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I want to thank DIVISION/Review for inviting me to write about why I founded The Unconscious in Translation (UIT), a new psychoanalytically focused publishing house. The inspiration was the work of Jean Laplanche.
Although his thinking constitutes a major axis of French psychoanalysis, in 2011 Laplanche's work was largely unknown in the Anglophone universe. What was known was limited to his early work, and that was often misrepresented in English language commentary. Only three volumes were easily available:
The Language of Psychoanalysis by Laplanche and Pontalis (which almost everyone reading this owns) was published in 1973 in Donald Nicholson-Smith's brilliant English translation; it had first been published in 1967 as Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse.
Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, first published in French in 1970, was published in English, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, in 1976 and remains in print.
Essays on Otherness consists of ten articles written between 1984 and 1993. Six of the translations are by Luke Thurston, one by Leslie Hill, two by Martin Stanton, and the last was written in English. John Fletcher selected the articles and wrote an excellent introduction that has for some years served as the clearest introduction in English to the work of Laplanche.
A little memoir is relevant here. For a long time, I'd known that there was something important and different about sex and sexuality. I hoped that psychoanalytic training in general, and especially Freud, would explain all this. The more I read, the more disappointed I became. Those who offered clear explanation were at best incomplete, and often evidently wrong in important respects. Freud's account of sexuality in general and infantile sexuality in particular was marked by changes and then returns, by paradoxes and contradictions sometimes acknowledged explicitly but mostly not. In this state of confusion, I read Laplanche and Pontalis's 1964 essay “Fantasme originaire, fantasmes des origines, origin