Each issue of Sitegeist takes a fresh turn and heads off—apparently—in a new direction. Issue No. 4 considers important developments in theory, particularly as generated by writers who do not write in English. Jean Laplanche heads the list of one of the most important analysts of our generation, much of whose work awaits translation.
Many members of the Site have a deep and abiding interest in the work of Laplanche. His work is taught and discussed on the training and appears as an important source of reference and debate in Site life in general. Why should this be? One answer is that Laplanche's project—that of endlessly and incompletely reworking and revisiting Freud's ideas is paralleled by the aims of the Site where contemporary ideas are regarded, not as something fixed, but rather as work in progress constantly disputed, revised and revisited. A second and more subtle reason is the clinical relevance of Laplanche's work, ironic perhaps in a writer who rarely if ever speaks directly to clinical experience.
Our opening paper has been especially written for Sitegeist by a well-known Laplanche scholar, Dominique Scarfone. Using the work of Levinas and Lyotard, he takes a close look at Laplanche's concept of the hollowed out transference. He argues that ‘the position of the analyst… presupposes an inherent fundamental passivity—or passibility—without which the provocation of transference would fail to provide simultaneously the “hollow” required by its deployment.’
Nicholas Ray looks at the issues of ‘human’ and ‘animal’ in Laplanche. He raises the Laplanchean problematic of ‘anthropo-decentring’. In what sense is Freud's biologism irretrievably problematic? However, does Laplanche's exploration of Freud's endless fourvoiements lead him up a blind alley of a different kind? From the problematic of ‘his Majesty the Baby’ and an anthropological slant, we turn to John Fletcher's exploration of the problematic of narcissism in Laplanche, ‘His Majesty the Ego’.
Laplanche has been read with close attention by literary commentators and here we turn to the paper by Anna Cavness, where she proposes that, Laplanche's treatment of mourning trespasses against his
own attempts to shatter the notion of an original, blank slate upon which ‘culture’ is imprinted. She uses the work of an Algerian novelist, Assia Djebar to illustrate via a literary text, a profoundly important issue for those in clinical practice.
If Laplanche provides a foot in the door, of opening up a space for discussion new theory, why not open it a little wider? For this reason, we take the opportunity to examine the work of two other contemporary non-English speaking psychoanalysts, Guy Rosolato and Léon Rozitchner. Since Rosolato, so far as we know has not been published in English translation before, Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz, our French translator for this issue, has selected a short chapter from one of his more recent books, ‘the double potentiality of the unconscious’, from his book, La portée du désir ou la psychanalyse meme. We publish two very brief commentaries by Site members, Chris Oakley and Philip Hill, in order to start the debate rolling.
Finally we close with a breath of fresh air. Philip Derbyshire, our translator from Spanish for this volume, provides a short introduction to the work of the Argentinian psychoanalyst, Léon Rozitchner. He has translated a paper where Rozitchner, in both intelligent and entertaining fashion takes Lacan to task for reading Freud's implicitly Jewish Oedipus through an implicitly Catholic lens.
In the next issue we hope to depart on a fresh fourvoiement—and go astray from the paths apparently closed by the term, ‘research’.