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The work of Jean Laplanche, who died on Freud’s birthday in 2012, has become well known across the English-speaking psychoanalytic world in the last decade or so, not least because of the efforts of John Fletcher and Nicholas Ray, who have both translated important Laplanchian texts from the French and also presented their own Laplanche-inflected scholarly work. Fletcher, for instance, has recently brought out a major single-authored book of his own, Freud and the Scene of Trauma (New York: Fordham, 2013), which develops several lines of thought inherited from Laplanche in order to reinstate the Freudian ‘seduction theory’. In that book, Fletcher carefully pares away Freud’s writings from first to last in order to show how seduction and the traumatic origin of sexuality continually return, even well after their famous repudiation in the late 1890s. This idea, that what we are faced with in Freudian theory is a tumultuous discovery that is denied or repressed but never lost, is one of the key ways in which Laplanche shakes up psychoanalytic orthodoxy; gradually, as more texts have appeared and more thoughtful commentaries have been written, it has become clear that this recovery of ‘seduction’ is not an aberration or weird piece of pornographic imagination, nor a peculiar, Masson-like climbing on an abuse train, nor even a sanctification of trauma to match the current ‘trauma culture’. Rather, it is a provocative but serious piece of reading and interpreting, an act of theoretical recovery that uncovers the traces that remain of the Freudian revolution; which is to say, it is a deeply psychoanalytic reading of psychoanalysis itself.
Seductions and Enigmas begins with this question of reading and interpretation, in an introduction by the editors that would be worth the price of the book on its own. For those not familiar with Laplanche, they offer a brief contextualising history, listing his main publications and noting the continuing fame and importance of the co-auth