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The edited volume, Seductions & Enigmas, presents in a concisely summarized form the theory of primal seduction proposed by Jean Laplanche. The introduction by John Fletcher and Nicholas Ray sets forth a history of Laplanche's career and work and is followed by translations of three important papers covering his major concepts. These ideas are developed in ten chapters, mostly reprinted or translated, that are grouped under three headings: Seduction, Sexuality, and Gender; Seductions, Enigmas, Literary Texts; and Seduction and Effraction in the Visual and Aural Fields. The authors apply the Laplanchian principles of “the primacy of the other” and “primal seduction” to reinterpret the origins of gender and to explore the meaning of a number of artistic and literary works. The accent falls on the “fundamental anthropological situation” of the extreme vulnerability and helplessness of the human infant, faced with a sexually mature parent (essentially the mother in these papers), who conveys a surplus of untranslatable enigmatic messages through her ministrations.
Laplanche was a brilliant scholar (agrégation en philosophie) who chose to pursue medical training at the behest of his psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, with whom he remained for about ten years. As an academic, he authored searching studies of Freud's thinking and commented widely on the psychoanalytic literature. After breaking with Lacan (following his expulsion from the International Psychoanalytic Association), Laplanche became a founding member of the new Association Française de Psychanalyse (APF) in which he remained a prominent member. He may be best known for his monumental Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (with Jean-Bertrand Pontalis in ), translated into English as The Language of Psychoanalysis (1973), and Vie et mort en psychanalyse in 1970, translated as Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (1976). His other books and articles in French were translated much later, but have gradually gained an internationa