Introduction

Psychoanalysis has an originary tendency, a preoccupation with origins, a vocation for origins—at the beginning it was the origins of symptoms, then came dreams, then slips of the tongue and then jokes, and from early on to the present, the origin of sexuality, of desire. The paper presented here was written in 1981 and, although there are anticipations of Laplanche's major theorizing of sexuality, what he calls the General Theory of Seduction (hereafter GTS), the essay does not emphasize the problematic of the origin of sexuality. This is partly because the GTS was first presented in 1987, six years after this essay was presented at the Faculté de Psychologie de l'UNAM (Mexico). The essay addresses central themes in Klein's theorizing and technique but does not touch on Klein's approach to sexuality, at least not explicitly. Laplanche's essay speaks for itself, but JAPA has asked that I situate it within the development of Laplanche's thinking and clarify a few phrases that may be obscure.

Laplanche insists that the unconscious, the repressed sexual unconscious, is the proper object of psychoanalysis. As only humans have such an unconscious, psychoanalysis is concerned with the origin and nature of the human subject. In other words, psychoanalysis is an anthropology in Kant's sense of the term. Laplanche's writing emphasizes the problematic of origins. In the 1950s he focused on the nature of the unconscious and by the 1960s he focused on what for him was almost the same thing: the nature and origin of human sexuality, sexuality in the expanded sense that Freud gave it. Laplanche considered the General Theory of Seduction his most important contribution. He first presented the theory in New Foundations for Psychoanalysis (1987, pp. 101-174) and called it “the hinge of my work” (personal communication). In 2002 he called the GTS The Fundamental Anthropological Situation (2007, pp. 99-114).