Laplanche, an introduction by Dominique Scarfone

In what we have come to know as his emblematic erudite and lucid style, Scarfone has offered us a remarkable introduction to Laplanche’s ideas and, most critically, to his way of thinking. This is no small gift. Scarfone’s text is excellent in its explication of Laplanche’s complicated and radical ideas. Laplanche’s contributions to analytic theory—which have long been known to French audiences but are only more recently becoming more widely available to Anglophone analysts through Jonathan House’s press The Unconscious in Translation—have far-reaching implications for psychoanalytic metapsychology and for clinical technique. But Scarfone’s most important offering to us in this volume is the particular way in which he has written it; it is a text that provides an immersive experience into what it feels like to be working intellectually not only with Laplanche’s ideas but more precisely with his method of using ideas psychoanalytically, which for Scarfone constitutes Laplanche’s most critical bequest. This book, therefore, accomplishes much more than a solid introduction to this major analytic figure. It exposes its reader to a way of reading texts and of applying Laplanche’s method of thinking of psychic movement as following not the linear order of repetition but that of an elliptical turn, a spiral (a point to which I’ll return) in the clinical domain as well as in our very process of theory building.

To the uninitiated, Laplanche poses two sets of challenges: First, as an extremely close reader of Freud he requires of his own reader a close familiarity with Freudian thought and scholarship. For those not as studied in Freud, it demands a staunch commitment to close reading alongside Laplanche’s; this can feel arduous and demanding to readers not accustomed to his meticulous and close dissection of texts. Second, and perhaps more critical, is that Laplanche’s thinking, which is unfurled in this book with unusual tenacity and clarity, insists on a decentering of