Having dedicated its previous issue to essays written by diverse authors in response to the work of Jean Laplanche, Sitegeist now presents a short ‘dossier’ comprising some of Laplanche's recent papers dealing with the question of research and critical methodology in psychoanalytic theory. With the exception of the interview, all of the texts presented here have appeared together in French, alongside many other essays, in Laplanche's most recent collection, Sexual: la sexualité élargie au sens freudien (2007). A complete English translation of Sexual will be published by International Psychoanalytic Books in 2011. It will constitute the first volume in the series of Laplanche's Collected Works in English which are to be published by IPB over the next few years. Since the papers which appear here do so without the contextual benefit of the others in the collection, a few prefatory remarks are perhaps in order.
As is becoming increasingly well known to Anglophone readers, Laplanche explicitly positions his metapsychology as a radical critical expansion of the self-proclaimed ‘Copernican’ trajectory of Freud's work, as a systematic effort to aggravate the wound inflicted upon human narcissism by the discovery of the unconscious. Laplanche's own elaboration of the ‘general theory of seduction’ and the ‘fundamental anthropological situation’ gives unconscious alterity and enigmaticity a constitutive place in the organisation of psychic Life. But if there is a consistent point of emphasis in the following papers, it is that a theoretical commitment to the radically de-centring potentiality of psychoanalysis need not—indeed must not—open the door to uncritical relativism. Rather, a commitment to the wounding radicality of the Freudian venture must go hand in hand with a recognition of Freud's own commitment, as a researcher, to a certain scientific rationalism.
In this connection, and as will be seen in the texts that follow, Laplanche's most recent work frequently lays emphasis on what he calls the ‘missed encounter’ between Freud and Karl Popper. The similarities between these two thinkers are easily overlooked, for Popper's (1957)
work explicitly relegates psychoanalysis to the domain of pseudo-science, while Freud himself never expressly engages with Popper's thought at all. Nevertheless, there are key moments at which Freud's thinking is strikingly congruent with Popperian principles of scientific advance. On the one hand, the opening paragraph of ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’ (1915)(reveals a Freud who is no less emphatic than Popper that science is not simply a matter of observation-based induction but requires inventive conjecture and equally that scientific observation cannot take place without the mediating matrix of some existing conjecture or other. On the other hand, Freud regards theories and conjectures which are truly scientific to be subject to precisely what Popper will call ‘falsification’. He says as much in the New Introductory Lectures (1933: 160), but it is also evident in his own working practice. The obvious example here—and a moment in Freud's itinerary which is of great importance to Laplanche—is the abandonment of the ‘seduction theory’ of the neuroses: the theory is officially jettisoned by Freud in 1897 not only because it has been insufficiently borne out by clinical ‘testing’ but because ‘there are no ‘indications of reality’ in the unconscious' (1887–1904: 21/09/1897)—a factor which would, precisely, exempt the theory of ‘real’ seduction from the criterion of falsifiablility.
Laplanche's increasingly recurrent appeal to the congruence between Freud and Popper is both daring and urgent. It has particular resonance at a time when psychoanalysis has come under severe attack in France, and not least for its supposed lack of ‘hard’ scientific credentials. Two of the most significant and well-publicised assaults are the deeply critical 2004 INSERM report on the ‘efficacy’ of psychotherapies (Canceil et al. 2004)2, and the publication in 2005 of the enormously popular collection of anti-psychoanalytic papers, Le livre noir de la psychanalyse (Meyer 2005). Laplanche is dismayed at the tendency of many psychoanalysts and analytic researchers to aggressively discount and even censor such criticisms, rather than actively discuss and reckon with them (in ‘Levels of Proof’ he is appalled by the hasty withdrawal of the INSERM report from a French Government website, allegedly owing to pressure from the analytic community). For Laplanche, such complacent insularity—the refusal of rational dialogue and debate—is inimical to the future vitality of psychoanalysis and to the assumption of a place, which Freud believed psychoanalysis warranted, within the ‘scientific
community’. What Laplanche stresses with increasing urgency is that the survival of psychoanalysis depends not on dodging the demands of scientific methodology, which ate sometimes wielded against it like a weapon, but on deploying methodological rigour in the very service of revitalising psychoanalysis and of progressively consolidating psychoanalysis's own scientificity.
