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Jean Laplanche's method ‘requires the continual traversal and analysis of Freud's oeuvre … in order to re-open psychoanalysis to creative rethinking and renewal’ (p. 27), write John Fletcher and Nicholas Ray in the introduction to their collection. While this quote reflects the content of this book it also echoes its form, as it is itself an analysis of Laplanche's oeuvre that re-opens psychoanalysis to creative rethinking. This fascinating and unique book opens with an introduction that surveys Laplanche's notions of ‘exigency’, the ‘enigmatic signifier’, and the ‘theory of seduction’, which acts as a springboard for the essays on visual art, film, culture and literature that follow in the first section of the book. Although they tackle dense theoretical concepts, the essays are accessible and compelling, and bring seemingly abstract theories to material experiences and bodies of work. The central thread involves Laplanche's discussions about the ‘decentring’ of the human subject, about how we are shaped by the ‘other’ and how this translates to social and cultural realities and texts. This theme is explored in the first section through three essays by Laplanche, which provides the backdrop for the second section, which is composed of two essays about sexuality and gender; the two final sections examine metapsychology through a variety of cultural works.
Appropriately, in the first essay Laplanche addresses the theme of interpretation ‘in’ Freud and ‘of’ Freud; the manifest and latent, conscious and unconscious text. This essay spills into the following, entitled ‘Exigency and going-astray’, wherein he deals with how ‘exigency’ and ‘going astray’ are connected to the ‘Copernican revolution’. Freud's work, Laplanche explains, is associated with the Copernican decentring of the human (as Copernicus decentred the human when he demonstrated that the sun did not revolve around the earth), because the ‘unconscious decentres man in relation to himself’ (p. 24); the unconsc