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Jean Laplanche, the French psychoanalyst renowned for his writings on Freud, often tests the comprehension of the American reader in his book The Temptation of Biology: Freud's Theories of Sexuality. Laplanche's theoretical perspective is intellectually challenging, and while “revising” Freud, despite his disclaimer, he also provides an important exegesis into certain aspects of Freud's thinking that warrant evaluation, reevaluation, and support. As he states, “there is no question of revising Freud”; the task is to “discern the false equilibria within it” (p. 6). The book is essentially a compendium of a series of lectures delivered from 1991 to 1992 at the University of Paris, along with one given in 1997 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Laplanche, who is both critical and admiring of Freud, presents an interesting paradox regarding Freud, whom he feels “may have gone astray,” but whose strayings nevertheless led to a “clearer picture of fundamental problematics often difficult to discern in [a] conceptual labyrinth” (p. xii). This should not surprise us, as Laplanche had indicated in an earlier paper, “Life and Death in Psychoanalysis,” that Freud's “dialectical approach, entailing an evolution through reversals and crises, mediated by contradictions whose status will not be immediately apparent in any attempt to situate them, are all “deserving of the same ‘free floating’ attention. No doubt, in practice, certain contradictions may prove to be relatively ‘extrinsic’ or adventitious, the results of polemic or of hasty formulations; but even in such cases, they cannot be discarded without a certain loss” (p. 1).
Thus, Laplanche's major criticism of Freud in this book provides an opportunity to follow his interpretation of Freud's first