The Unconscious In Translation: Jean Laplanche: Laplanche: An Introduction by Dominique Scarfone (D. Bonnigal-Katz, Trans.). New York, NY: The Unconscious in Translation, 2015. 144 pp. The Temptation of Biology: Freud's Theories of Sexuality by Jean Laplanche (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). New York, NY: The Unconscious in Translation, 2015. 140 pp. Between Seduction and Inspiration: Man by Jean Laplanche (J. Mehlman, Trans.). New York, NY: The Unconscious in Translation, 2015. 304 pp. Freud and the Sexual by Jean Laplanche (J. Fletcher, J. House, & N. Ray, Trans.). New York, NY: The Unconscious in Translation, 2011. 318 pp.

Introduction

“I like the titles of articles: they are often more interesting than the content” (Laplanche, 2011, p. 154). In the spirit of Laplanche's attention to titles, his own included (which he carefully crafts even for his collections of papers, and which we will have occasion to study), I will begin by explicating this one.

The first meaning is simply that this paper reviews the first books in a series devoted to the work and thought of Jean Laplanche published by The Unconscious in Translation, a new publisher headed by Jonathan House. Intending to translate “works that otherwise would not be available in English” (Laplanche, 2015a, book cover), The Unconscious

in Translation on Laplanche includes Freud and the Sexual (2011), Laplanche: An Introduction (Scarfone, 2015; this includes a retranslation of Laplanche and Pontalis's seminal and earliest paper originally translated in English in 1968 in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis), The Temptation of Biology: Freud's Theories of Sexuality (2015a), and Between Seduction and Inspiration: Man (2015b). These translations, other than the retranslation of his very early work, cover Laplanche's later work spanning lectures and essays published from 1992 through 2006, thus just about completing the translation of his oeuvre that includes such seminal books as Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (1977; Vie et Mort en Psychanalyse, 1970) and, with Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (1973; Vocabulaire de la Psychanalyse, 1967), among others.

The Unconscious in Translation is particularly well suited to Laplanche's thought, because both “the unconscious” and “translation,” as well as the unconscious “in” translation, are some of its most central features in a variety of overlapping combinations. Here are just a few:

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  To begin, he headed the French translation of Freud's collected works, a project Laplanche saw not as a straightforward translation of the texts but as a way of relating intellectually to Freud, o