that dramatize precisely a traumatic scenography. He then submits his chosen texts to an ‘Oedipal’ reading that marginalizes or excludes the daemonic repetition that characterizes them. The book argues that Freud’s engagement with literature at key moments of theoretical impasse and crisis, as well as his long study of Leonardo da Vinci, constitute thought experiments in an imaginary space of literature and painting. When the chosen works of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Hoffmann and Da Vinci are read in the light of the tension verging on conflict in Freud’s thought, between what Jean Laplanche has called a ‘Copernican’ or the other-centred model of trauma and a ‘Ptolemaic’ or self-centred model of development, the insights of his rejected ‘traumatology’ return to challenge and disturb his dominant developmentalist framework. It will be argued that the texts Freud is drawn to both invite and resist his Oedipal readings, while themselves bearing imaginative witness to the foundational relation to the traumatic or seductive other, even as Freud’s readings recentre them on the impulses of the centred, single individual.
Where conventional accounts often see the repudiation of the theory of traumatic seduction as the maturing, if not the foundation of psychoanalysis as such, the book develops the thesis of Jean Laplanche that in this shift from a traumatic to a developmental model, along with the undoubted gains embodied in the theory of infantile sexuality, there were crucial losses: specifically, the recognition of the role of the adult other and the traumatic encounter with adult sexuality that is entailed in the ordinary nurture and formation of the infantile subject. It also argues that Freud’s attention to the power of scenes – scenes of memory, scenes of fantasy – persists, both in his general psychology of dreaming and his major case studies. Along with this persistent Freudian ‘scenography’ is the recurrent surfacing, at different moments of his thought, of key elements of the officially abandoned model of trauma.