Resuming anew the methodological rationalism which can be identified at key points in Freud does not mean co-opting the epistemologists of scientific method in order to effect a superficial restitution of psychoanalysis ‘as it stands’. It is, rather, a matter of opening up psychoanalysis as productively as possible to what Laplanche has for a long time referred to as a ‘catharsis’ (Laplanche 1987: chapter 1; cf. Laplanche 2000: 7)—a rigorous and ongoing critical excavation, sifting and refinement of the Freudian conceptual terrain, in order to establish new and ever more stable foundations for psychoanalytic practice and research.
Now, almost all of Laplanche's theoretical work over the last five decades has, implicitly or explicitly, been oriented by a ‘cathartic’ imperative. His own critical methodology in this regard has always been strongly influenced by two of the most eminent figures of twentieth-century French epistemology: Gaston Bachelard (Laplanche's former teacher) and Georges Canguilhem. It is from Bachelard and Canguilhem that he inherits the substantive notion of ‘problematics’—the structured and structuring conceptual fields that underlie the history of scientific development—which he critically adapts and which gives its name to his seven volume series of teaching seminars, Problématiques I–VII (Laplanche 1980–2006). Laplanche's ongoing interrogation of the problematics of the Freudian oeuvre makes consistent recourse to two almost axial terms, which are invoked in the papers collected here: ‘exigency’ (exigence) and ‘going astray’ (fourvoiement).3 What Laplanche refers to as the exigency of Freud's thought is the theoretical necessity which impels Freud's great Copernican discovery: the discovery of the other within. But the orientation of this exigency is linked in a constitutive way to the very object of Freud's reflection i.e. the psychic apparatus itself. It therefore also exerts a powerful ‘magnetic’ constraint upon the articulation and evolution of Freud's thinking, sometimes leading the latter to wander from its Copernican course. Freudian
thought—and psychoanalytic thought mote generally—goes astray when it is thus led to adopt and re-inscribe at the level of theory the narcissistic occlusions and coverings-over of unconscious alterity which mark the illusory egoic self-centring of the psychic apparatus. The major problematics of the Freudian corpus are profoundly inflected by this quasi-mimetic theoretical drift. Laplanche's decades-long development of ‘new foundations’ for psychoanalysis has been guided by the need to question these over-determined theoretical strayings in order to get closer to the Copernican impulse which they labour to conceal.
Laplanche's appeal to the notion of ‘scientificity’, then, in no sense constitutes a break with his earlier positions or his earlier epistemological inheritance. It represents a deepening of a consistent vein in his work. In the following papers, while astutely underscoring the proto-Popperian impulse in Freud's own work, Laplanche also implicitly invokes the model of ‘research programmes’ developed by Imre Lakatos. This post-Popperian model distinguishes between the ‘hard core’ of theoretical commitments within any research programme and its ‘protective belt’ of auxiliary hypotheses (e.g. Lakatos 1970). It is a model of scientific development which allows for the possibility that the ‘peripheral’ hypotheses of a programme may be falsified without imperilling the integrity of its essential theoretical core. Indeed, ‘progressive’ research programmes are marked precisely by their capacity to confront and resolve on their own terms—and according to what Lakatos calls their own ‘heuristic’—the internal theoretical impasses which the programme itself has produced. If Laplanche here reprises this model, it is because it meshes so suggestively with the matrices of his own longstanding methodology. The identification and criticism of the manifold goings-astray in psychoanalytic theory does not mean jeopardising the core of the psychoanalytic approach. On the contrary, the attempt to tackle, criticise and ‘put to work’ (Laplanche 1992: 147) such auxiliary drifts and impasses is for Laplanche inseparable from the endeavour to consolidate the essential dimensions of the psychoanalytic ‘research programme’ and attest to the foundational exigency which drives it.
What Laplanche refers to in ‘Freud and Philosophy’ as the ‘wounded rationalism’ of Freudian thought is thus an articulation of precisely the double imperative which has consistently, and ever more emphatically, impelled Laplanche's own enterprise: to keep open the psychoanalytic wound of the unconscious in its most radical form, and to think and
rethink the analytic approach to it in a methodologically rigorous and theoretically sustainable manner. The texts in this short dossier are as much a statement of where this wounded rationalism has taken Laplanche's thought to date as a provocation to reflect seriously about where else it might yet lead.
All the pieces in the following dossier were translated into English from the French by the translation team for Laplanche's forthcoming Collected Works: John Fletcher (Editor), Jonathan House (Translator) and Nicholas Ray (Translator)
INSERM is the National Institute for Health and Medical Research (Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale). It is a public body which might to some extent be compared with the UK's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).
For a fuller account of exigency and going astray, see Laplanche 1993. Cf. Ray 2006 where I discuss in greater detail the evolution of these axial terms in Laplanche's work, and their broader significance within his theoretical project.