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In Jean Laplanche's theory of early childhood, the primal scene is an act of communication. A parental message that is enigmatic, beyond the child's grasp, constitutes both the unconscious and the subjectivity of the child. The message of the other is thus of overwhelming importance to the formation of the subject. Yet this is not a one-way communication. The child, trying to wring meaning out of a signifier that is beyond its grasp, tries to “translate” the enigmatic signifier into the terms of its own infantile belief systems. The part of Laplanche's paradigm that is important to my argument in this paper is the active part the child plays in trying out one interpretation after another, assigning multiple meanings to a message that in the end it can only partially understand. Jean Laplanche's model enables me to work through a response to the question that drives the first half of this essay: How does a child develop a desire to interpret?
However, the goal of my inquiry concerns the adult subject. I extend Laplanche's paradigm past childhood, exploring its implications for adult creativity and investigative work of various kinds. I develop a hypothesis that a child's repeated wrestling with a mother's or a father's enigmatic signifier—trying and failing to interpret the parental message, and trying again—can provide the basis for a mode of patient, extended intellectual inquiry or creative production in later life.
It is the enigma of the parent's words (or gestures) that engages the child's desire to penetrate the meaning of words and provokes her to generate interpretations—and yet more interpretations. (And Laplanche makes it clear that this encounter