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Laplanche's approach to theory focuses on what makes psychoanalysis the discipline it is: the unconscious, whose effects are felt by the analyst not only as clinician but equally as theorist. I will focus in this commentary on Laplanche's method of critiquing psychoanalytic theory. One has the impression that Laplanche was a practitioner of the principle of Occam's razor, the philosophical precept that in problem solving “entities are not to be multiplied without necessity.” In the context of psychoanalysis this means that when one is presented with competing hypotheses based on the same clinical observations, one should select the solution with the fewest assumptions. We see clearly how Laplanche eliminates redundant theorizing in his critique of Klein's “pairs.”
Notwithstanding the rhetorical flourish of asking whether Klein is a witch needing to be burned at the stake, Laplanche subjects her to the same mode of critique he uses when “attacking,” as he puts it, Freud or, for that matter, his daughter Anna or Lacan. Moreover, Klein may be in for special treatment only to the extent that she took certain aspects of Freud's theorizing (phylogenetic inherited instinctual sexual fantasies and the death drive) and then pushed them even further. These aspects of Freud's thinking receive Laplanche's most severe criticism.
I am writing here from my point of view as someone who has been interested in French psychoanalysis over the years and written about Lacan, Michel de M'Uzan (Simpson 2017), and more recently Laplanche himself (Simpson in press). Laplanche was an analysand of Lacan but managed to not become a Lacanian. If there is a transmission from Lacan to Laplanche, one might say that it has taken the form of a “return to Freud” well beyond Lacan's vision of “return.” Laplanche's warrant for his critique of theory is his profound study of Freud's German text,