Laplanchean Dialogues with Hélène Tessier

November 1, 2022 - January 3, 2023

2nd Dialogue

*Editor’s note: the first dialogues were included in the Winter DIVISION/Review (Issue #30).

Bryan Batista-Thomas: Which parts of Laplanche’s theory are lost in translation?

Hélène Tessier: I’m a little bit taken aback by this question. Something is effectively lost in translation, but it would be interesting for Laplanche translators to answer it. I have not read Laplanche in other languages aside from French. Laplanche was very aware of what is always lost in translation. His whole metapsychology revolves around this affirmation. Furthermore, he closely monitored Freud’s German-to-French translation, discussed it with the other translators of his team, and wrote about the decisions that had to be taken while translating—decisions that were never entirely satisfactory. For further developments on the translation of Freud by Laplanche, I would refer you to the collective book Translating Freud. In the translation of Laplanche’s works, there are, of course, things that are lost. I will try to identify some of them. As preliminary comments, I would say that the choices made in translation depend partly on who translates. One always translates from one’s formation, interpretations, theories, and, eventually, ideologies. There is also the lexicon of a language. For example, the word “indice,” in French, which is essential in Laplanche’s description of the sexual unconscious, is translated as “index” in English. It makes a huge difference because the term “index” also exists in French–and is to be also found in Laplanche’s theorizing–but means something different than “indice” and can hardly be combined into an expression like “pulsion d’indice” [index drive], which is an earlier formulation of the concept of source-object.

The idea of what is lost in translation is at the basis of Laplanche’s theory of the formation of the sexual unconscious. He developed it extensively in a few papers, including “A Brief Treatise on the Unconscious” in Between Seduction and Inspiration: Man. As you can see, your question touched on a fundamental issue, not only for the practice of translation but for the process of becoming human.

BBT: What about the translation of après-coup?

HT: For après coup, even the French translation loses something from the German. Laplanche tackled this issue in his translation. Après coup is not Laplanche’s translation, it’s Lacan’s. Lacan was the one who was interested in this Freudian concept, a concept which is not that prominent in Freud. Before talking about the concept of après-coup, let us say that Laplanche criticized the English translation of Nachträglichkeit, given by Strachey, which is “deferred action.” He argued that it was a translation enhancing a solipsist perspective, reducing it to a well-known psychological effect of the delay between an event and its psychological repercussions. Deferred action would then be something that happens in time one and has its effects in time two: this is a psychological temporality. This is true for everything and may be more so for traumatic experiences. In the solipsist view of deferred action, the timeline goes like this: past—present—future.

Though Laplanche uses the French translation après-coup, he also underlines that it may lead to another solipsist understanding of the concept, the retroactive effect. In this understanding, which he called “bombe à retardement” [timed detonation], an event of the past is re-interpreted through future circumstances, something similar to re-writing history, which involves a Heideggerian bend. He thinks that this view of après-coup is also solipsist. In this retroactive effect view, the timeline goes past—future—present.

We can refer to the anecdote Laplanche likes to tell—I think it comes from Freud— about the man who says: I cannot believe I was suckling my nounou’s breast! Had I known at the time, I would have enjoyed it more!

For Laplanche, the “deferred action” and the “retroactive effect” perspectives are unsatisfactory because they don’t involve the other. This is why Laplanche proposed that in English, we use the word “afterwardness.” Laplanche’s view of après-coup is dialectic: it involves the other from the start. It is the temporality of the message, which has to originate in the other, and is the temporality of translation. The message implies two moments: moment one, a message coming from the other—in other words, something that makes a sign, which is addressed, which is received by the individual (the infant), and moment two, its eventual translation. For more precision, let us refer to the conclusion of Après-coup: Problématiques VI. Après-coup is not something intrapersonal but instead interpersonal. It is not played out within one individual in the successive stages of his/her/their life but in the simultaneous presence of an adult and a child (Laplanche, House & Thurston, 2017, 156).

The temporality of translation sheds a different light on the time, which Laplanche calls the temps-auto, which is the main time for the formation of infantile sexuality, in other words, auto-erotic sexuality. This time, “auto” is the time when the external message coming from the other becomes an exciting internal other: it is a temporality that is essential to the process of fantasmatization, which is the trademark of infantile sexuality.

BBT: Are there other words or notions with translational issues?

