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Gila Ashtor, PhD, LP, is a psychoanalyst, writer, and critic on the faculty at Columbia University. In writing about the work of Jean Laplanche, she joins a small group of psychoanalysts in the avant-garde of theory here in North America where Laplanche's work has only reached an English-speaking audience in the past 2 decades or so thanks, mainly, to the translations of John Fletcher and Jonathan House and his associates at Unconscious in Translation Press.
Dr. Ashtor is a careful and thorough scholar of psychoanalysis whose project in this book is to stage “an encounter between Laplanche and the field of Contemporary Anglo-American psychoanalysis as it exists today” (p. 34). The book is structured around four major concepts and areas of conflict in the field: the mytho-symbolic and metapsychology, sexuality and the unconscious, seduction and psychic structure, and translation and motivation. She begins by posing two questions to psychoanalytic theory since Freud: Why has theory not been more forthcoming about its divergences from Freud, as it seems clear that thinking and practice have changed radically without, nonetheless, a concomitant radical change in the language of theory itself? And, how can we account for the allegiance to Freud himself as a figure, a synecdoche for psychoanalytic theory and practice?
Ashtor observes that Freud has commanded an allegiance to his person that subsequent generations of psychoanalysts have been loath to openly challenge for all the usual Oedipal reasons but more because of the fact that the field itself has ingrained and self-perpetuating “habits of looking externally, rather than internally, for sources of the field's flaws.” As examples of these externally imposed “flaws,” Ashtor cites both positivist science and postmodern philosophy (p. 7). While her introduction of the interventions of Jean Laplanche goes a long way toward correcting these ingrained habits, at least theoretically, her own turn to affect theory and to neuro