The La/La Showdown

This phrase captured my imagination when it was uttered by Ali Shames-Dawson, a graduate student studying clinical psychology at the New School, who had been working at the Sandor Ferenczi center. The center was hosting a talk by the Lacanian Gerard Pommier on the subject of patriarchy. Discussants David Lichtenstein and Muriel Dimen, alternately urbane and combative, created sparks that may have ignited something in Shames-Dawson. Certainly when she said La/La showdown—playfully drawing attention to the conflictual relationship between the psychoanalytic contributions of Jacques Lacan and Jean Laplanche—I was thrilled and determined to make something of it. So we persevered and brought this creature into the world at the 2016 SIPPS conference in New York. My only regret, retrospectively, is that we did not make more of the delicious soundtrack Ali, fellow student Scott Mimnaugh, and others put together.

Soundtrack, you say. What is this? Battle of the Bands? Celebrity Apprentice? Psychoanalytic Super Bowl? Yes and no. The event and its planning were serious fun. I wanted (Nachträglichkeit in the making) to go back to the early 1960s (hence the soundtrack) and revisit the quarrel Lacan was having with Laplanche and Pontalis over the question of language and the unconscious.

In addition to my general interest in Laplanche, I have always been particularly impressed by his early work, which contributed to a view of the unconscious that is now more visible through the work of the field theorists (Ferro and Civitarese, Lombardi) and through primarily French-driven work on levels of representation and registration interwoven with what is usually contained in the term symbolic. I am reminded of the work of the Botellas, Aulagnier, Scarfone, Reed and Levine, and from a more generally psychological theory, the work of Ignacio Matte Blanco.

In the English-speaking world, this interest in primitive states, unmentalized experience, and the layering of representation is most visibl