HT: We can say a few words about other problematic translations of Freud in English, which open the way to a specific Englishspeaking reading of Freud—for example, the word repression. Repression may be the correct translation for Verdrängung in English. But in French, the word chosen is refoulement. As you can see, a different line of interpretation opens if you speak about repression, which has a more general social meaning, and refoulement, which is more directly related to physics. We may say that a society is repressive, that there is police repression, or that religion or morals lead to the repression of certain acts. At the same time, refoulement is much more a term of physics. In French, the image that comes with refoulement is pressure: “refoulement des eaux, ou des égouts.”

BBT: Is “of a sewer”?

HT: Yes, sewer. When you are in a city with too much rain or the water does not flow where it must go, it comes back into the houses and basements. This, in French, is called refoulement d’égout. That is refoulement: it is about water or liquid in physics. If you put a barrage to stop the water, and if it does not work and the water floods, that’s refoulement. However, in French psychoanalytic circles, refoulement gets very technical. The word refoulement is still very common: commonly used in French for trivial things, like if a sink is blocked.

In Freud’s work in German, Verdrängung also has the same connotation, the same physical/physicalist image. Laplanche mentions that Freud was quite influenced by physicalist imagery for the circulation of energy in the physics of his time. Repression in English has no connotation that relates to physics. You can see how different it becomes to read “repression” instead of refoulement (or Verdrängung).

In French, the image of something blocked and may flow again comes easily. This image of le retour du refoulé, the “return of the repressed,” becomes handy in French psychoanalysis. It evokes, among other things, blocked water flowing again. It looks very poetic in English, “the return of the repressed,” but it doesn’t mean much. In French, le retour du refoulé, is evocative of a physical phenomena.

Another word would be “obsessional neurosis.” Laplanche objected to Strachey’s and French translations of Zwangsneurose by obsessional neurosis. Laplanche’s translation was névrose de contrainte. A contrainte (Zwang) is something that has a hold on you. In a way, it implies the other, a sense of externality. Even if a contrainte is a self-imposed contrainte, it still conveys the idea of being forced to do something or to think something. An obsession has this quality: it feels beyond your control.

Another word we can discuss is the translation of Seele, which became “mind” in English—you can see the possible rapprochement with philosophy of mind in the US—and psyche in French, which has a technical and disconnected quality. Laplanche rejected both these words and chose a neologism, an adjective derived from the noun “soul” or “animique.” To translate Seele as mind puts one in the filiation of philosophy of mind, which is very influential in English-speaking circles.

BBT: Why did Laplanche choose animique instead of psychique?

HT: Seele is the German word for âme in French. In English, mind and mental refer easily to “mental” or “mentalization.” In French, using psychique instead of mental is already different, but using animique—which is an adjective for âme, though not used in current French—instead of psychique takes one away from a technical term: it refers to processes which are in the realms of ideas, images etc. In his translation of Freud, Laplanche uses “animique” for “seelisch” and “psychical,” when Freud himself uses psychical or psychic—for example, “Appareil de l’âme” for “psychic apparatus.” Another example is the expression “psychic reality,” a central concept of Laplanche’s work, that he differentiates from psychological reality. This instance is a translation of Freud using the word “psychical” in German. We will come back to this. I don’t know if the English translation of Laplanche says apparatus of the soul. They should because that’s what he writes. In Laplanche’s book Translating Freud, he and the other members of the translation team explain their lexical choices.

The neologism may be why Laplanche’s translation of Freud in French is not so wellliked. Psychoanalysts feel more comfortable with the more fluent Freudian French. They rarely use “animique” or “Appareil de l’âme.” But it would be interesting to ask ourselves, why is there this resistance?

BBT: There is a theological bend to it.

HT: Yes, that may be why people resist it. But in German, no. It is a historical word in philosophy, for example, in Aristotle. It may be the same in French or English, but I do not know. Âme refers to the realms of ideas, the one we share with animals of what is not material. According to Laplanche, what happened with the word psychic, especially in French psychique, is that the reference became a technical term. People use it in all sorts of circumstances but without thinking about it.

BBT: In talking about translation in this way, there’s a way in which we are metaphorically speaking about Laplanche’s Translational Model of Repression. I am now going to make a fairly large pivot: I understand there’s a whole historical context of Laplanche being pushed out of mainstream psychoanalysis in France.

