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Allyson Stack's presentation of Jean Laplanche's work offers an accessible and important perspective on the analytic encounter. Through a discussion of literary criticism, Stack explores how we engage with the alien cores around which the psyche is structured. The resultant paper is of significant value to anyone interested in the contemporary writings which explore the relationship between psychoanalysis and scientific understandings of emergent phenomena. It is also relevant to those who wish to bring Jung's key concepts (especially those relating to our encounters with the manifestations of inner otherness, such as complexes, archetypes and active imagination) into conversation with clinical thinking about the intersubjective encounter.
As Stack points out, much thought needs to be given to how one engages with the otherness of the other. There is a strong pull towards re-modelling this alien, unsettling presence into a flat surface onto which one can project pre-existing theoretical and existential prejudices. Here I am reminded for a comment by David Miller,
If Jung were alive today, would he not have to be a semiotician rather than a symbolist? Would he not be nearer to the French Freudians than to the American Jungians with
Page 582all their hermeneutic knowledge? Today… Jungian fundamentalism [is] symbolic. [It has] become a knowing. But what Jung called symbolic, and recommended for the soul, is not this knowing. It is the paratactic, ‘gappy’ unknowing that is today called semiotic.
But of course, the problem of using the other's otherness as a vehicle for one's own fantasies of knowledge is not restricted to any one group of practitioners or theoreticians: it is a tendency with which we all struggle.
What I appreciate about Stack's paper is that she offers reference points, which can be used specifically to engage with this struggle more mindfully. In particular, she provides a means of thinking about how one might work with the transference-cou