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For their 21st issue, the Libres Cahiers pour la Psychanalyse propose a rereading of the 32nd lecture in the New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis series (Freud, 1933a, 1932-36; Strachey, 1964). Written during the summer of 1932 with the aim of boosting the Verlag's finances, these lectures are addressed primarily to a wide, cultivated readership with an interest in psychoanalysis. They are also an opportunity for Freud to announce how his thinking has progressed, and to return to various points of discussion while prolonging his reflection on certain established concepts. A Foreword written by the editorial committee provides a synopsis of the lecture that is the focus of interest here and has spurred the thinking of 11 contributors.
In the opening text Daniel Wildlöcher considers the origins of the question. ‘The Language of Anxiety’, a chapter from his book, Metapsychology of Meaning (Wildlöcher, 1986), considers the different stages of elucidation of this particular ‘state of affect’ and draws our attention to the maintenance of a paradox amidst the oscillations of Freudian thought: ‘how can anxiety be at once defined as a traumatic experience and as the very signal of that experience’? Melanie Klein tried to reply to this question, referring to the Freudian model of a danger signal perceived by the primary ego as belonging to the sphere of the death drive; here, she returns to the theory of trauma as conceptualized by Laplanche (1970, 1980), who sees “the stamp of the death drive in the demands of the drives in the raw” (Wildlocher, 1986, p. 26). Distinguishing fear from anxiety and inverting the Freudian model, Laplanche positions anxiety in the external and primary trauma of maternal seduction. Faced with these contradictions, the author suggests that the essential reason for them is that “these theories do not all address the same object” (p. 27). In a gesture to the notion of programming, he constructs an overview describing “the sequence of operations