HT: Yes and no. We can say that it was the opposite, at least concerning the IPA, but maybe not within French psychoanalytic circles, which, according to what I know, the relations within psychoanalytical schools were complex. On this topic, you may want to read Francis Martens’s new book, Lacan pris au mot: Les fureurs de Bonneval ou Laplanche maudit par son maître

Concerning the IPA, it was Lacan who was pushed out of the IPA for a set of reasons. Laplanche and others, like Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, founded the APF (French Psychoanalytic Association): they wanted to remain in the IPA.

BBT: I was referring to his theory.

HT: I will answer based on what I know and have observed, not from France but Canada. In France, I usually work more closely with analysts close to Laplanche’s work. According to what I know, his theory was never mainstream in French psychoanalysis. He was well-considered when developing the Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse [The Language of Psychoanalysis] and the Problématiques. However, when, in 1987, he published New Foundations for Psychoanalysis and developed his own theory, he became less popular than others, like Pontalis or André Green. His criticism of Freudian concepts like the Oedipus and Castration complexes, and more generally of mythosymbolism, when used as defining primary content of sexuality, have been, I believe, a source of irritation. In addition, there was also his critical discussion of recognized authors, like Winnicott, and, in general, of dominating trends that, according to Laplanche, were definitely leading to a desexualization of psychoanalysis.

On the issue of sexuality, I think that Laplanche’s thought represents the only possible way out for psychoanalysis. On the one hand, he rejected the classical definition of sexuality in psychoanalysis, its normative view on the differences between the sexes and the composition of the family but, on the other hand, without joining other critics of the same issues in overlooking the central role of infantile sexuality in psychoanalysis. He came up with another way of conceptualizing sexuality and its formation in psychoanalysis. He did so by building from a Freudian definition of infantile sexuality: a sexuality that is perverse and polymorphous. To the difference of Freud, he underlined that this sexuality originates in fantasy, is not linked to the difference of the sexes, and has no reproductive aim. He parted from Freud’s “temptation of biology,” so to speak, and from Freud’s use of phylogenesis and mythosymbolic tools to account for the formation and content of human sexuality. He also made clear that in psychoanalysis, the focus on sexuality requires a focus on infantile sexuality, which invades everything, including adult sexuality.

Laplanche affirms, for example, that there is nothing sexual in Oedipus. Quite the opposite, he describes it as anti-sexual. It is a tool, among others—maybe less popular than it used to be in 1960—at the disposal of the ego to bind the excitement linked to the attack of the sexual death drive.

Another part of the criticism of Laplanche’s work, mainly in France, revolves around the scientific nature of his metapsychology, his requirement or argument for the necessity of scientific truth, coherence, and a systematic integration of all parts of this metapsychology, including when it accounts for the action of clinical psychoanalysis.

On a more general level, we still have to say that everybody respects Laplanche’s work: nobody would have said that Laplanche did not know Freud or psychoanalysis. He was sometimes accused of not being clinical enough. Some said he was not doing enough clinical practice and was too much of a theoretician. On the level of clinical practice, I cannot say. However, on being clinically useful, I totally disagree. Laplanche’s metapsychology goes hand in hand with the practice of psychoanalysis. It is a way to account for the clinical action of psychoanalysis.

In some French circles, Laplanche is described as a repentant Lacanian, a pale copy of Lacan’s original theorizing. I disagree with this statement: the two are on two opposite epistemological planets and belong to different philosophical traditions.

BBT: What do you mean by “a systematic integration of his metapsychology” that would have led to a criticism of his work?

HT: In Vie et mort en psychanalyse [Life and Death in Psychoanalysis] and in the first five Problématiques, Laplanche was considered a critical reader of Freud, which indeed he was. Though he started early on to emphasize the original definition of some concepts, his writings were still very much a discussion with Freud. From New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, Laplanche formulated a theory: the General Theory of Seduction. Even though most of the pillars of the theory were developed in previous books, in New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, Laplanche assumed the consequences of presenting a systematized theory, which, in some circles, was seen as a provocation. If it was not a provocation, it was certainly a rejection of the postmodern and deconstructivist epistemological trends. Freud also, but at a different point in time, when it was less polemical, presented a theoretical system: more precisely, he formulated two systematized models: the first topographical model and the second structural model.

