You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This volume contains a foreword, prologue, introduction, and epilogue, each of which introduces and provides commentary on a collection of eight authors' conceptions of the unconscious. The fact that a full third of the book consists of commentary about its body hints at the complexity, the intellectual pleasure, and occasionally the frustration of reading this collection of disparate renderings of a central psychoanalytic concept.
To my reading, the most impressive efforts in the volume are those in which the author locates his or her vision of the unconscious in a clear and systematic way, and delineates how it may differ from, agree with, or add to previous conceptualizations. Not surprisingly, the essential differences among the pieces stem from the authors' views of the extent to which bodily experiences and contributions from the aggressive and sexual drives are viewed as central, from their attempts to locate the role of the other in the structuring of the unconscious, and from differences among the authors regarding unconscious structure itself—that is, what it includes, how it is structured, how it works.
I will address first the chapters that offer the most comprehensive descriptions of the possible structure of the unconscious and how one might come to know it. For me, those are the chapters by Jean Laplanche, James Grotstein, and Rene Kaës. Other chapters offer different delights and challenges, and all address some aspect of the central differences outlined above.
Jean Laplanche (“Three Meanings of the Word ‘Unconscious’ in the Framework of the General Theory of Seduction”) critiques modern schools of psychoanalysis that to him have lost the central importance of the role of infantile sexuality in structuring the unconscious. He adds two concepts, however, that dramatically alter the classical conception. One is his view of the fundamental anthropological situation, in which the asymmetrical communication between parents, who have language, and infants, wh