French psychoanalytic circles are close to philosophical circles. Since the 1970’s, philosophical circles have moved towards postmodern deconstructionism. These trends imply a contestation, or at least a de-consideration of the idea of scientific truth. In elaborating on his theory, Laplanche keeps in line with the rationalist tradition (see Rationalism and Emancipation in Psychoanalysis: The Work of Jean Laplanche), strongly anchored in humanism.

In that respect, he situated himself in an antipostmodern epistemological endeavor, which he openly affirms. The systematic approach to theorizing and the definition of metapsychology has a science that should try to tell truths about its object as part of this affirmation.

In psychoanalysis, the unconscious is often described as impossible to account for scientifically. This objective is seen as a counter-productive pursuit since the nature of the unconscious would be to express itself in a poetic, associative, ethereal form. Laplanche disagrees with such a position. For him, clinical practice has to keep away from the theory: the analyst should work: listening with free-floating attention, concentrate on the associative/dissociative method of psychoanalysis, accepting the refusement [refusal], which goes along with an attitude of respect for his/her/their unconscious. However, analytic theory and metapsychology have different purposes: they aim to account for psychoanalysis’s mode of action and the formation of the human soul and its possible transformations. This is, for him, a scientific objective.

BBT: How do you understand the interest in his work now in North America?

HT: It certainly has to do with the increased availability of the translated Laplanche’s work, especially in English. For a few years, there was a real acceleration of the translation in English. The fact that Laplanche is dead may also make it easier to approach his work. Direct discussions with him are no longer possible: his theory may be presented as closer than it is to other theories that proceed from a different epistemological inspiration. So, this interest can also dilute Laplanche’s specificity and radical difference from other psychoanalytic theories.

This being said, I will highlight why I think Laplanche’s work is of great interest to contemporary psychoanalysis. I just discussed most of this above in a different context, but it is worth insisting on. Laplanche’s metapsychology is fundamentally nonsexist, and his definition of sexuality is non-normative, to the difference of most psychoanalytic theories. It has a nonnormative view of the family, with no reference to abstract concepts such as “the Maternal,” “the Paternal,” “the Feminine,” “the Masculine,” etc. His definition of the Fundamental Anthropological Situation is as simple and as nonnormative as possible: an infant with no unconscious in the presence of an adult—or an older child—who has one. There is no mention of family structures, family ties, gender, or differences between the sexes.

The same with his definition of infantile sexuality. As I said, in Laplanche’s definition, infantile sexuality has its roots in fantasy, is polymorphous and perverse—that is to say, essentially, masochistic and sadistic—and has no links to reproduction and the difference of the sexes.

Maybe this is why some theorists of Cultural studies, Film Studies, and Gender Studies, like Teresa De Laurentiis and Judith Butler, took an interest in Laplanche’s work. I do not know enough to comment on their uses of Laplanche’s work. Still, from what I read, it seemed related to a different epistemology, closer to a Neofoucauldian inspiration.

It is worth repeating that the other great interest of Laplanche’s work for contemporary psychoanalysis is his way of re-affirming the centrality of infantile sexuality in psychoanalysis. In so doing, he enhances the specificity of psychoanalysis, its method, and its clinical stance. Even if his work moves away from Freud’s theory in many aspects, Laplanche considers that the sexual unconscious remains the center of interest of clinical psychoanalysis, which constitutes a unique way to access its derivatives.

BBT: I will make another pivot: do you think there are holes or incongruencies in Laplanche’s work?

HT: Laplanche’s development of the enclave [unconscious enclave], which I referred to earlier, raises questions for me. He states that this enclave contains messages that encounter a radical failure of translation and messages waiting for translation. Let’s leave the part about messages awaiting translation and concentrate on messages that face a radical failure of translation. We must ask ourselves what messages we face with this radical failure. What makes them untranslatable? Among other messages on which we will come back, Laplanche mentions messages that are barely messages, messages where the translation is the message itself, and messages of unbound violence, totally invaded by the sexual unconscious. This raises three issues: What makes a message translatable or untranslatable? Second, is a message invaded by the sexual unconscious still a message? Thirdly, is a message of unbound violence “sexual”?

If we follow Laplanche’s reasoning about translation, what renders translation an option is the internal imbalance of a message; in other words, its compromised nature is caused by unconscious fantasies1. If the message is invaded by the sexual unconscious (meaning fantasies), yes, it could become untranslatable. But the opposite would also be true; a message deprived of unconscious fantasies would also be nontranslatable or uncompromised. Laplanche does not go into the uncompromised. He sorts of postulates that it’s compromised; I think this can be questioned. I am inclined to think that messages encountering radical failure of translation are of the latter type, in other words, totally uncompromised. Especially since, as Laplanche writes, the unconscious enclave is not sexual: topically, it is in a different location than the topographical system constituted by the sexual unconscious and the Ego. As Laplanche writes, they express unbound violence and this, according to me would have more to do with self-preservation, a negative self-preservation, if you will, but still self-preservation, especially considering, let’s say, the clinical implications of these messages, which have to do with violence. We then deal with life and death, not of the ego, but of the individual.

The other aspect of my questions revolves around Laplanche’s affirmation that these messages are barely messages. I agree: what he means, I think, is that they only conserve the material element of the message, which is the address. They still “make a sign.” But I suggest that instead of messages, we call them “signal,” a term borrowed from semiotics. A signal cannot be translated because it cannot be interpreted; nothing is lost in translation. It calls for obedience, not translation.

The purpose of Laplanche in developing the idea of an unconscious enclave was to propose a unified model of the human soul and to account for fully protected psychotic breakdown. It is a worthwhile objective that goes along with the requirement of systematization that he put as a standard for his theory. One of the important theoretical consequences of this model, and here, as you can see, I am not expressing dissent with Laplanche’s idea but elaborating on them, is we have to remember that the unconscious enclave, not being translatable, does not undergo repression and for that reason, do not contribute, neither to the formation of the sexual unconscious and to the formation of the ego. They stay as external messages, covered, as Laplanche writes, by a thin layer of consciousness. For this part, the individual was governed by something coming from the outside, reluctant to be integrated into an auto-historicization in a story about oneself.

BBT: Shall we stop here? Analysis is always incomplete and open to further elaboration. Thank you for your time, Hélène.

HT: My pleasure.

References

Laplanche, J., & Mehlman, J. (1976). Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. John Hopkins U.P.

Laplanche, J., & Pontalis, J.-B. (1988). The Language of Psychoanalysis. Karnac Books and the Institute of Psycho-analysis. Laplanche, J. (2011). Freud and the Sexual. The Unconscious in Translation.

Laplanche, J., & Mehlman, J. (2015). Between Seduction and Inspiration: Man. The Unconscious in Translation.

Laplanche, J., & House, J. (2016). New Foundations for Psychoanalysis. The Unconscious in Translation.

Laplanche, J., House, J., & Thurston, L. (2017). Après-coup: Problématiques VI. The Unconscious in Translation.

Laplanche, J., & Thurston, L. (2020). The Unfinished Copernican Revolution: Selected Works, 1967-1992. The Unconscious in Translation.

Martens, F. (2022). Lacan pris au mot: Les fureurs de bonneval ou Laplanche maudit par son Maître. Hermann.

Ornston, D. G. (1993). Translating Freud. Yale University Press.

Tessier, H. (2012). “Métapsychologie, Épistémologie et éthique de la clinique psychanalytique, Psicologia im estudo.” Vol 17, no 3 Jul. Set. 2012, pp 373-381.

Tessier, H. (2020). Rationalism and Emancipation in Psychoanalysis: The Work of Jean Laplanche. The Unconscious in Translation.

Endnotes

1. This is in Laplanche’s theory. We have to underline that it is in accordance with translational theory in semiotics: a translation is never without a residue, except for signs which bear their own codes of translation (a stop sign, for example).

Contributors

Bryan Batista-Thomas, LCSW, MA, is a psychoanalytic candidate at IPTAR and a graduate of Performance Studies from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where he focused on the queerness of temporality, the performativity of epistemology, and oral traditions. He is currently preparing a manuscript provisionally entitled Readings of Jean Laplanche in Process: Conversations Amplifying Differences (forthcoming Routledge 2024). Bryan works full-time in private practice.

Hélène Tessier, LL.M., D.E.A., Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst, a member of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society and the International Psychoanalytic Association, and a lawyer member of the Quebec Bar. She is a Full Professor in the School of Conflict Studies in the Faculty of Human Sciences and Philosophy at Saint Paul University (Ottawa). She is the Vice-President of the Scientific Council of La Fondation Jean Laplanche/Nouveaux Fondements pour la psychanalyse and the author of publications on Laplanche’s work and their epistemological and ethical implications.

Ben Stephens, photographer, https://www.benstephensphotography.com

photo: Ben Stephens